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Cloud & Service Management blog
The Virtues of Cloud Coverage or How are Runners Like Data Centers?
Jennifer Dennis 110000CSRM firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  running o'connor texan ibm-cloud texas data ibmcloud doug cloudburst summer cloud-burst chris cloud-computing dynamic-infrastructure webcast center cloud brown service+management don workloads service-management dynamic dynamic-infrastruc thomas 3,363 Visits
It's been said that the only difference between a native Texan and an adopted Texan is who complains more about the crazy, long hot summers. For those of you who know neither, believe me when I tell you the natives complain a lot more. The adoptees relish it.
A lifelong Texan and passionate runner, my idea of good weather is not based on how hot and sunny it is outside. I prefer a temperature just shy of 50 degrees with plenty of cloud coverage, and even a little rain is welcome. As my skin sizzled under the 97 degree sky yesterday, I was thinking about IBM CloudBurst and wishing I could order up my own personal cloud . . . maybe someday IBM will invent that!
For now, I remain very impressed with the cloud that IBM does offer today. You will be too, if you attend the June 25 webcast, A Breakthrough in Service Delivery for Data Center Workloads hosted by Doug Brown, Chris O'Connor and Don Thomas.
In the mean time, here are some of the features and benefits you can expect when you introduce IBM CloudBurst in your enterprise with the dynamic infrastructure of IBM Service Management.
Faster time to value: Delivered on site as a prepackaged and self-contained service delivery platform for cloud computing... virtualization included!
Flexibility: Scalable platform allows you to deploy now and easily scale as business needs change. Ease of use: Self service portal for rapid access to cloud delivery
Simplified systems administration: Integrated systems management of both physical and virtual workloads - through a single interface to blade servers, storage and networking
Superior reliability: Keeps your virtualized infrastructure up and running - with multiple layers of redundancy built into the hardware platform resulting in no single point of failure.
Energy efficiency: Designed from the ground up to dramatically improve power utilization and reduce energy costs. Integrated power management to help you plan, predict, monitor and actively manage power consumption of your BladeCenter servers.
Visit IBM CloudBurst to learn more.
Break out your lighters, the IBM Service Management World Tour is coming!
Robert Pickard 060001RDA2 email@example.com Tags:  storage service-management eam management service tour world z system ibm 2,802 Visits
I have some big news to share. You thought world tours were only reserved for the Stones, Springsteen and other big-name acts? Well, I guess service management has hit the big time, because the IBM Service Management World Tour kicks off in mid-August with gigs across the U.S., Europe and Asia.
I think this is a perfect follow-on to Pulse a merry band of IBM experts comes to a town near you (hopefully) and delivers in-depth presentations on the latest IBM solutions and approaches in service management, storage management, enterprise asset management, and System z. Its a series of hard-hitting one-day events held in smaller settings where you can get some serious face-to-face time with service management gurus. Im helping one such expert with his presentations on the Tivoli Service Management Center for z and consolidating Linux workloads on z (no snappy title yet), and Im impressed with his focus and clarity. Even I get it! By the way, if you missed my profile, thats what I do, write presentations, podcasts and website stories for Tivoli.
Anyway, the tour begins in Boston on August 12, with events in 13 more US cities; the Europe and Asia schedules are being finalized now. You can check out what we have so far and even register for the road show at the World Tour page. You can always ping your favorite IBM sales rep, who is sitting by his/her laptop yearning to hear from you, or ping me, Bob Pickard. In any event, I'll be blogging new news on the tour as it comes along. Party on, Garth.
In the News: Don't be shy - step up the microphone at Pulse 2011!
Kimberlee Kemble 120000GMAV email@example.com Tags:  service-management ibm integrated-service-manage... pulse pulse-2011 1,907 Visits
Pulse will return to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas February 27 through March 2, 2011, and over 300 client presentations will demonstrate how Integrated Service Management helped their organizations gain an end-to-end view of business services across boundaries to effectively manage risk and compliance, change the economics of delivering service and achieve common business objectives.
- Al Zollar, Tivoli General Manager
Learn more by reading the article Get Into the Spotlight at Pulse 2011. And join us for a webcast on October 18th to learn more about Pulse 2011 and what you should know before you submit your proposal to present at Pulse. Note that proposals are due by November 9th, so don't wait - submit your proposal today!
Your friendly roving Integrated Service Management reporter
In the News: IBM X-Force Threat Reports
Kimberlee Kemble 120000GMAV email@example.com Tags:  security service-management integrated-service-manage... x-force 1 Comment 2,922 Visits
It almost goes without saying, but, hey, I'll say it anyway...Security is top of mind for everyone these days, no matter your industry, no matter the size of your organization - and even on a personal level, too. You certainly don't have to be a security manager to be concerned about security, particularly internet security.
Case in point: Which of the following internet vulnerabilities is keeping you up at night these days?
1. Malware
2. Phishing
3. Spam
4. Patches
5. Remote access
Perhaps a more precise answer would be "All of the above plus a few more."
So, how can you stay ahead of these types of threats - understanding what the most critical and recurrent vulnerabilities are and what you can do to prevent them? One excellent source of emerging information is the IBM X-Force Research and Development team. For more than a dozen years, these security specialists have tracked well over 40,000 different vulnerabilities, from Trojan horses to malware to Web spoofing, and documented them in the world's largest and most comprehensive threat database.
The IBM X-Force researches and monitors the latest internet threat trends, develops security content for IBM customers, and helps advise customers and the general public on how to respond to emerging and critical threats. Twice a year, the team releases a detailed report discussing the latest security complexities. These reports are far more than just abstract information. They are actionable intelligence, designed to lead to more comprehensive security and a better business outcome. Take a look at the latest report.
For more information about how the IBM X-Force research can help your organization (and perhaps even keep you from losing sleep worrying about security threats), check out this Service Management in Action article.
Signing off for this week,
Your friendly roving Integrated Service Management reporter
In the News: If variety is the spice of life, Pulse 2011 is HOT!!!
Kimberlee Kemble 120000GMAV email@example.com Tags:  pulse-2011 service-management ibm pulse integrated-service-manage... 3 Comments 4,278 Visits
Unless you've been hiding under a rock the last couple of months, you know that Pulse 2011 is coming to Las Vegas February 27-March 2, 2011. And you know that the Premier Service Management Event will bring together 6000 attendees, focusing on the best practices, solutions and expertise needed to help organizations design, deliver and manage new, innovative business services.
Your friendly roving Integrated Service Management reporter
zEnterprise Is Here!
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ email@example.com Tags:  zenterprise service-management 1 Comment 2,768 Visits
Yes. I used an exclamation point. Because this is that exciting! (there it is again)
The zEnterprise is, as we call it, a "smarter system." It's fast. It's scalable. It's efficient. It's reliable. It's secure. Most important, it's highly manageable.
With that, IBM Service Management on System z is a single service management engine to give you the visibility, control, and automation needed to deliver quality services, manage risk and compliance, and accelerate business growth.
Together they will assist our customers in innovating their business; and that's what it's all about.
The road to a Smarter Planet is going to take systems and software that can be used to create a Smarter Data Center. It's worth your time to read more about it. There's a ton of press coverage (point your favorite search engine at "zEnterprise" and it's dealer's choice on articles). Twitter is already trending with #zEnterprise from analysts, IBMers and customers. And, I've also put some ibm.com links below.
That said, in honor of the new announcement I give you a tribute to an old Jeff Foxworthy bit and a little something we like to call "You might be a not so Smarter Data Center." (and feel free to add yours to the comments section).
Here goes:
Live...from Las Vegas...it's Pulse 2011!
Kimberlee Kemble 120000GMAV firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  integrated-service-manage... smarter-computing service-management ibm pulse-2011 pulse 2,092 Visits
Dateline: Boca Raton, Florida - February 28, 2011 - 11:00 am
Whew! What a great way to start! I encourage you to watch the Day One General Session in its entirety at your convenience - and to tune into the Day Two General Session tomorrow morning. My experience with Livestream is that that the technology was practically flawless (I only had one minor audio glitch when Dean Kamen was showing the Stephen Colbert video). Otherwise, the livestreaming went along perfectly. And it will well be worth your while to watch the whole session. It will get your mind thinking, and it will inspire you at the same time. Plus, it's like having a front-row seat!
You can view the full Pulse Livestream agenda on the Pulse web site. Take advantage and enjoy!
Is drowning in information a step forward from drowning in data?
ivor macfarlane 2700022KPS email@example.com Tags:  service-management ivor itil itsmf pulse 1,733 Visits
I recently booked my travel for a business trip to the
If there is
anyone out there actually reading this stuff, and is in Vegas for Pulse, or at
the LIG is
But – not
unusually – I have distracted myself a little from where I thought I was going
when I started writing this. So … I booked some flights: from
Let me divert again a little bit and remind you – because you are all experts and know this stuff – about a basic knowledge management concept; the spectrum that runs data->information->knowledge->wisdom. At the beginning data is extensive but not too helpful. If it ever reaches wisdom[1] it actually helps you survive and thrive.
But back to that
travel information I was getting. Remember I had booked a flight in late
February to the
I interpret it –this may be grossly unfair of me, but I am the customer and customer perception is what matters – like this: travel advice is being planned and delivered by someone who goes to the same desk in the same office everyday, and rarely puts foot on an airplane. Of course the real culprit behind this is ease of programming – data is cheap and plentiful, applying some basic ideas to turn that into information is quite fun, sounds good and means you can despatch all sorts of travel notice updates to people who will be travelling sometime in the future. But it is – sorry but it really is – just using data because you have it. Maybe they bill on the number of messages? Maybe they really think I want to know? The real consequence is that I delete these emails unread now – so if they were by some miracle to send me something useful, I would miss it altogether.
Another example,
last year this system showed the kind of silo thinking that comes from not
knowing the customer's environment – the kind you often see in service
management reporting. I spoke for itSMF
Now of course
I suppose if somebody were to ask me what I want notifications about, I would be happy to work with them, and set up delivering something that goes beyond information, starts delivering knowledge and gets me the wisdom I need to make the right decisions.
But if that is actually ever to happen then those of us receiving all this useless information need to realise it is – mostly – our fault. I could have responded offering to help them improve, I could proactively tell them what I need – I could offer some of my time as an investment in my own future knowledge and wisdom deliverables. But It is easier (and more fun?) to carp and whinge – so maybe my New Year's resolution should have been around practising what I preach – doing what I talked about in my itSMF conference presentations last year – and to start being a good, committed constructive customer because it won't get better otherwise.
OK – I'm off to find the 'help us improve our service' button on the web site. See you at Pulse?
And a final reminder – For simulation information go to our landing page- for info on LIG presentations go to http://www.itsmfusa.org/local-interest-groups
[1] Best explanation of the step from knowledge to wisdom is one I stole from my daughter, Rosie and it goes 'Knowledge tells you a tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable; wisdom is knowing that but also knowing not to put it in a fruit salad'.
Tivoli + Rational = Gremlinbusters
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ email@example.com Tags:  innovate tivoli rational service-management 1,932 Visits
During the late 90's, I worked for a company that sold Java components and had the opportunity to do a demo in front of a sea of developers at a large Java conference in New York city.
I must have tested my demo about 20 times the night before and everything worked perfectly before I put my head on the pillow.
You can see where this is going, right? The next day, in front of at least 70 people, my demo crashed so hard that I might as well have been wearing a nametag that said "Colt Seavers."
I can't tell you what happened between my brother's apartment and the Javits Center.
Gremlins? Maybe. All I know is, one minute the thing was working. The next, it wasn't.
It's the same thing with many of our customers. They develop products and services and test the heck out of them, then deploy and those darn gremlins seem to just spout up out of nowhere.
With Integrated Service Management, IBM provides customers with a means to address their pain points with regard to the service lifecycle. Specifically, Integrated Service Management for Design & Delivery is about the design, delivery and management of software engineered into intelligent devices and services.
It's the alignment of information, processes and workflow across architecture, development, testing and operations teams.
From brainstorming the service or product, to development, testing, to deployment and maintenance and rolling out future features - it's about breaking down the silos between development and operations. And yes, it includes new technologies like Cloud computing.
Here's a good example: customers developing and testing new applications built on SOA need a way to simplify the process of troublshooting (and resolving) issues once this application is deployed into production.
One way that IBM is able to address these problems is with integration of solutions such as IBM Rational Performance Tester and IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager (ITCAM).
ITCAM is a tool that can be used in both the test lab and production environments to isolate the root cause of the problem, right down to the specific code, and feed that information back to Rational Performance Tester.
By doing this, the testing staff can replicate both the test lab scenario and the production problems and if it takes more than just a configuration change they can feed those details back into the development tools and correct the problem at the code-level based on what has been identified.
In a nutshell, we describe it as, "Service lifecycle integration that links data and work flows."
It's good stuff and this is only one example (out of quite a bunch) where we have service lifecyle integrations across Rational, WebSphere and Tivoli software that enable organizations to bust the gremlins that inhibit continual service improvement across the end-to-end service chain.
Speaking of busting gremlins, a guy who saw a gremlin back in the day was William Shatner; star of "Nightmare At 20,000 Feet" (Twilight Zone) and former conference speaker for Rational's big customer event.
So it shouldn't surprise you that I'm gonna bring this back around IBM's (and Rational's) premier software and product delivery event; Innovate 2010.
If you were at Pulse 2010, then you know that we've been talking about Integrated Service Management for much of this year and it's going to continue this weekend at Innovate 2010.
Keep an eye on our next blog post where we'll have all the details of where you can expect to see Integrated Service Management at Innovate 2010.
And if you're not attending, not to worry. The Rational team are putting a ton of the information (including live streaming for Keynote sessions) on the website
Bridging the Gap Between Software Development and Operations
Kathleen Holm 2700009BHX firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  rational service-management design-and-delivery tivoli 2,215 Visits
As the world becomes more intelligent, instrumented and interconnected, designing and delivering the systems and application software for innovative new products and services becomes more and more complex.
For example, today's cars contain a 100 million lines of code that are connected to the dealer, to a smart traffic system, to an insurance provider, and to a smartphone, which alone could run 100,000s of new applications.
The complexity of these systems of systems has exploded overnight as every single service and interaction between the multiple systems needs to be managed, monitored, and maintained across the entire service lifecycle.
Current models of design, development, operations, and deployment do not scale and are not cost effective. In addition, there is a huge gap between design, delivery, and operations, inhibiting the efficient delivery of services.
Both development and operations see a number of challenges in their IT and product delivery organizations:
Integrated Service Management—which includes Rational and
Integrated platform. Improve the speed of cross-domain tasks, such as closed loop resolution on problem fixes, and resolutions resulting in an average of 80% reduction in downtime and lost revenue. IBM Rational Team Concert™ and IBM Tivoli Service Request Manager unifies the view of incident tracking and defect management, while IBM Rational Performance Tester and IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager together pinpoint root causes.
Lifecycle process automation. Accelerate the development, test, and deployment cycles; reduce operational risk; and improve audit posture. Rational Asset Manager catalogs templates and deployment reference architectures tailored by industry, which invoke the build-test-deploy workflows resulting in greater consistency, predictability, and faster time to market. IBM Rational Build Forge®, IBM Rational Automation Framework for WebSphere®, and IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager provide an automated test and deployment workflow reusable across application and data center provisioning environments significantly reducing the manual effort in test and build set up and tear down.
Attend Innovate2010 and to learn more about Integrated Service Management for Design and Delivery. Register today.
Tired of listening to presentations and sales pitches? Want a more hands-on service management experience?
Kathleen Holm 2700009BHX email@example.com Tags:  itil service-management 1,372 Visits
IBM is offering an IT service management simulation event in six cities across the U.S. The IT Service Management Simulator is designed to give participants--C-level professionals, executives and line managers from business and IT, IT process owners and ITIL and service management project leaders--a hands-on service management experience.
Attendees will be given the chance to participate in a simulation game where they experience first-hand what it's like to run a fictional logistic organization faced with real world IT challenges. They will gain a deeper understanding of the tangible impacts IT process and service management have on an organization that will help them determine how best to move forward with their own service management initiatives.
The IT Service Management Simulator events will be offered in the following locations on the dates indicated below:
The facilitator, Ivor MacFarlane, is a globally recognized ITIL© expert, author and evangelist. Anyone who has ever heard him speak or read his blog knows they are in for an incredibly informative, engaging and entertaining experience.
For more information on how to register for the IT Service Management Simulator in your area, email firstname.lastname@example.com. This is an experience you will not want to miss!
In the News: Looking beyond the costs of service management - here's my two cents worth...
Kimberlee Kemble 120000GMAV firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  tco ibm service-management itil integrated-service-manage... 1,979 Visits
In Ivor Macfarlane's most recent article, he (rightfully) points out that we should look beyond cost to improve service management. Cost used to be the major (if not only) factor in making IT decisions, but it isn't any more, especially when it comes to service management. IT services deliver a lot more than economic savings. They create new possibilities, generate new business advantages, empower new services and strategies, connect organizations with new customers and markets, and much more.
For more of Ivor's valuable insights, read Ivor's latest article Real-World Service Management: Looking Beyond Costs to Improve IT Service Management.
Signing off for now,
Your friendly roving Integrated Service Management reporter
In the News: Pulse 2011 Demos - A Visual Tour of Service Management
Kimberlee Kemble 120000GMAV firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  industry ibm service-management ibm-pulse pulse integrated-service-manage... industries pulse-2011 1,903 Visits
It probably goes without saying, but service management means different things in different industries: Service management can help banks improve customer service, drive business model efficiency and manage operational risk. Service management can help government agencies reduce complexity and waste and deliver services more effectively to the citizens who rely on them. And communications service providers need innovative service management solutions to address the limits of the backbone, a highly competitive environment and customer loyalty.
The list goes on, but in all cases, rendering better service management in any given industry means weighing and balancing different complexities—as well as the leading solutions and strategies best suited to address them.
Your friendly roving Integrated Service Management reporter
Integration everywhere
ivor macfarlane 2700022KPS email@example.com Tags:  itsmf service-management ivor itil 1,557 Visits
In every walk of life we see the components in things:
The Device Whisperer
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  service-management frampton ism-library innovate opal 1,684 Visits
In the Simpsons episode "Homerpalooza," Jimbo is marveling at Peter Frampton's performance and says, "Man, that guy's guitar is talking."
Aside from having good taste in hats, Jimbo was somewhat prophetic in that these things are "talking" to us.
The reality is, some of the smartest devices are no longer inside the data center. They are the intelligent, instrumented and interconnected devices that are enabling IBM and our customers to build innovative solutions for a smarter planet.
Which is why we were pretty excited to talk about the enhancements we made to OPAL in today's press release from Innovate (see "IBM Announces New Offerings to Help Organizations Drive Innovation While Managing Cost and Risk").
OPAL is now the Integrated Service Management Library and it's packed with 1,800 software accelerators developed by IBM and third parties to help customers create more intelligent operations in fourteen key industries including automotive, aerospace and finance.
It's not enough for devices to talk; someone's gotta be listening. The Integrated Service Management Library connectors help the digital and physical worlds communicate with each other to better manage a company's equipment, buildings, IT operations and business services.
Here's an example, to optimize a datacenter, the Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems and data center temperature sensors need to supply data to the software management systems. There is an accelerator in the catalog that enables the building automation system to provide cooling and temperature information directly to IBM Tivoli Monitoring which can combine this information with server usage and power consumption data to identify data center hot spots. Once the hot spots are identified workload can be moved from over utilized systems to the under utilized systems to balance energy and cooling needs.
The Integrated Service Management Library is located at ibm.com/software/ismlibrary and sports a new interface with a bunch of new features; redesigned to help you get exactly the information you need, as quickly as possible.
Other new improvements include:
Go to the site, and start searching for accelerators that can help you with your solution development. You'll see that you can find accelerators faster and more easily with default indexes such as title, company, product, integration type and service management categories. In addition, a rotating feature list that changes every half hour helps keep site users apprised of new developments as they're rolled out.
Oh, and the site is quite collaborative as well. We're looking for customers, such as yourself, to submit success stories and reviews. Also, feel free to submit new feature requests (or feature improvements) on existing connectors
Go toibm.com/software/ismlibrary and code like the wind.
PS, the alternate title to this blog was going to be "Do You Feel Like We Do…About Integrated Service Management Library"
The Security Family Portrait
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  security service-management integrated-service-manage... 1,865 Visits
Last Tuesday, we debuted new releases to the IBM Tivoli Access Management family with an announcement letter (210-159).
I suggested that we take the products down to the local Sears for a "family picture." We'd go for a tropical theme (to commemorate the ending of Lost) and maybe even let IBM Tivoli Unified Single Sign-On hold the teddy bear.
I was outvoted. I won't say by how much. But I was outvoted.
Instead, we did something a heck of a lot better. It's something that I retweeted last week.
As customers are driving new business initiatives, IBM can provide the secure access they need. Typical access requirements we're hearing from our customers are:
All of this is provided in detail on the Enhanced Security website, where there is more information on these initiatives. If you like what you read, contact your IBM sales representative or business partner.
And, no. See above, I do not have wallet-sized pictures of the Tivoli Security Policy Manager...maybe next time...
In the News: Make your Buildings Smarter with IBM Asset Management
Kimberlee Kemble 120000GMAV email@example.com Tags:  service-management asset-management facilities-management 1 Comment 2,668 Visits
In April 2010, IBM conducted an online survey of over 6400 adults working full- or part-time in office buildings in 16 major US cities. The survey showed that "US office buildings have failed to keep pace with the revolution in automation that pervades modern life. While cars, transportation systems, electrical grids and other systems are being instrumented and interconnected to be more efficient and user friendly, the majority of office buildings remain rooted in the past. As a result, this intelligence gap is taking a measurable toll in lost productivity and unnecessary spending."
It starts with a better way of managing those buildings: IBM Maximo Asset Management.
Maximo delivers holistic, end-to-end tracking and monitoring of all assets, at every point in their lifecycles. It helps make building facilities management simpler, faster and less expensive—thus essentially transforming buildings into smart buildings, capable of delivering their full potential to your organization. Specifically, Maximo can:
Of course, there are many more examples of how Maximo can help you manage your facilities more efficiently and cost effectively, all of which enable a shift from facilities maintenance to facilities management, from a reactive stance to proactive stance, resulting in improved asset performance, longer asset life and ultimately more sustainable - and, dare I say - smarter buildings.
For more information on how Maximo can make your buildings smarter, read this Service Management in Action article.
Signing off for this week,
Your friendly roving Integrated Service Management reporter
Conversations at CIOsynergy: How a dynamic infrastructure frees up time for CIOs to focus on innovation
Kathleen Holm 2700009BHX email@example.com Tags:  ciosynergy dynamic-infrastructure ibm service-management al-zollar 2,303 Visits
Al Zollar, will be collaborating with thought leaders at CIOsynergy on May 6. One of the topics Al will be talking with other CIOs about is how building a dynamic infrastructure can help CIOs free up more of their time to focus on innovation and driving competitive advantage.
CIOs in every industry are all too familiar with the operational and financial challenges that growing infrastructure complexity and rising energy costs are creating for their organizations.
There is increased complexity across the board, and that is a trend that will continue. Creating competitive advantage now means dealing with complexity better than your competitors. And that means the ability to work across your organizations technology siloes to harness technology to support breakthrough innovations. It also means creating a flexible and dynamic infrastructure to support those innovations.
It's an approach that allows CIOs to:
That means CIOs will be better able to align IT with business goals and help pave the way for creating the
Find out more about building a dynamic infrastructure.
Learn more about Integrated Service Management and how it can help CIO's better align IT with business goals.
Integrated Service Management in Action
Kathleen Holm 2700009BHX firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  ibmpulse pulse2010 integrated-service-manage... pulse service-management 1 Comment 2,386 Visits
In his keynote address yesterday, Al Zollar talked about how customers are leveraging Integrated Service Management. Capital Region of Denmark in Copenhagen, is in the process of leveraging Integrated Service Management to track missing assets, improve maintenance schedules and get their company back on track.
Capital Region of Denmark is a conglomerate of hospitals with data distributed across three different storage tiers and four sites, with an online disk capacity of 500 Terabytes and backup and archive data exceeding 1.5 Petabytes.
They have solved their storage complexity issues with Integrated Service Management and are managing their entire storage infrastructure with only four people.
He also talked about how the U.S. Air Force is leveraging Integrated Service Management. The U.S. Air Force defense and intelligence network manages the operations of nine major commands, nearly 100 bases, and 700,000 active military personnel around the world. They are leveraging Integrated Service Management solutions to design and deliver a cloud infrastructure with unprecedented levels of security and resiliency.
It's not just a vision for the future--it's happening now. Integrated Service Management can help your company get past the complexity and risk you deal with on a daily basis.
I-TUP, You-TUP, Were All Up for ITUP
Robert Pickard 060001RDA2 email@example.com Tags:  itup service-management itil composer process 1 Comment 5,154 Visits
As names go, neither IBM Tivoli Unified Process nor its acronym ITUP is among my top 10. They just dont fire the imagination or clearly describe its purpose like, for instance, Conan the Barbarian or Floyd the Barber. Now those are names that say something.
Yet more than 17,000 people are registered users of ITUP, a Web-based service management tool, which is now in its eighth release. And to be fair, it would be hard to come up with snappy name that captures what ITUP can do, which cant be described in a few words.
For example, ITUP is often touted for its ability to make ITIL actionable. Say what?
Okay, lets break it down. ITIL the Information Technology Infrastructure Library -- is a few volumes worth of best practices on how to manage IT infrastructures, based on hard-won, real-world experience. Many of us in Tivoli have gone through a few days training to become ITIL-certified, which gives you a general understanding, a nice certificate and healthy respect for it.
But the challenge with ITIL has always been, how do you take that general wisdom and apply it to real-world situations at a particular organization? Thats where ITUP comes in. It takes ITIL from concept to reality by mapping those best practices to the people (by their specific roles), processes, information and technology (right down to the names of specific IBM solutions) that customers use, or can use, in their organizations. It serves as a roadmap to help customers understand how to actually implement ITIL best practices and a service management approach and see the real value they can gain. It even shows how ITIL best practices can fit in with other models, such as CoBIT and eTOM.
ITUP is based on the collective experience of thousands of IBM engagements, is continually updated to keep current with the latest version of ITIL, and its free. Theres also a product version of ITUP, called ITUP Composer, which takes customers beyond the understanding phase into the actual implementation phase.
I think an ITUP demo is worth 1,000 words, especially mine, and fortunately, weve got a good one. Check it out, and then maybe we can start a naming contest for the tool. Maybe ITUP the Implementer? ITUP the Eighth and Counting? ITUP the Actionable-izer? This name stuff is harder than I thought.
why we might love the most what we don't notice
ivor macfarlane 2700022KPS email@example.com Tags:  service-management ivor back2itsm 7,416 Visits
There have been a lot of good discussions on Back2ITSM recently. I find the site a wonderful reminder of the two universal constant truths: 'everything changes' and 'there is noting new under the sun'. They might seem contradictions at first, yet the older I get the more both seem true.
Firstly, if you aren't looking at the Back2ITSM group on facebook then you are missing out - go sign up, now! Let me explain what it is and how it is brand new and full of ITSM tradition at the same time.
Secondly, it is about people talking with each other. That's the bit that is the same as it's always been. The willingness to share ideas, help others – even those in competing organisations – is just exactly like many itSMF regional meetings I have been to, in UK, Canada and New Zealand; except that now we are all in three at the same time.
Of course, social media isn't new, and facebook is not the newest kid in town. But what is 21st century about this kind of group are the immediacy of comment and dialogue and the wide spectrum of simultaneous participants it allows. Since it has active members from all across the world, there is constant input and comment.
OK, so we have all know that the technology for this has been around a while. After all it is 'just' about real time input to a forum – and we now have about 20 or 30 people across the world presenting their opinions to an audience of 500+ (lurking is positively encouraged). For me what is important is precisely that I am not aware of the clever technology or feel all the time that I am using a novel means of communicating or even just how damned clever the whole thing is. With this group I have reached stage three in my own 'using technology' scale: comfort and taking for granted.
Stage 1 is when you are using some new way of doing things just because you can. This isn't just about IT of course, many of us may recall how such things have affected our choice of travel (my
example is choosing an airline because they had A380s on the route, and even if a bit dearer I had never been on one of them before …).
Stage 2 is when the mean is no longer overwhelming the ends – you're using it now because it is logical to do so, and it is delivering value. But, you are still very aware of how cool it is. And you probably keep telling other people how cool it is too.
Stage 3 is when your focus is totally on what you are doing. I can now just read what is written, comment if I have something to say. You know it's a normal conversation because it goes off at tangents, people get flippant, say daft things, agree, argue, make subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) digs at each and launch jokes that no-one else notices. In short, it's normal human conversation, without thinking about how you are achieving it nor where all the people are, or what time it is there.
And to me this is a good motif for successful technology. It isn't when it is there and running that the implementation part is properly over. Real success is when people don't notice it any more, but just get on with using it, unconsciously – as part of their everyday lives.
It's one more example of how success is about being invisible. First time I flew in an A380 I was excited about it – last time I was watching a movie before we reached the runway. That's success. (Ok, so there was a little re-attention on the technology after the Qantas 380 had an engine explode but I am back to ignoring it again now.)
So the important lesson and message that I see is how we need a customer perspective on the introduction of new technology. And maybe what you actually want is people to stop telling you how impressed they are, because then they are getting on with using it, which was, after all, the real point of the exercise, wasn't it?
Looking back to look forward
ivor macfarlane 2700022KPS firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  itil ibm ivor service-management itsmf back2itsm iso20000 7,803 Visits
I went to an itSMF
Now that kind of thing, apart from making me feel old (which is, admittedly, a fair enough feeling at my age) also made me look back and think on where we (the ITIL community) have come from and where we are now.
The first thing that occurs to me in thinking back to the early days of ITIL is that we now find ourselves in a place that none of us imagined we would. Don't get me wrong, the original inventors and drivers[1] of the ITIL idea were not short on confidence or vision, nor in seeing the benefits that documenting this aspect of best practice would bring. But I suspect that world domination of this industry sector by the word 'ITIL' was beyond even their best possible visions.
The key to the expansion of ITIL was that it quickly became about more than just the books. The ITIL advertising leaflets produced in the mid 90s coined the term 'ITIL philosophy' to represent this expanded
scope of ITIL. I suppose I should confess that I invented that phrase and also the diagram that went with it – a version from about 1997 is shown here. The accompanying words suggested that, even back then, less than 1% of 'ITIL-related sales' were about the actual ITIL books, and the rest were evolved services.
The fact that I couldn't even hazard a guess at what that percentage might be today indicates a few, pretty self-evident truths:
Some other things have changed too.
Nowadays the maturity of the ITIL ideas means most players are focused on market share rather than growing the sector itself. That means more competition than there used to be. Nonetheless there are still lots of examples of that collaboration still easily found. Probably the best example is the 'Back2ITSM' facebook group – a place where free advice, constructive debate and openly shared thoughts are still the norm[3].
The itSMF was born in 1991, and played – probably – the major coordinating role is promoting the idea, importance and approaches of service management. Like ITIL, itSMF predates the term 'service management', having started as the ITIMF. Even here we have seen a lot more competition during the last third of its lifetime: both competition from other community organisations and also considerable internal competition. I hope itSMF will evolve form this to carry on delivering benefit to its members. I am a bit too frightened to work out what percentage of my time has been given to itSMF over the last 17 years – or at least frightened what my employers over that period might think. But that commitment does make me wish hard for its future health.
So, looking back should makes us appreciate where we are now – nostalgia can be deceptive for usually the past wasn't better; because progress is exactly that – going forward and getting more. And wherever ITIL is now, IT Service management has come a wondrous way in the last 20 years. Global technology changes have made a difference to that journey; we've seen personal computing and the internet make all but unbelievable levels of change. We may well see Cloud do the same; personally I think cloud might do that by freeing us from some of the technical baggage and letting us see and address real service management issues, without the obfuscation of technology issues or the opportunity to hide behind them any more.
We've seen a move from books being the go-to source of wisdom when ITIL started to an amazing range of information sources. Nowadays your typical service management will expect their influences to come via social media, electronically delivered white papers and the like. Interestingly, in many cases, they would also expect them to come for free, and that throws a real challenge on the thought leadership business. If ITIL 4 ever happens I think it will be a radically different entity from versions1-3.
Where I want to see ITSM going is towards SM. IT is now so pervasive that it is everywhere, which to me means that ITSM cannot be a subsection of overall SM anymore because it logically applies to everything, since all services now depend on IT. Nevertheless, IT has treated SM well, and – after some effort –has taken it seriously. I hope those lessons will work their way into broader adoption and we will see an improved – and critically an integrated – approach to service management across enterprises because of that. I am driven to optimism in this (not my natural state you understand so it is noteworthy) by the fact that, alongside this blog, I am involved just in this same month in a webinar and an article for IBM's SMIA series on the idea that IT is now spreading its ideas – and delivering its technology and specifically its evolved software solutions – to the broader enterprise needs.
I wonder what we will be saying in another 20 years looking back – maybe ITIL will survive another 20 years, maybe not, but I am certain service management will progress and improve.
[1] And the top two names I would put here are Pete Skinner and John Stewart – perhaps our least sung heroes, especially the late Mr Skinner – but pivotal all the same.
[2] I don't plan to, and hope no-one else is tempted – there are far more constructive things for intelligent service management practitioners to progress knowledge about.
[3] And if you are interested (sad?) enough to be reading this then you should be part of that group if you aren't already.
Orlando Is The Happiest Place On Earth: IBM Edge And IBM Innovate
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ email@example.com Tags:  cloud devops service-management apm innovate jazz storage edge 1 Comment 6,516 Visits
Over 51 million tourists travel to Orlando, Florida every year, but only the cool ones go to attend IBM Edge and IBM Innovate.
As I type this, so many of our customers, partners and my colleagues are in the "brutal" 88°F* weather learning more about storage and software & system innovation.
IBM Storage
Since much of my focus is around product announcements, I wanted to point folks to the IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center V5.1 announcement that happened yesterday (Announcement Letter 212-189).
For content coming from the conference, a number of the marketing team are on the ground at Edge and tweeting. Be sure to follow Maria, Martha and Branavan (and of course, @ibmstorage) as well as the hashtag #ibmedge.
IBM Innovate
The Rational team have a number of exciting new announcements around Jazz and they will be talking quite a bit about mobile, cloud, industry solutions and a few other things including DevOps.
For us service management folks, DevOps translates into tangible benefits we can bring back to the business; like fewer errors and faster time to resolving errors if they do occur.
Back at Pulse 2012, we announced, among other things, the Beta for IBM SmartCloud Continuous Delivery (see the blog post and press release).
Of course, at Innovate there's a lot more to talk about with DevOps. Including the announcement from last week of IBM SmartCloud Application Performance Management 7.5 (Announcement Letter 212-143).
Along with IBM SmartCloud Control Desk and IBM SmartCloud Provisioning Manager (among others), it's about developers and testers having access to the same tools, data and information that operations uses and leveraging them to fix problems before they occur. And if problems do occur, the linkages with tools like Rational Application Developer and Rational Performance Tester allow the developers and testers to quickly resolve these issues as everyone and everything is connected.
As stated before, fewer errors and faster time to resolving errors if they do occur. This translates into using time to be productive and being innovative. Innovation is what provides value back to the business.
There's a good press release from yesterday, "IBM Expands Collaborative Software Development Solutions to Cloud, Mobile Technologies" that highlights some of the integrations and new solutions (including Application Performance Management).
The conference is being livestreamed (with video available right on the IBM Innovate home page) and be sure to follow the discussion on Twitter using the hashtag #ibminnovate and be sure to read the Invisible Thread blog for updates on what's happening on the floor.
Pulse 2012: Day 1 General Sessions Recap
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  service-management pulse2012 pulse keynotes 2 Comments 4,196 Visits
As a reminder, all of the general session keynotes (and more!) can be found on the Livestream site.
This morning was kicked off with the band Naturally 7, who were amazing. During one of the speaker changes, they did "In The Air Tonight" and rocked the drum solo.
The opening video (which was pretty awesome) started with the fact that we have 8,000 attendees from 79 countries and then talked about how one of the things that is affecting all of us is that lower cost technologies are literally changing the planet we live on.
This is leading to a Smarter Planet where infrastructure is everywhere.
Our first customer speaker from WellPoint echoed this sentiment and both he and Scott Hebner (VP of Marketing for IBM Tivoli Software) how Visibility. Control. Automation™. (VCA) is critical to turning this "infrastructure is everywhere" reality into a successful future of innovation
Robert LeBlanc (Senior Vice President, IBM Software Middleware Group) continued this conversation about VCA.
He had a great line from one of our customers, "If you can't get excited about the change and challenges of this industry, I don't know what you're doing here."
The three things driving business imperatives are dexterity, reinventing customer relationships and uncovering new profit opportunities. Analytics followed by mobility, virtualization, cloud and then security are keys to driving these technology shifts.
Achieving desired business outcomes is about VCA.
One thing that you'll hear a lot about at Pulse is that cloud is about more than virtualization. You'll hear that message a lot, because it's true.
Technology for technology's sake doesn't work. It has to impact the business. Cloud computing has the potential to add that value. As does mobile.
Mobile + Cloud (which Danny Sabbah talked in detail about) will have the biggest impact on our customers. Two statistics that Robert gave were the fact that data has surpassed voice and that last year more smartphones shipped than PCs.
How do you manage and secure all of those devices? VCA. Specific to security, it's about security and compliance; people, data, applications and infrastructure.
And, of course, assets and facilities (smarter physical infrastructures) will play a critical role as everything becomes interconnected, intelligent and instrumented.
Robert closed out with an interesting comment - data for data's sake isn't important. It's what you do with it. It's ensuring Visibility. Control. Automation.
Applying analytics is one of the ways IBM does this across VCA:
Applying IT analytics to improve business outcomes. Taking an Open/integrated approach to service management and leveraging the cloud to unify the service value chain.
Next up was Dr. Danny Sabbah (General Manager, IBM Tivoli Software) and he put cloud and mobile into context.
Danny hit the ground running, talking about the three dominant transformations happening in technology; Smarter Physical Infrastructure. Mobility. Security.
The intersection of these three has caused a lot of complexity (and confusion) for our clients.
The way to tame that complexity is Visibility. Control. Automation.
The lines of business are doing what they need to so they can compete which means that our clients must simplify, standardize and automate to get this to work efficiently and add value back to the business.
It's about going beyond virtualization. It's about Mobile + Cloud. Together.
Tennis Australia built a smarter physical infrastructure capturing and using the data in real-time. This helped build out the relationship with their customers (in this case, tennis fans).
The video (included in the Livestream) with Tennis Australia is great and the nice thing about them is that what they did is applicable to any industry. In fact, the best comment they made in the video was that, "Providing information on all platforms is table stakes these days."
Danny let that sit for a minute. Table stakes. Meaning that you need to go beyond just offering up the data and provide value at levels that won't happen with just virtualization.
It's about mobile + cloud. The infrastructure must deliver value back to the business.
CIOs are the key to driving this innovation. Technology is about real outcomes and not just playing with the latest toys.
We must simplify, standardize and automate.
Danny mentioned the over 3,000 customers we have helped with this type of transformation and one of the best examples was helping an infrastructure delivery that used to take 40 days reduce to just 20 minutes.
Our customers (you) need to be resilient to velocity of change. Have security intelligence. Be able to have the choice/flexibility (mobile, hybrid) to be workload aware and utlitize analytics.
It's cloud done right. It's IBM SmartCloud Foundation.
Danny took the time to talk about the Worklight acquisition and more specifically the big announcements we made with the integration of Q1 Labs and QRadar into our security portfolio (see the press release from Feb 22).
He concluded with discussion around OSLC as a specifcation to simplify integrations and increase agility. Development and Operations (Dev/Ops) continuing to be an important aspect of how we turn isolation into integration! He also mentioned the IBM SmartCloud Control Desk (mentioned in the announcement letter from Feb 28).
Danny concluded by saying that if you wanted hype and marketing. Go somewhere else. This is about cloud done right.
And with that. We're off to the stream kickoffs and a full say of sessions.
Stay tuned for a wrap-up of tomorrow's general session keynotes, right here on the blog.
In the meantime, use the links below to stay connected to everything happening at Pulse.
Additional Related Links:
Cloud Service Management Simulator Workshop At Pulse 2012 (Saturday and Sunday)
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ email@example.com Tags:  workshop simulator service-management cloud pulse service-management-simula... 2,509 Visits
David has written about the Cloud Service Management Simulator Workshop in a previous blog and things are heating up as we get closer to Pulse.
In addition to the Sunday workshop we have a few extra seats left on Saturday for business partners and customers who wish to attend. If you are interested, please send an email to firstname.lastname@example.com. Both workshops (Saturday and Sunday) are from 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm.
And for more information, watch developerWorks' Scott Laningham interview Ivor MacFarlane on what to expect in the room.
The October Business Agility Launch: It Starts Here
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ email@example.com Tags:  analytics ism bizagility tbsm bsm business-agility service-management 2,646 Visits
I am going to tell you a story, and the truth is it's probably pretty familiar to you already.
Here goes: in today's competitive market, your services are what make your organization innovative. They are what set you apart from your competition.
They are what have taken your IT from being seen as a "cost center" to playing a role as one of the most crucial parts of your organization's success (or failure).
The services you provide are what make your organization innovative. Failure on the part of IT can mean failure for everyone.
(No pressure. Am I right?)
By definition, a competitive market is one that is in constant states of change. New customer demands. Competitive maneuvers. New service offerings. Industry or government regulations.
Speed is of the essence. But, of course there's the need to ensure that everything stays within the governance you've put in place, your security policies and of course you're trying to be as risk adverse as possible.
Doing all of this while navigating the complexity of your IT.
(Like I said. No pressure.)
This is the story you already are pretty familiar with. So now, let's talk about what we do about this.
Today, Tivoli along with Rational and WebSphere are a part of a larger IBM Software Group launch around Business Agility.
There are a number of announcements around Business Agility - about providing you with "business agility levers" that assist with combinations of technology capabilities that accelerate the path to agility with reduced cost and greater efficiency.
This is the start of a series of blogs where we'll be discussing a number of the business agility levers. Today, I'm going to talk about one; Predictive Business Service Management. My next blog will focus on Collaborative Development & Operations.
Predictive Business Service Management
With Business Service Management solutions from IBM, organizations are able to put services in the proper business context so that both IT and the business teams can accurately see the complex relationships their services and supporting technology infrastructure have with each other.
On Tuesday, IBM announced a new version of the Tivoli Business Service Manager solution. Key to this new version (Announcement 211-444) are role-based dashboards with easy self-service, drag & drop capabilities to customize a user's visibility into key service health indicators, KPIs, and business or IT detail required for their role or tackling a current issue.
That level of "Visibility" can be taken to a new level when organizations leverage Predictive Analytics.
Business service disruptions and outages cost organizations millions of dollars per year. Even with existing investments in infrastructure monitoring and performance management solutions, organizations are often unaware of an impending service issue…until it is too late.
Predictive Business Service Management identifies performance issues in an organization's IT and network infrastructure prior to these costly service disruptions or outages. With this type of early warning system, detection is done early enough that mitigating steps can be taken to stop the issue from ever negatively impacting critical application or business services. Put simply: it finds problems before the organization knows to look for them.
Also on Tuesday, IBM previewed a new solution for predictive business service management that will address predictive business service management (Announcement 211-468).
For more information around everything that is happening around the Business Agility launch contact your IBM sales rep or one of our Business Partners using the Business Partner Locator website.
Also, we're doing something a bit new with this announcement. The IBM Software Group Blog, Impact Blog, Rational Blog and this blog are all telling the story together. You'll be able to click across the different blogs and get more information about all aspects of this launch.
Update: there's a great website for the Business Agility launch, specific to Tivoli and service management on our website.
Related Links:
devops? should I have known what that is?
ivor macfarlane 2700022KPS email@example.com Tags:  itsmf tivoli service-management innovate-2011 ivor itil ibm itsm 1 Comment 5,566 Visits
Service Management Connect, FTW!
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ email@example.com Tags:  service-management community connect 1,509 Visits
If I had one take away from Pulse, it would be that the community is the key to IBM's success in all of our endeavors.
Our customers (you: the community) are the ones who help us with ensuring that we're giving you the tools to do your jobs and make it home in time to watch Justified (or whatever it is you do when you get home).
Events like Pulse illustrate that one of the ways a community is at its finest is when the members are interacting with each other and helping one another.
Reading, writing and sharing content is one of the ways that communities create ties and these ties tend to be strongest in the technical community.
Today, we're announcing Service Management Connect.
Service Management Connect will provide a direct path to IBM service management experts and promote fast effective two-way communications between customers and IBM on a variety of service management topics.
The first sub-community to go live will be Business Service Management and these sub-communities will compliment the Tivoli User Groups and ISM Library.
Start by going to the site today and taking a look. We will be talking about it more in the weeks to come as well as be adding new categories soon.
See below for a video that Denny and I shot on the show floor at Pulse 2011. (YouTube link)
Additional Related Links:
In the News: As if you needed another reason to attend Pulse 2011, here's two...
Kimberlee Kemble 120000GMAV email@example.com Tags:  pulse proven-practice-workshops integrated-service-manage... special-inteersts service-management ibm pulse-2011 ibm-pulse 1,796 Visits
Proven Practice Workshops
And just what are Proven Practice Workshops? First of all, they're new to Pulse 2011 - reason enough to check them out. Second, in these workshops, you'll hear from leading Tivoli Services experts about their proven implementation best practices and guidance. Tivoli Services will lead 5 of these dynamic workshops:
Pulse 2011 will deliver more information, in more ways, on more relevant subjects, than ever before. With such a rich array of information to choose from, some of you may be wondering: "How can I zero in on exactly the right sessions for me?"
Your friendly roving Integrated Service Management reporter
It's January, Time For A zEnterprise Webcast
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ email@example.com Tags:  webcast zenterprise service-management 1,493 Visits
As far as holiday gifts go, a brand new shiny zEnterprise wouldn't be too shaby,* and there is enough of a lull in the beginning of the new year for planning that a webcast like Tivoli for zEnterprise – Speeding problem isolation and resolution makes a lot of sense to check out.
If you're new to zEnterprise or even if you've had your system for a while, this is a great opportunity to listen to speaker Randy Scott discuss this topic (and there will be a live question-and-answer session as well as a future replay).
Here's a brief description of the webcast and we look forward to you attending:
In the News: Confessions of a Self-Proclaimed Luddite
Kimberlee Kemble 120000GMAV firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  ivor-macfarlane service-management ism real-world-service-manage... ivor integrated-service-manage... 1,547 Visits
Ok, so I'm not really a Luddite in the original sense of the word...but I fully admit that I prefer handwritten notes to emails and texts, hardcover books to paperback or eBooks, buying the full CD (AKA the album to us old-timers) rather than downloading a single tune...and just don't get me started on the term "my bad..."
Your friendly roving Integrated Service Management Reporter
Yesterday's TV, recollections and ways to measure
ivor macfarlane 2700022KPS email@example.com Tags:  ivor itsmf itil service-management 1,663 Visits
I've done a few talks to camera recently – interviews at the itSMF Spain conference and a mock programme at the UK. The UK thought I was perfect for 'Antiques Roadshow' and I have to admit I fit the title's parameters. I watched the people using modern video equipment and it did make me feel old. Nearly 40 years ago I was editor of the student TV society at University and I was recalling how many of us it took to deliver 30 minutes worth of black & white programme onto 2 inch wide reel-to-reel video tape. It seems all but unbelievable watching the kids now (the age I was then) record it in perfectly balanced colour on something the size of a small book – when our kit weighed more than the library. But the whole situation is another example of getting focused on the changes and missing what stays the same.
While the television technology has changed beyond recognition, the basics of interviewing haven't. So hopefully I helped by trying to follow those basic rules for an interviewee – ignore the camera, keep talking, try to say something interesting. You can judge for yourself at http://www.best-management-practice.tv/best-management-practice-at-the-itsmf-uk-conference-2010. (Actually if you are sad enough to be interested in the earlier ITIL days, I shall be writing an article on that next year.)
So, this TV stuff is like most services these days – the technology bit keeps changing, using new ideas – basically becoming far more complex to understand whilst at the same time becoming ever easier to use. That means customer expectations keep increasing (you don't find many people content with black & white TV any more) but at the real core, the prime deliverables remain the same. We might talk more and more about plasma vs LCD, 3D, surround sound, HD and all the rest; but the real satisfaction comes from watching people be clever, funny, informative etc in a way that holds our attention and entertains us.
And there is the heart of most of what I have been talking about at conferences for the past few years. It is easy to measure things like pixels and screen size and the number of channels and hours of programming available, but so much harder to measure what we actually want from a TV service.
Keeping that old television link, last week was the 30th anniversary of John Lennon's murder: a sad time for anyone of my age and background. So I found myself watching old clips of Lennon on a programme recalling his life. Now the man was clearly an extremist with impossible dreams – and I may well return to my belief that we need some extremists to make the majority move at all, but that's another blog. One of his lines, though, did trigger the realisation that this need for real measurement isn't a new idea. He was ranting about governments (as usual) and said "If anybody can put on paper what our government, and the American government etc., and the Russian, Chinese, what they are actually trying to do, you know, and what they think they're doing, I'd be very pleased to know what they think they're doing". Now he followed that with "I think they're all insane!" which perhaps is more about presumed results than objective measurement, but nonetheless the basic concept is interesting.
We want to know what is at the heart of our and others' behaviour but it is very difficult to express that. It is hard even to ask sometimes in a way that doesn't sound as if you have failed to pick up the social or business norms; because often we just presume there is a reason and take the usual comfort in things 'that have always been done like that'. Maybe it is just easier to hide behind the numbers and the detail of how you are doing things rather than making it all that clear what it is you are trying to do, why you are doing it or even who you think you are doing it for.
One last seasonal example maybe, since it is mid-December as I write this. Many of us will get back to work in January to be greeted by the question 'Did you have a good Christmas?' For those who did, you will know without recourse to precise measurements – it isn't based on the number of presents you received, how many carols you sang or how much turkey you ate. Unless the biggest fun you have is skiing, it probably won't have mattered that much if it snowed. But if you had a good Christmas then you will know – but my, isn't it hard to set genuinely accurate measures beforehand?
And what can we learn from that, or at least set out to do better? Maybe if we are buying or delivering any kind of service we should at least try to be aware of – if not the ultimate – then at least a higher level goal. And don't be surprised or disappointed if your expensive new TV might not affect the entertainment value, although it will help you see the ball better in the cricket, and that might be an important factor. And at work, a new finance package won't make your profit margins higher – but it might tell you faster what they are, and perhaps that makes an important difference. Just be sure that's important enough for what it is costing you, and that you know the knock-on effect onto the higher level measure.
Conference commonality and cultural variation
ivor macfarlane 2700022KPS email@example.com Tags:  itsmf service-management itil ivor 1,711 Visits
I am writing this on a plane back to England from Madrid, at the end of a pretty hectic few weeks that involved speaking at five itSMF events in five different countries – from Finland to Spain. There has to be a good joke somewhere in a run of 5 events that started with the Finnish – but I'll let you work that that one out for yourselves.
In A World... (The Integrated Service Management Trailer)
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  service-management integrated-service-manage... 1,336 Visits
I forget how this project got started, but when I heard about it I was pretty excited.
This trailer is the perfect setup to talk about Integrated Service Management. It drives home our message around Visibility. Control. Automation.™ and uses several real industry examples including Healthcare, Financial Services and Travel.
The real power of the trailer is that it gives the necessary time to explain Integrated Service Management and drive home its value. (it's short, promise)
Innovation happens with Integrated Service Management, and this trailer shows you how IBM can assist you in getting there.
Click on the link below to watch. And I promise, this is 100% safe for work (SFW).
* the title to this post is a nod ot the late/great Don LaFontaine and his signature introduction to action trailers with the phrase, "In a world..."*
Friday Afternoon Is A Great Time To Work On Your Pulse Proposal
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  pulse service-management 1,238 Visits
When did my calendar start looking like a game of Jenga?
Ugh. The good news is tomorrow is Friday. Things tend to taper off on Fridays and Friday afternoons are the perfect time to "disappear" and block out some time to work on miscellaneous projects.
So here's what I was thinking.
Tomorrow afternoon: go and get a nice lunch and think about a proposal for Pulse 2011.
The call for papers opens on September 22nd, so now is the perfect time to get ready.
We are looking for speakers, like you, to talk about your experiences in implementing service management.
Jennifer Dennis wrote an excellent post with all the details ("Pulse 2011 Call for Speakers - Opens 9/22 @ ibm.com/pulse!") on the Pulse blog.
The best part is that if you are selected to speak, you get a full conference pass ($1,995 value) not to mention the recognition of your peers (whom you'll be interacting with at the event) as well as a great resume builder.
What do you think? Not a bad way to spend a Friday afternoon!
I speak for everyone on the team when I say that we look forward to what you put together.
PS Obviously, you're not just limited to doing this on Friday. Every day is a good day to work on your abstract :-)
One Of The Biggest Henges In The World
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  integrated-service-manage... service-management stonehenge virtualization 1,624 Visits
The average IT infrastructure is a lot like Stonehenge.
Few people can tell you when it was built.
Even fewer people can explain exactly what it's function is.
But everybody agrees that it is immovable.
That sucker is not going anywhere. Comedian Eddie Izzard has a bit about how the Druids flippantly ask the henge builders, "That stone and this stone. Can we swap them around?"
Outside of its original (and intended use), the immovable structure of Stonehenge makes for a great tourist attraction; but that's about it.
The immovable architecture severely limits its functionality.
Fast forward to today. The head Druid (or your CEO...depends on where you work, I suppose) asks you, "This workload and that workload. Can we swap them around?"
Is your infrastructure a Stonehenge? Or is it a Virtualized henge?
Horrible pun aside, I'm serious. Can you move those workloads around? Can you automate business priorities? How agile is your infrastructure?
Take a moment to think about that. Is innovating your business a button punching task, or is it rolling rocks across the highlands?
Virtualization is a key technology enabler for Integrated Service Management and it's something IBM has a long and successful track record implementing with our customers.
I've been working with IBM products that have utilized Virtualization of some sort going all the way back to LPAR with the p630, and this video is one of the best things I've seen on communicating IBM's value with Virtualization.
Take the eight minutes to watch it and post comments below or reach out to your IBM sales rep and/or Business Partner (use the Business Partner Locator) and ask them to sit down and talk about it with you.
In the News: IBM Mainframe Delivers Simplified Service Management
Kimberlee Kemble 120000GMAV email@example.com Tags:  system-z ibm integrated-service-manage... zenterprise service-management 2,096 Visits
Last week, IBM made an historic announcement with the introduction of the highly anticipated zEnterprise - a first of a kind technology representing a new dimension in computing. zEnterprise integrates IBM's leading technologies to dramatically improve the productivity of today's multi-architecture data centers and tomorrow's private clouds. Truly, a smarter system for a smarter data center.
Long Term Evolution, It's The Jam
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ email@example.com Tags:  netcool service-management tivoli 1 Comment 2,505 Visits
New York reached 100 ºF yesterday and it is currently 91 ºF down here in Austin.
Which is why "inside" inside is the place to be.
And while you're inside, you might want to be sure to watch the newest on-demand webcast "IBM Service Management Jam- Long Term Evolution."
Here's the abstract on the webcast:
Stay cool.
In the News: IBM Unveils the ISM Library - Smart accelerators, high ROI
Kimberlee Kemble 120000GMAV email@example.com Tags:  service-management ism-library integrated-service-manage... accelerators 1 Comment 3,210 Visits
A rose by any other name...OPAL (the Open Process Automation Library) is now the Integrated Service Management Library, and you're invited to the grand reopening!
Your friendly roving Integrated Service Management reporter
Making infrastructures secure by design
Kathleen Holm 2700009BHX firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  #ibminnovate security security-by-design service-management 1,677 Visits
IBM just introduced new software and services to help build security into the design of new applications instead of adding it later as an afterthought.
New technologies like cloud computing and virtualization are making organizations more efficient and competitive. These new technologies are also adding increased complexity and risk forcing businesses to find new ways to deal with compliance, risk management and data protection.
The new security software and services announced by
These new offerings help organizations ensure their infrastructure organizations lower cost, reduce risk, and ensure their infrastructures are secure by design. For more information about these new security offerings from
Re: In the News: Make your Buildings Smarter with IBM Asset Management
Kathleen Holm 2700009BHX email@example.com Tags:  asset-management service-management facilities-management 1 Comment 2,676 Visits
In response to: In the News: Make your Buildings Smarter with IBM Asset ManagementGreat blog about smarter buildings! The Service Management article is excellent too. I'm looking forward to your weekly updates.
The Integrated Service Management Service Delivery Chain
Kathleen Holm 2700009BHX firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  service-management service_delivery integrated_service_manage... 1,199 Visits
We've been talking a lot at
Increasingly, physical assets are being transformed into smart, digitally-aware assets that can receive and emit data and connect with one another, allowing people, systems and objects to communicate and interact in entirely new ways. The ability to interconnect smarter products and information technology is making it possible for industries to deliver new, innovative services to customers—smarter services which fundamentally change the economics of delivery services.
For example, smarter energy services leverage new smart meter technology to better manage energy distribution across the grid. Smarter energy service has resulted in a 14% reduction in CO2 power plant emissions and reduced homeowner costs up to 10%. Smarter traffic service leverages smart tolls and communication systems to better manage traffic flow, resulting in 20% less traffic, a 12% drop in emissions.
Underpinning these smart business services is a Service Delivery Chain that must be aligned and integrated across processes, roles, and assets.
Integrated Service Management provides a holistic approach to designing, managing and delivering smart services. It connects processes, roles and assets together making everything occur in a seamless flow- A customer places an order, the system checks inventory, delivery gets scheduled, inventory is replenished; to quickly pulling together and making sense out of any kind of information and data;. to finding and fixing complex problems with little or no human help; to making collaboration a fundamental part of how work is done; to creating an infrastructure that helps reduce costs, improve service and manage risks.
Judith Hurwitz on Cloud Computing
Kathleen Holm 2700009BHX email@example.com Tags:  service-management cloud cloud-computing 1,746 Visits
Tiffany Winman
In the interview, Judith talks about how customers are looking at both internal and external clouds as a way to optimize their use of IT technology from a real business perspective.
One of the initial areas customers are looking at implementing Cloud is test and development. Rather than investing in new servers and tools, it makes economic sense to use a Cloud infrastructure for pilots. Plus when you give developers temporary resources, you often don't get them back!
Check out this podcast to hear more of Judith Hurwitz's thoughts on Cloud computing.
Judith Hurwitz on Cloud
Real Time Asset Location For Healthcare Video Demo
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ email@example.com Tags:  maximo healthcare service-management asset-management pulse2010 integrated-service-manage... 1,865 Visits
At Pulse 2010, my friend Cathy and her team put together an awesome little video demonstration of their new real time asset location solution for the Healthcare industry. The solution uses Maximo software to monitor and manage patients, staff and physical assets in a hospital. Check it out:
Pulse 2010 Announcements
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  pulse2010 integrated-service-manage... service-management 1,773 Visits
If I had a penny for every time the word "Pulse" has been said around the IBM offices over the past month…I'd have a lot of copper!*
Seriously. "Pulse fever" is in full effect. It's happening right now. As I write this, our customers, our valued business partners and many of my colleagues have converged on Las Vegas and are having a service management jam fest that makes Woodstock look like band practice in some dude's basement on a Wednesday night.
So, one of the things that I have been working on is compiling the new and exciting announcements that are happening in and around the event.
We can start with the post Tiffany "Lois Lane" Winman's wrote on the Pulse conference community blog about the Keynote featuring Tivoli General Manager Al Zollar and former Vice President Al Gore.
The following are some of our announcement highlights as well as some helpful links. Please feel free to post comments on this blog.
Press Kit for Pulse 2010: this includes a video for smarter buildings and facilities with the Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino, as well as "Galveston National Labs Employs IBM Software to Help Fight Infectious Disease" and "Tennessee Valley Authority Goes Live With IBM Software To Streamline Fleet Operations." [Update: Todd Watson has full coverage of the press conference which includes some additional details on these and other products]
Integrated Service Management
This is something that the entire IBM team has been working on for quite some time. Kathleen Holm discussed this yesterday and the only thing that I would add is that it is an exciting time to be working in service management. Companies such as IBM are helping customers expand their capabilities outside of the confines of the data center and assisting them all of their intelligent assets. Integrated Service Management is much like the "web 2.0" of service management (but without the funny t-shirts), and IBM continues to be in a leadership position in this space.
As you may have read last week, the IBM Corporation was proud to announce the acquisition of Intelliden, a leading provider of intelligent network automation software. Pulse is a great way to welcome our new IBM brothers and sisters to be a part of our Integrated Service Management solution, and looking at what they have achieved so far with Network Change and Configuration Management (NCCM) I know that they are going to be a valuable contribution to our customers and to the IBM company.
When In Austin Or La Gaude, Visit Our Solution Experience Labs
If you are a customer and want to see our Smart Grid solution, there are two labs that you can go to; one here in Austin, TX and the other in La Gaude, France. The Smart Grid solution is an end-to-end Energy and Utilities lab environment with a focus on Advanced Meter Management to help customers address security challenges.
Smarter Buildings With Our Partners, Johnson Controls
Above, I discussed the press releases we did around smarter buildings and facilities with some of our customers. In addition to those, Todd Watson has a great post about what IBM is doing with Johnson Controls to create smarter buildings. The long and short of it is that IBM is working with Johnson Controls energy efficiency building technology to provide advanced business analytics to help our customers address inefficiencies (press release).
Ricoh Intelligent Device Management
Todd also discussed our announcement with Ricoh. It's "…an advanced device and printing management system which infuses office devices with real-time tracking and monitoring to help firms significantly reduce their print-related costs, improve service and cut back on carbon footprints." (press release)
The Open Process Automation Library (OPAL) are some great "ready to deploy" solution integrations and references that extend our software's "out of the box" deployments. The interface to the website is smooth, easy to search and best of all there are now 1,800 entries. If you are a customer, you gotta check this site out.
Storage Software for Data Centers
In addition to a brand spanking new information retention solution, IBM Information Archive (see the wiki), IBM also announced new versions of the popular Tivoli Storage Manager, Tivoli Storage Manager Fastback and Tivoli Storage Manager Fastback for Workstations. The links above are to the announcement letters for all of these products unless otherwise noted.
Tivoli Security Information & Event Management:
Version 2.0 provides customers with a single integrated product for insider threat, audit and compliance management, and reporting. New features can be found in the announcement letter.
Tivoli Role Modeling/Management Open Beta Program
Since we're talking about security, I should also mention that we currently have an open beta program for two exciting products; IBM Tivoli Security Role Modeling Assistant and the IBM Tivoli Security Role Management Assistant. Details on the solution and the beta are on the IBM website.
IBM Remote Managed Infrastructure Services (RMIS)
A service from IBM that assists customers with planning, implementing, configuring, testing, and basic skills instruction for selected IBM Server and Storage technology. A highly skilled IBM technical specialist can help customers implement selected server and storage products remotely (which is pretty cool, right?) (announcement letter).
IBM Managed Security Services
A new IBM service that addresses security concerns by managing computing policies at the gateway (announcement letter).
That's all for now (as if that's not a lot already). For those at Pulse, say hello to my colleagues. End of line.
* Actually, I wouldn't have much copper at all. The US cent piece (aka "penny") is composed of 2.5% copper and 97.5% zinc (US Mint)
Al Zollar Launched Integrated Service Management in Compelling Keynote at Pulse 2010
Kathleen Holm 2700009BHX firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  pulse ibmpulse pulse2010 service-management smarter-planet integrated-service-manage... 2,102 Visits
In his keynote today, Al Zollar described the opportunities and challenges presented by a more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent world. The proliferation of smart devices presents new opportunities to deliver new innovative services- services that wouldn't have been dreamed of just 10 years ago. These new smart devices also add new levels of complexity that is growing due to the number of new devices and connections added each day, and skyrocketing numbers of security threats and compliance regulations.
Al Zollar outlined examples of increased complexity in a number of industries i.e. an electric company dealing with smarter meters, regular old school meters, transmission insulators, servers, and turbine buckets; a conglomerate of hospitals in Copenhagen managing data distributed across three different storage tiers and four sites with online disk capacity of 500 Terabytes and backup and archive data exceeding 1.5 Petabytes; and the U.S. Air Force managing the operations of nine major commands, nearly 100 bases and 700,000 active military personnel around the world.
He then posed the questions, How do you overcome all of this complexity? How can you possibly see everything? How can you manage and secure everything? How can you increase speed while reducing cost?
The answer—Integrated Service Management that provides the software, best practices and expertise needed to manage infrastructure, people and processes—across the service delivery chain—in the data center, across design and delivery, and tailored for specific industry requirements.
He then went on to explain how Integrated Service Management contains service architectures tailored by industry like the smart grid for energy, or electronic medical record systems for healthcare.
It has lifecycle management bridging workflow across line of business, enterprise architecture, development and testing, and IT and business operations to speed delivery of products and services and ensure continual improvement.
Integrated Service Management also includes service dashboards that allow all audiences—from executives and business operations to IT managers—to see the service and gain insight into service health.
He closed by someone needs to be the thought leader in your organization...and that someone is you! Integrated Service Management can help you achieve that goal.
Attend Pulse for a New Take on Service Management
Kathleen Holm 2700009BHX firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  service-management ibmpulse pulse pulse-2010 2,258 Visits
There are many great reasons to attend Pulse 2010- you can see real-world demonstrations of the newest service management solutions, you can hear about strategies and product roadmaps that can help you chart your roadmap for success, and you can get free-certifications and hands-on instruction in on-site labs. These are all great reasons to attend Pulse 2010, but I would like to focus one that often gets overlooked--networking with people not like you.
Pulse gives you the opportunity to attend tracks tailored to your specific area of focus and network with people doing work like you do. While there is a great deal of value in networking and sharing ideas with people whose roles are similar to yours, there may be even more value in talking with people who don't do what you do.
What would happen if CEOs, service providers, IT professionals, plant managers, facilities managers, VPs of Operations, security administrators, and storage managers talked with each other? What kinds of solutions and ideas would emerge?
For true innovative thinking to occur, reframing challenges and understanding different points of view is key. While it's easier to stay in your comfort zone and talk with people who speak your language, the opportunity to talk with people from other industries or from your industry but with roles different than yours may be one of the one of the best ways to gain new insights, reframe the challenges you are facing, and think outside the box.
Pulse 2010 gives you the opportunity to do just that. It offers you the chance to network with industry leaders and a broad audience of users and partners who may have different takes on service management—ones that can help you solve existing problems more efficiently, develop new services, or find new ways to accelerate growth and gain competitive edge.
Financial Services IT Service Management Strong in an Uncertain Economy
Kathleen Holm 2700009BHX email@example.com Tags:  financial-services service-management industry-soltuions 2 Comments 2,063 Visits
IBM Survey Results:
IBM conducted a global survey of CIOs and other IT investment owners during December 2008 and January 2009. In these 'uncertain economic times' the results are very interesting from a Financial Services IT point of view.
Key survey results
IBM believes that these IT investments are continuing because these companies recognize that IT services can not only help the enterprise as a whole to operate more effectively and efficiently but also provide competitive advantage. These businesses have realized that just cutting costs within IT has limited business benefit and introduces unacceptable levels of risk to the entire organization that depends on the quality and reliability of IT services for efficiency, compliance, security and even competitive differentiation. If IT is 10 percent of the operational expense of a financial services business, cutting IT by 50 percent will yield only a 5 percent reduction in business operational expense, but will most likely unacceptably expose the other 90 percent of the business to significant new problems, risks and competitive disadvantage.
Financial services organizations were also disproportionately more likely than other industries to also expect IT to be an innovator, to research and recommend enterprise strategic objectives, to identify opportunities for innovation and to develop new business areas or services.
Financial Services IT priorities to support business requirements
IT Service Management is the key priority
Conclusion and recommendations
This business-driven approach to service management emphasizes the role IT services can play in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization as a whole rather than on the type of cost-cutting within IT that can produce negative and unacceptable business risks.
The study results point to the following key recommendations:
For more information:
Mike Zelle is the market segment manager for the financial services sector for Tivoli Software at IBM.
Tough Times Call for Superior Customer Care
Kathleen Holm 2700009BHX email@example.com Tags:  ibm service-management communications_service_pr... service-providers customer_care 1,323 Visits
Industry Solutions: Communication Sector Blog
This popular notion was initially supported by stating that the wireless data market experienced 7.3 percent quarter-over-quarter growth in the fourth quarter of 2008, an overall 38.7 percent increase from the fourth quarter of 2007. However, according to Chetan Sharma Consulting, this growth cannot be sustained in a continually deteriorating economy.
During these times, both businesses and consumers are scrutinizing costs, which leaves telecom service providers vulnerable to losing customers looking to cut household and business spending. Customers will be quick to drop services that don't meet their standards, so providers need to go above and beyond to prove their value. Subscribers have many carriers to choose from, and for some customers, the deal-breaker may be differing qualities of service, both at the network layer and call center level. According to Stratecast analyst Karl Whitelock, service providers lose a large percentage of customers because of service issues. For some carriers, the number of lost customers exceeded 10 percent of their customer base.
Proper customer care is positioned to be a game-changer for wireless providers as it builds trust and drives satisfaction. Service providers are aware that maintaining a high quality of customer service is a key factor in customer retention, but reaching this metric is always a challenge. The inhibitors to superior customer care include weak communication between call centers and network operations and poor network intelligence. By being more proactive about identifying service issues, service providers can empower their customer care representatives with the tools to improve customer experience and help grow business.
Providers can employ a number of best practices to improve customer service. These relate to boosting visibility across the network, monitoring communications capabilities and prioritizing problem resolution.
Visualizing service quality
Monitoring the customer experience
Improving internal communications
Prioritizing problem resolution
Final thoughts
We are witnessing the telecommunications market migrate from a strictly voice-based industry to one that sells Web access, rich media content and business applications on cell phones. As this evolution continues, service providers will have to deal with the added responsibility of fielding service questions about data issues, which according to Stratecast take three times longer to resolve than regular voice service issues. Faced with this challenge, customer experience management is a valuable tool that providers can use to deliver positive customer satisfaction, high service quality and gain competitive advantage.
Scott Sobers is the program director for the communications sector for
IBM Tivoli Foundations- A quick overview
Kathleen Holm 2700009BHX email@example.com Tags:  ibm service-management tivoli 1 Comment 1,808 Visits
I wanted to better understand the new
Tivoli Foundations includes two appliances announced on
Tivoli Foundations Application Manager offers turn-key performance and availability monitoring for mid-market companies. It allows them to restore a service that is experiencing performance and/or availability problems with the shortest mean time to recovery possible.
Tivoli Foundations Application Manager also delivers real-time information allows an organization to visualize service performance and health across their network, server, middleware and application components enabling them to effectively manage risk and improve service quality.
Tivoli Foundations Application Manager helps clients optimize their resource allocation and reduce cost by giving them the ability to identify underutilized resources and reallocate them to support new business operations. At the same time, risk is reduced by anticipating resource over-utilization and generating proactive events and reports against resources that do not have the capacity to address growing business needs.
Tivoli Foundations Application Manager comes with out-of-the box best practice monitoring policies that track IT Infrastructure health against pre-defined thresholds. This allows organizations to quickly and proactively identify and respond to problems and issues before critical applications and customers are impacted. Overall service is improved by restoring the service or application that is experiencing performance problems with the shortest mean time to recovery possible using autonomic capabilities to fix problems before human intervention is even needed. Reducing problem determination time decreases cost and allows organizations to spend more resources focusing on business innovation and creating competitive advantage.
Tivoli Foundations Service Manager provides service desk capabilities that allow mid-size companies to handle help desk calls, track problems, and make changes that prevent existing problems without creating new ones. It also provides a self-service, searchable knowledge base that delivers fast answers to common IT problems.
In addition, Tivoli Foundations Service Manager delivers dashboards that provide real-time performance views and out-of-the box content including workflows, templates, key performance indicators (KPIs), queries and reports targeted for mid-size clients.
The Tivoli Foundations Service Manager appliance-based service desk solution helps mid-market clients reduce their costs by optimizing the productivity of operations personnel through its built-in problem solving tools, providing operations a way to increase the efficiency of its service support functions. The robust self-help portal which is populated with best practice resolutions to common problems, gives end-users a way to quickly resolve problems on their own without having to involve any additional personnel.
Managing risk is key to small and mid-market clients that have extremely limited IT skills in-house. The Tivoli Foundations Service Management solution ensures process compliance by integrating standards-based incident and problem management processes resulting in a repeatable and consistent service support process.
Tivoli Foundations Service Manager delivers streamlined standards-based incident and problem management processes that enable rapid service restoration and improved overall service quality. It provides real-time visibility to end users on priority, urgency, and impact of problems, incidents, and service requests. These built-in survey capabilities allow organizations to track and trend overall end-user satisfaction with their operations and creates a closed loop environment where overall service quality can continually be improved.
For more information, check out the datasheets IBM Tivoli Foundations Application Manager, and IBM Tivoli Foundations Service Manager.
Service management in a digitized world
Kathleen Holm 2700009BHX email@example.com Tags:  ibm service-management smarter-planet 1,461 Visits
Every day, the world is becoming more instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent. Infrastructures and assets across the globe are rapidly being digitized, turning physical assets into smart assets that allow people, systems, and objects to communicate and interact with each other in entirely new ways.
This "smarter planet" is creating opportunities for new, smarter, differentiated services and products. Organizations that can rapidly adapt and innovate to meet or exceed customer expectations for new services and products will be in a position to accelerate growth and gain competitive edge.
Watch this video to see how smart meters have made a significant impact on Portland General Electrics business.
Watch this video to see how smart meters have made a significant impact on Portland General Electrics business.
How IBM Service Management can tame the complexities of SOA
Kathleen Holm 2700009BHX firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  soa service-management 1 Comment 1,889 Visits
Because service-oriented architecture (SOA) has emerged as a strategy many organizations are adopting in order to respond more quickly and cost-effectively to customer needs, I really wanted to understand what it was all about.
After reading many articles and talking with a number
of subject matter experts from
Definition of SOA: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a method for breaking down large applications and business processes into smaller "services" and a system for linking them on demand so they can be reused to create new applications and business processes.
While not elegant or profound, this definition helped me understand how SOA
provides organizations with a dynamic infrastructure that allows them to break down large applications and business processes into smaller, loosely-coupled "services" that can be reused to create new applications and respond quickly to customer needs. The result is a simplified, more powerful infrastructure in which services can dynamically scale to meet changing organizational needs or workloads, while reducing cost and management complexity.
With the tremendous value SOA provides also come new challenges. Some of the challenges include managing the complexity of deploying interdependent services, ensuring compliance with multiple service level agreements for the same service, checking for the proliferation of duplicate or overlapping services, and protecting a SOA application and data from unauthorized access to name just a few. Meeting operational goals in a SOA environment requires a new approach.
That's where
I've enclosed a link to an excellent webcast--Service Management for SOA: Go the Extra Mile—that explores in more detail how Service Management can help tame the complexities of SOA.
Four-Jam Analyst Series: Cost Reduction in an Uncertain Economy
wendy whalen 0600014P1G email@example.com Tags:  service-management tivoli 1,493 Visits
Service Management in an Uncertain Economy
with Gartner VP and ex-IBMer David Williams and Tivoli GM Al Zollar.
12:00 - 1:00 p.m. ET; 16:00 - 17:00 GMT
Audience: service management and asset management practitioners
Sign up by 11 a.m. ET: http://bit.ly/m5Uot
Upcoming Jams in the Series:
Note: Replays available within 24 hours and for one year.
Smarter Rail: New IBM Global Rail Innovation Center
Tiffany Winman 12000065XB firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  rail global service-management asset smarter management asset-management beijing innovation smarter-rail center maximo transportation smarter-planet 3,312 Visits
Welcome to the new IBM Service Management blog
Tiffany Winman 12000065XB email@example.com Tags:  availiability process service service-providers governance asset management ibm soa green security itil eam performance it financial service-management 2,817 Visits
Welcome to the IBM Service Management blog. A variety of authors who represent different parts of IBM will discuss a range of Service Management topics such as service availability and performance, green IT, IT asset and financial management, IT governance, service delivery and process, storage management, SOA management, enterprise asset management, and service assurance for service providers.
We'll discuss industry trends and happenings, analyst
perspectives, new product and solution announcements, support and services
offerings, upcoming events, helpful resources, and heroes in the broader IBM
Service Management network. This blog provides multi-directional communication
with the public, and we encourage and look forward to your feedback, thoughts,
and questions. For extended sharing, check out our new IBM Service Management community.
I'm Tiffany Winman, the IBM Service Management community and social media program manager, and my blog topics tend to focus on communities, people, companies, heroes, and stories in the broader Service Management and Tivoli "ecosystem" and the use of innovative social technologies to facilitate online social networking and collaboration. When I'm not blogging on group blogs such as Service Management, Tivoli, Pulse, and Web 2.0 Goes to Work, you can join me in riveting conversation ;) on my individual blog.
Let us know if you have any questions or we can assist in any way.
Q: What does IBM Watson know about Incident Management?
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ email@example.com Tags:  collaborative-lifecycle-m... linked-data oslc-series oslc tivoli watson cloud service-management jazz 5,484 Visits
A: Linked Data
The following article was written by Cameron Allen, Pierre Coyne and Beth Sarnie and is the second in our OSLC series.
In fact, if you were at Pulse 2012...you heard how IBM Watson will be used to help doctors diagnose medical conditions and improve patient care at WellPoint.
For those of you, like myself, that don't have a Watson-like recollection, here's a quick flashback detailing a millisecond in Watson's brain on a sample patient:
If you're in the business of IT, this may sound a lot like incident management. And as any level 1 support person can attest, diagnosing the root cause of an incident is much like diagnosing a patient's condition. You need information from multiple sources (e.g. service desk, license, CMDB, monitoring, and asset management systems), but more importantly, it has to be in context, up to date, and delivered in a timely basis to make an accurate diagnosis of the root cause.
The problem has always been that an incident manager, like a doctor, has to jump between tools, entering requests in each system for the right information...and that is time consuming. In some cases, information isn't readily available and must be requested from other sources, not under their direct control.
One of the ways Watson is able to be such a great diagnostician (and incident manager) is through "linked data," which allows it to seek out and find related information on the patient from multiple sources in a fraction of a second to facilitate faster, more accurate patient diagnosis.
Until now, an incident manager did not have this same luxury.
That's where Jazz for Service Management comes in. Jazz is IBM's realtime platform for integrating management across multivendor tools, and across service lifecycle processes and functions. Like Watson, Jazz for service management uses principles of linked data, along with community standards (including OSLC) to support Watson-like service management decisions, regardless of what vendor tools you have in place.
If you want to learn more about OSLC and linked data in the context of service management, join the IBM developerWorks Jazz for Service Management community for demonstrations, and to gain early access to beta software.
Motherhood, Apple Pie and Devops
ivor macfarlane 2700022KPS email@example.com Tags:  ivor itsmf devops service-management itsm itil ibm 4,489 Visits
A while back I wrote a blog just mentioning devops, and what a sensible idea it seemed – certainly the word 'devops' hit some bells and I got 3 times my normal hits in the first day. At the beginning of this year (2012 in case you got here late) I wrote a blog inspired by a discussion with a TOGAF fan; I felt we in parts of the IT world need to talk to our neighbours a lot more.
I was reminded of these by seeing several devops write-ups recently (separate articles in itSMF UK and US magazines in the same month). Both are encouraging and make the unavoidable point: what devops suggests as a matter of principle is clearly something to be supported like the proverbial apple pie. It is just so obvious, it has to be right - why would you not use the people who built and know a new piece of software (or anything else for that matter) to get it in place and working, and as first point of call should anything not work as expected?
Both articles argue that ITSM people should embrace the ideas rather than rush to defend their empires. Devops is not the only example, but it seems to me that what we might be faced with is set of approaches[1] all driven from disparate firm foundations in our vast ocean of IT and services.
In fact the commonality between the approaches is massive, especially once you get past a temptation to overly rigorous application. It amazes me that the same IT people who would never dream of reading the instructions before using their new technology toys insist on applying every word of best practice.
If you want an example of how ITIL® overlaps the base devops concept look at section 6.7, page 236 of Stuart Rance's Service Transition book in ITIL 2011[2].
The point I really wanted to make is that we need to get above the point of origin and see identification, creation delivery and operation of service as the real goal and the subject of some integrated guidance. Everything we have so far shows its origins.
I started my career helping organisations establish and improve services, I got sidetracked into IT and oft-times I miss that bigger image. I still find it hard to think only of IT aspects and solutions, but I find I am often talking with people – suppliers and customers – who are content to be restricted to IT aspects.
In the short term I think what we need is more selling of the neighbour's ideas. I want to see devops being evangelised by someone from the ITSM community, and we need the converse too. Otherwise it can feel like the recommendations for apple pie are coming exclusively from the apple marketing board; doesn't mean they are wrong but they can less than convincing, especially to a cynical audience or to one that has something they feel they must defend. Maybe I have stumbled onto my subject for next year's conferences – anyone interested in inviting me?
[1] You call them methodologies, frameworks, revelations, best practices or whatever – I was searching for a generic term, if you have a better one let me know.
[2] In case you don't like what is there, I should point out the content of that section comes from the 2007 version, which was not written by Stuart. There is simple diagram here that makes the point, but it is Crown Copyright so I dare not use it here, so please o look if you are interested.
IBM InterConnect And SmartCloud Foundation
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  interconnect storage cloud smartcloud service-management 4,321 Visits
As the Western Hemisphere was slumbering, news from Singapore was lighting up Twitter as our senior executives took the stage at the IBM InterConnect conference to talk about some of the latest announcements from the IBM corporation on innovation and a Smarter Planet.
Much of the reporting has been done on Twitter (hashtag #IBMInterConnect) and these keynotes are available on the LiveStream including an amazing speech by Dr. Michio Kaku about the future of computers ("everywhere and nowhere").*
These are supplemented by interviews conducted by Todd "Turbo Todd" Watson, also on the LiveStream.
Since this event was focused on a Smarter Planet (the entire IBM portfolio), we covered a lot of ground. Big Data. Social. Mobility. And, of course, cloud.
For SmartCloud Foundation, the Tivoli organization has a number of exciting solutions that are designed to help you increase the levels of innovation you provide to your clients.
For this blog, I thought it'd be good to focus on three of the new solutions you might not have seen before that are going to help you in building out your private cloud.
IBM SmartCloud Cost Management is one of the key components in transforming IT from a "cost center" to an innovation center by providing levels of visibility, and transparency, to the IT costs associated with your cloud. Measure, analyze, report, and invoice the utilization and costs of physical, virtualized, and cloud computing resources, storage and network resources, applications, and other non-IT cost drivers.
IBM SmartCloud Patch Management combines the benefits of two solutions, IBM Endpoint Manager for Patch Management and IBM SmartCloud Provisioning, to provide an effective entry point that delivers lower costs and improves the visibility and control of physical, virtual, and cloud environments.
Finally, the IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center is a solution that you might have seen us talk about at Pulse 2012 and it's now an exciting addition to the portfolio. This solution helps IT storage managers migrate to an agile cloud-based storage environment and manage it effectively without having to replace existing storage systems. If you're looking to increase your storage efficiency in cloud, but don't have the checkbook to do a "rip and replace" of your entire infrastructure, you need to be looking at this solution.
There's more going on in Singapore over the next two days, and more discussion of SmartCloud Foundation and IBM Smarter Planet. Stay tuned to Twitter and the LiveStream and feel free to post comments below.
* I have to confess that this blog was delayed because I got sucked into watching the keynotes.
Enterprise Systems from IBM
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ email@example.com Tags:  system-p system-z service-management enterprise-systems system-storage entsys storage 1 Comment 6,333 Visits
This blog post was written by George Mina
Earlier today, IBM shared its point of view on the future of the data center with Smarter Computing V3 (press release). A central focus is IBM Enterprise Systems (zEnterprise EC12 and Power) and their ability to deliver exceptional value through a private Cloud. We've seen how organizations have been able to leverage IBM Enterprise Systems to achieve significant benefits. Take the City of Honolulu for example which was able to lower its licensing costs by 68% while increasing tax revenue by $1.4M USD in just three months.
By adding Tivoli software to their current IT environment, organizations can advance their enterprise-class Cloud environment while protecting their existing IT investment. How? IBM SmartCloud Foundation software is deeply rooted in openess - an open standards approach and common management tools that are platform agnostic. Essentially, you pick the platform(s) that best meets your business goals and we deliver a set of interoperable Cloud management tools across your heterogeneous environment. Of course, there are intrinsic benefits to building a Cloud management stack on top of IBM Enterprise Systems given the tight integration between hardware and software. OMEGAMON for example leverages a deep integration with zEnterprise systems to deliver advanced monitoring that reduces typical time to resolution from 90 minutes to 2 minutes.
Whether your starting to consider virtualizing your IT environment or deep into your Cloud journey, we have open Cloud management tools that help you expand your Cloud footprint without fear of vendor "lock-in". Learn more about the latest announcement and our Cloud solutions by visiting this site and attending the System z webcast on October 17.
You Can't Spell 'Service Management' Without 'OSLC'
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  oslc-series linked-data oslc service-management cloud jazz tivoli collaborative-lifecycle-m... 5,562 Visits
The following article was written by Cameron Allen, Pierre Coyne and Beth Sarnie and is the second in our OSLC series.
In non-acronym speak, what I'm saying is that the future of service management has arrived in the form of Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration.
Or, "OSLC."
But, what is OSLC and what does it have to do with you?
If you are a user of service management tools of any kind, or rely on information from tools to do your job, then you probably know that finding the right information is half the battle, and getting realtime access to that information when it is not under your direct control can feel next to impossible.
OSLC means you can now leverage the simplicity and ease of web links to both find and share information across your management tools (be they IBM, or any vendor tools).
Just as web pages can be linked on the Internet, data can be linked together from one application to another – creating an application ecosystem where applications don't care what vendor they're from. They look up who has the data in a directory, and jump right to it.
OSLC is not something new, and Tivoli is not the first to adopt it for integration. If you're an IBM Rational user, you may already be a believer. IBM Rational, its users, and an extensive ecosystem of partners have been using OSLC to successfully interconnect the application lifecycle for years.
In fact, Rational Jazz is the realization of OSLC community specifications and shared services in an open platform that anyone can use to interconnect the application lifecycle. Rational just delivered their 4th incarnation of the integrated product offering called Collaborative Lifecycle Management based on Jazz.
Tivoli is now leveraging these same principles to help break down silos of information across the end-to-end service lifecycle. That means expanding the notions behind Jazz from service design and development to now include service delivery and management. We call this Jazz for Service Management.
Take for example, problem management. In order to diagnose and resolve a given trouble ticket, the problem information must be gathered and aggregated from multiple sources. We may need information pertaining to the application topology, the health of a system within that topology, outages or events that may be affecting the application, the CPU utilization, the versions and configurations of the hardware and software that this application is dependent upon. I could go on...
The problem is that all of this information lives in different places. You can either call around to the various owners of that information, or you pay a business partner to learn the API of the tool in order to get to the data, or you can have a highly skilled, in-house resource write the integration. These options require extensive expertise in vendor-specific APIs and lots of maintenance to keep them current.
OSLC utilizes community defined specifications for sharing and linking data applied to specific service management scenarios so that in a critical outage scenario, all relevant information relating to that outage can be accessed in real time from any number of sources, displayed in the context of that problem, in a single integrated view, with related actions that can be taken.
The difference is simplicity. You might be able to do this this now with a lot of experts and time but OSLC delivers simplicity.
And, most importantly, because OSLC uses community specifications for service management scenarios, integrations can be built once and applied across multiple 'related' OSLC-enabled tools. "Write-once, Apply-many."
For more information, listen to this podcast on the Tivoli User Community. This podcast provides a deeper insight into the next generation of service management built using linked data.
Also, at Pulse 2012 (video link), developerWorks' Scott Laningham is joined by Don Cronin, program director, Tivoli Technical Strategy and Architecture; and Mike Kaczmarski, IBM Fellow and Tivoli Chief Integration Architect to discuss the Magic of linked data.
Leave your comments on how you are using OSLC in your organization below and don't forget to follow us on Twitter @servicemgmt and be sure to bookmark our OSLC story on Storify.
APM In The MQ
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  mq gartner service-management magic-quadrant apm 3,599 Visits
Depending on where you're from, some people call it "autumn" and other people call it "fall."
Either way, it's when things in most offices start getting a bit hectic.
Back in the autumn of 1968, IBMers in Boca Raton were putting together 1130 computer systems for customers.
Here's a neat photo of them hard at work in the factory.
As you can see, once demand picks up in autumn. It doesn't slow down.
Even today. Demands on services are high and they keep getting higher which is why application performance monitoring (APM) becomes important.
It's why I'm pleased to let you know that Gartner identifies IBM as a leader in the 2012 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Management (APM).*
The full report is available on the Gartner website.
Give it a read and let us know how you are using APM in your organization in the comments section below.
PS I recognize that the 1300 has nothing to do with this blog post. I just felt the need to post pictures of classic IBM hardware...
* Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose
Why Is IT Agility Still So Darn Elusive?
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ email@example.com Tags:  linked-data cloud tivoli service-management oslc-series oslc 4,669 Visits
The following article was written with significant contributions from Cameron Allen, Pierre Coyne and Beth Sarnie
Question of the day: why is IT agility so darn elusive?
Give up?
Follow up question: after spending multiple millions in technology to improve service delivery, quality, and productivity, why do so many line of business executives perceive that IT is still not moving "fast enough?"
Silo'd information presents a big speedbump to agility. According to the 2012 IBM study of CEOs, high performing organizations are able to access data 108% more, draw insights from that data 110% more, and act on that data 86% more, than their underperforming peers.
Which brings us back to the specific problem: Information exists, but it is not shared. Information remains trapped in silo'd tools and departmental applications. It's not only not moving "fast enough," it's not moving at all.
If you agree with ITIL and related methodologies, agility is directly linked to your IT processes. So while we can improve process methodology and connections across roles and functions, and within specific technology siloes with tools, if the data and resources can not be freely shared across process-enabling tools, then its all for not.
Going one level deeper, what is the cause of this 'information black hole', where data enters tools, and is never seen again? Your reality is that you probably rely on a mix of multi-vendor tools. Those vendor tools rely on proprietary APIs for integration and trying to make tools with different APIs communicate requires the IT equivalent of a team of United Nations translators, where each is an expert in their applications main language (API). Once successful, the herculean effort can create a constant maintenance cost, and might not work well in the end - things will be lost in translation. That said, even single vendor tool suites are notoriously difficult to integrate.
So what can be done?
Stop for a moment and consider the best example that demonstrates simplicity of integration on a massive scale. It's the Internet. With the Internet, you can get information from millions of different web sites and all you need is a browser.
So for argument's sake, if tools are the equivalent of web sites, then all we need are links to connect two tools. We can take that one step further, borrowing principles from social networks like LinkedIn or IBM Connections, where we can search for one person, and see relationships to other people (making searching for data across tools much easier).
That in essence is OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration): A set of open, community agreed upon specifications for linking tools using web technology. (And before you ask, no. It's not a standard, because apparently standards alone have not done the job)
Data from any vendor tool is registered in a directory like a search engine, where other tools can find it, its relationship to other data, and access it via simple web link technology. Not similar to the Internet, but exactly like the Internet.
What that means is you can easily interconnect tools and processes. You can even replace tools with competitive tools - eliminating vendor lock in. It also means you can re-purpose one integration across a series of 'like' tools. "Write once, reuse-many" inherently applies here. All of this translates into simpler and faster access to information by people and tools, better analytics leading to better decisions, and better automation of workflow.
Now, IT will be seen as agile.
No longer elusive.
This is the first in a series of articles we will be posting about OSLC. Feel free to leave your comments below. Be sure to listen to the podcast we did for OSLC on the Tivoli User Group - TUC Podcast: OSLC Series - Learn how Tivoli's enhanced architecture strategy will help you simplify integration across products – IBM and Other Vendors, and don't forget to follow us on Twitter @servicemgmt.
Also, stay tuned to the blog for more in our series of articles about OSLC.
PS a reminder that InterConnect 2012 in Singapore is coming. October 9-11 and it's going to be an amazing conference. Tiffany Winman has a great post about it on the IBM Software Group blog.
IBM Research, Africa And Smarter Cities
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  smarter-cities service-management research africa 1 Comment 4,682 Visits
One of the coolest things about working at IBM is the global nature of our company.
Which is why the announcement of the new IBM Research - Africa (press release) is so cool. Of note is their focus on Smarter Cities. Specifically:
I'm looking forward to seeing the work that our African IBM team is going to do in this space and can't wait to work with them on future projects.
Could we just fake the IT?
ivor macfarlane 2700022KPS firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  itil ibm service-management itsmf tivoli ivor 1 Comment 6,467 Visits
Today we trust computers – literally and unconsciously with our very lives. I was reflecting on this level of trust when I got £50 of cash out from my local ATM and declined the offer of a receipt. Seems I now have total faith the computer systems will 'get it right'. I've come a long way from keeping all my own cheque books to cross check against later bank statements.
Now, combining that faith with a little healthy British cynicism, and triggered by watching the Olympics tennis finals on TV, a mischievous but irresistible thought came to my mind.
It used to be that when a ball hit the ground near the line we relied on the human eye to say whether it was 'in' or 'out'. That caused disagreements and discussion – and - in tennis often - sulking, swearing and the full range of petulant behaviour.
Nowadays that is all replaced by referencing the technology. When there is doubt – or one of the players questions a call - then we simply ask the computers. What we get then is a neat little picture representing the appropriate lines on the court and a blob showing where the ball had hit. So, problem solved: disappointment still for one player but, so it seems, total acceptance that the computer is right. After all it is an expensive system working away inside a very expensive box – must be right, mustn't it. Or to put it another way 'computer says in', who would argue?
But what occurred to me is this. All we can actually see is some boxes around the court, and a stylised display with a blob on it. That could be delivered by one person with a tablet showing the court lines and them touching the screen where they think it landed. Very cheap and still solves all the arguments because – naturally – everyone trusts technology don't they!
Now – of course, and before anyone calls their lawyers – I am not suggesting for the merest moment that there is the slightest possibility of such a thing happening. But it's fun to think it might be possible. There is little public awareness of what accuracy the system – and here I presume it does really exist – works to. If you dig around on the web you can find out (the answer by the way for tennis is 3.6mm). You also find out there is some very minor grumbling and questioning going on. But that seem at geek level – in everyday use the audience stands instantly convinced.
So, thinking it through there are a couple of interesting consequences to real IT life:
I guess my big issue is to wonder how comfortable we are – as the deliverers of the technological solutions for our customers – and especially our users - to have such blind faith. Of course, people being the irrational things they undoubtedly are, that blind faith in the detail is often accompanied by a cynical disregard for overall competence – think faith in ATMs and on-line bank account figures with the apparent level of trust in the banking industry as a whole.
As a little codicil to the story, I registered with anew doctor yesterday – the nurse asked me questions, took blood pressure etc and loaded all the data she collected into a computer. The system was clearly ancient, with a display synthesising what you typically got on a DOS3.0 system. First thought: 'OMG why are they using such old software, that can't be good? Second thought: 'They've obviously been using it for years, so they really understand it, have ironed out all the bugs and it does what they need. It ain't broke so they aren't fixing it'. But my instinctive reaction of suspicion of it for not being pretty was there and I had to consciously correct myself.
Would you as a service provider prefer more questioning of what you package up and present to your customers and users, or are you happy to have that faith? My own view is that the more blind faith they have in you, the more the retribution will hurt if things do go wrong. Or perhaps that's just me being cynical again?
Maybe the service is bad on purpose?
ivor macfarlane 2700022KPS email@example.com Tags:  itil complaints tivoli itsm ibm service-management ivor 3,560 Visits
itSMF Publishing Annual meeting
ivor macfarlane 2700022KPS email@example.com Tags:  ivor itsm ibm tivoli best-practice itsmf service-management 2,964 Visits
For most of last week I was attending and – I hope – contributing to itSMF's international publishing meeting. This was held in
Now, first a little background, just in case there is anyone who does not know what the itSMF is. The letters stand for IT Service Management Forum – and that sums it up quite well: a place for those interested in ITSM to talk, learn, teach, compare and discuss. Part of that communication naturally involves publication – and our group focuses on that – from reviewing others' books through translation and dissemination to encouraging authoring and publishing books. Crucial to its attitudes and success, itSMF is a non-profit organisation, owned by its members.
OK, as you may imagine it is – as well as serious working meeting – a chance to catch up with friends and colleagues of the ITSM global village. And the active ITSM community really is like a village, except that it spread across some 50 countries – we have all the relationships that you would expect: friends, enemies and lots in between.
All of us have our day jobs, many of us
working for cut-throat competitors but that all gets set aside and we settle
back into our 'all in this together' mode. One of things that I came back from
That makes the non-profit member owned organisations a lot like government – and like governments today we are strapped for cash. These are hard times and no-one has much in the way of spare money. But we still strive to fight against what would be a sensible approach for an organisation focused on shareholder value. We still need to deliver what the 'right things'. From our publishing perspective it would be tempting to look only at safe books – rearranging established best practice into easier, shorter or simpler reads. Instead though, everyone at our meeting sees that we need a focus on innovation and stretching our industry.
Of course we need to be financially successful with enough of our projects, and we have work to do on building a firm base to take ourselves – and our industry – forwards. But I am proud that the books we have already managed to publish contain real industry innovations and new perspectives – both on service management as you would expect but also into wider topics such as organisational change.
So, I came back feeling the need to write down how much work people put in – for nothing – last week. I'm not claiming I did that much, but lots of work was put in, and even more commitments made to keep the momentum going and I felt that it was a few day's work I was proud to have been a part of and an effort worth recording here. In some later blogs I might relate more about other aspects of the trip - like using budget airlines and the change in perspective of value that goes with that.
So – please go read about what we have already managed (6 books published, quarterly magazine, whitepaper competition etc.). You can find out about the books are – and read the magazines for free by going to http://www.itsmfi.org/content/publications. If that gets you interested in how you can get your ideas written up and out there then get in touch. My portfolio responsibility is 'Authoring', so I would love to hear from you. We are keen to find new authors, for whitepapers, books or articles – and happy to offer any level of support you might need – from final review through mentoring and even to co-authoring or ghost writing.
By my next blog, I will be back in successful company mode, but it is good to remember that the commercial companies also live in and benefit from the wider community. It is good to see that being recognised through sponsorship and support. IBM sponsored the meeting last year - this time we had support from TSO and BTC. massive thanks to those companies. With more support next year we should have more people and achieve even more.
This week's new releases
ivor macfarlane 2700022KPS firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  ibm cobit itil tivoli service-management ivor itsmf 2,946 Visits
No trouble spotting the biggest news in service management this week – with COBIT 5 available. I guess with both ITIL and COBIT having released new versions over the last 12 months, that should tell us something about the SM industry. Mostly, I think it tells us that as a concept and topic to take seriously, service management is not going away any time soon.
But I suspect we might reading more in the next few weeks of the 'should I do ITIL or COBIT' type of question. That's a shame, because it is still not a sensible question. Both ITIL and COBIT are expanding their scope of course and that means more and more overlap, but I can't – admittedly after quick glance through only –see where any real conflict.
Of course COBIT is still a product of ISACA and it builds upon a philosophy of control and governance. ITIL initially came from a team set up to advise on approach rather than massive detail and that still shows even in the 2011 version I think. And I do still believe any serious SM profession would have both on their (electronic) bookshelf, the way a good cook will have books by more than one cookery author on their kitchen bookshelf.
Analysing the content, requirements and fine print can come later – and will open us up to all sorts of interpretation and contextual adjustment. But some things hit you straight away. The core COBIT product is available for free and takes up 685k of pdf file. The core ITIL books cost around £300, weigh five kilos and/or take up 77.4MB of my hard drive inside a fancy secure Adobe reader to make sure I don't pass them on to anyone who hasn't paid their £300. Now I know that there are lots more books around the COBIT 5 core than give you more detail – and ISACA charges for those - but still I must confess to liking the idea of free entry to the gig even if it doesn't get you that near the stage.
Putting a positive spin on the size differential and the lack of real conflict, you can see that it shows how the two products can be seen as complementary: COBIT's distillation of what should be done and structure with ITIL's more wordy guidance.
And COBIT's heritage shows through with several pages on maturity assessment – great stuff for the 'give me a number' crew.
But maybe the most encouraging thing is the differences that exist – the pretty clear realisation that frameworks aren't competition but different perspectives. Everyone in this business is really concentrating on helping each other get better at delivering value to the customer. COBIT 5 will help so this is a good week.
Now all I need is a long flight somewhere to give me peace and quiet to read it carefully.
IBM PureSystems And SmartCloud & Tivoli Solutions
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ email@example.com Tags:  puresystems cloud smartcloud tivoli service-management 3,918 Visits
The Expert Integrated Systems, IBM PureSystems being announced today is probably one of the most exciting solution announcements to hit our industry.
The New York Times wrote a very good piece on the announcement, "I.B.M. Aims to Sharply Simplify Corporate Data Center Technology"
Our own press team put together two releases. One about the announcement ("IBM Sets the Stage for the Next Era of Computing") and another around the 600 partners supporting this announcement worldwide ("Global IT Companies Support IBM Puresystems").
IBM PureSystems
It's not hardware. It's not software. It's a new category of solution; expert integrated systems.
It's one of the "game changer" solutions that our customers have come to expect from IBM (and that our partners love). It's solving very specific problems that customers have on their road to innovation.
One of those problems is built-in expertise. This is a hardware and software solution that is integrated at levels you've not seen before on a solution; giving customers and partners a simplified user experience for implementation and maangement.
IBM SmartCloud & Tivoli
To that point, you'll notice IBM PureSystems has it's own end-to-end management capabilities specific to the solution.
It does. But, for broader management challenges, IBM SmartCloud and Tivoli software will extend the investment in that IBM PureSystems solution by providing Visibility. Control. Automation(tm) across the entire IT infrastructure.
Together with IBM SmartCloud and Tivoli software, IBM PureSystems will push customers to higher levels of efficiency with their service management practice.
As you talk to your IBM sales rep or your business partner, ask them about IBM SmartCloud & Tivoli software with IBM PureSystems for your entire infrastructure and service management.
Video: IBM Pulse 2012: Cloud Service Management Simulator Workshop
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ email@example.com Tags:  pulse cloud service-management pulse-2012 simulator ibmcloud 3,120 Visits
As you know, the team held a Cloud Service Management Simulator Workshop at Pulse 2012 and I was in the room for a portion of the session (look for me in the background at 1:03) and I know that the attendees had their eyes opened.
The team cut together a pretty cool trailer to give you an idea of what goes on at one of these simulator sessions.
If it looks like chaos, that's because there is a good bit of chaos in the process of role-playing the real-world interaction between IT and business when they are not aligned properly.
The goal is to keep the company profitable. That lasts for about 3 minutes...
But here's the thing. As the workshop progresses, the transformation occurs and balance is achieved (and money starts to be made).
Every service management practitioner should bring their co-workers to this workshop. It is an experience that will help drive your company towards innovation.
Watch the video to see what I mean, and for more information on the simulator, send an email to tivmktg [at] us [dot] ibm [dot] com.
saying it with pictures
ivor macfarlane 2700022KPS firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  ibm ivor tivoli service-management itil 2,689 Visits
IBM SmartCloud Control Desk Demo
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  desk smartcloud cloud itil service-desk service-management control 7,920 Visits
If you were following the Pulse coverage of new announcements or our press activities, you no doubt heard about the exciting new IBM SmartCloud Control Desk solution.
For those new to the blog, IBM SmartCloud Control Desk was one of the new announcements made at Pulse. It is a service catalog/service desk based on IT Infrastructure Library™ (ITIL™) V3 and ideal for streamlining incident, problem, change, configuration, release, and IT asset management.
This service desk offering will assist customers in process control center for managing change & configuration, assets, incidents/problems, service requests, SW licenses and more.
The announcement letter (212-051) was published on March 13 and we now have a very cool demo that showcases the solution.
View the demo, and to find out more about IBM SmartCloud Control Desk you can also visit the product page as well as contact your IBM sales rep or one of our Business Partners using the Business Partner Locator website.
Cisco Prime And IBM Netcool (Pulse 2012)
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ email@example.com Tags:  netcool tivoli prime cisco service-management business-partner 3,671 Visits
If you weren't at Pulse 2012, I won't sugarcoat it. It was another successful event and the customers I spoke to got a lot of value out of the conference.
If you were not there (and even if you were), don't forget about our regional "Pulse Comes To You" (PCTY) events in your country. It's another way for you to meet with us and get the information you need about our service management solutions.
One of the things that makes IBM...well, IBM is that we have excellent business partners like Cisco.
I was able to get some time with David Flesh (Director of Marketing, Cisco Network Management Technology Group) to talk about the partnership that Cisco has with their Cisco Prime solutions and our IBM Netcool solutions.
This will be the first of several videos we'll be posting on the blog. More to come...
Pulse 2012: Day 3 General Sessions Recap
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  pulse service-management keynote pulse2012 woz watson smarter-computing booch 4,795 Visits
After a pretty rockin' concert from Maroon 5 (who are better than Maroon 4!), it was time for the last day of general session keynotes.
As a reminder, all the general session keynotes (and a ton more) can be found on the Livestream site.
Another one of my livestream videos has been posted. This video is me talking with CTO of Industrial Sector Dr Naguib Attia about service management and Industrial sector.
I should also mention that Dave Barlett (VP of Industry Solutions and @davebart on Twitter) wrote another one of his fantastic blogs about Smarter Buildings over on the Smarter Planet blog.
I will also point you to the IBM Pulse 2012 press kit that has some great client success stories and exciting new announcements.
Now, onto the general sessions.
The intro video from IBM Research (@IBMResearch).
The video, which you really need to watch on the Livestream, showcases our "5 in 5" (five technology innovations that will occur in the next five years).
Today's keynote are about the future of innovation (and BTW, Visibility. Control. Automation (VCA)™ provides that innovation).
First to the stage was Erich Clementi (Sr. Vice President, IBM Global Technology Services) to talk about service aggregation.
Smarter Computing is offering new opportunities that will impact the infrastructure due to the unprecedented scale in everything and the way consumability (everything everywhere every time) is changing how IT needs to respond and react.
The boundaries of IT are changing, the infrastructure is changing. Anywhere. Anytime and any device is the new reality.
Erich remarked that the industrializatin of IT supported services (think Ford assembly line) will open up new options in sourcing services. This will reinvent all sorts of services born on the cloud to be more complex and with richer options.
The hybrid cloud will be critical because customers are going to run workloads where it meets the best fit. So these hybrid clouds need to be interconnected, integrated, seamless, secure, auditable and dependable.
This is changing the role of the CIO.
There was an interesting comment Erich made that James Governor (@monkchips) and I were talking about on Twitter. "We are confronted by the infrastructures our clients have, not the ones we wish they have." James responded (and I tend to agree), "make them change. the status quo is not acceptable."
Erich showed how CAPEX utilization is actually a minor benefit of going to the cloud whereas things like the standardization from being on the cloud provide the greater value to customers and it's in OPEX where the bigger savings come in.
There is an existing world that will need to be re-factored and re-thought out to get to the cloud.
Erich left the audience with three interesting thoughts:
Helene Armitage (GM of IBM System Software and Systems Growth) was next to present on innovations and Smarter Computing.
(I worked with Helene when she was in charge of AIX development it was her leadership with AIX, in my opinion, that helped get us back in the game in the early 00's with pSeries).
Helene did a very nice transition from Erich's keynote to talk about how these are the systems that are powering the things Erich discussed previously.
Consumer behavior is what is driving what happens in the IT data center and influencing hardware design. Consumers are creating data that is being captured and driven and running in the back-end systems in these data centers.
We need to evolve what is there today, but the rate and pace of change will continue to grow and the requirements for hardware will be driven by consumers. Where the consumers go, the IT department has to follow.
Smarter Computing systems are designed for data, delivered in the cloud and tuned to task. Helene used a good healthcare example. The data explosion in general, let alone healthcare (which Manoj will discuss), is phenomenal.
Everything is instrumented and capturing data. Data growth will be at 50x by 2020. An estimated 80% of the world's population will have a mobile device in the coming years.
The social implications of this data explosion will affect how hardware requirements are written. Enterprise systems with performance, scalability, reliability and availability will be critical.
Flexible systems to manage the data and remain secure will be important (and Helene gave a mention of RAS in this instance).
Helene also left the audience with three things (it's a day for lists):
Helene handed the stage to Manoj Saxena (GM of IBM Watson, @manojsaxena).
(I call IBM Watson "he," though I was corrected on Twitter and IBM Watson could very well be "she")
Jeopardy was not the end, it was just the beginning of putting IBM Watson to work.
IBM Watson is currently focused on Healthcare (and now) Financial Services Sector jobs and is a key enabler for Smarter Planet and the new problem of data explosion.
Consider that 90% of data was generated over the past 2 years. 80% is unstructured and only 20% of it is used by traditional systems.
Those companies that can effectively use this "Big Data" are more successful.
Manoj is breaking down how IBM Watson does its magic. It not only reads Big Data, it understands it. IBM Watson is a filter, that's what makes it so good
Healthcare is a great place to start with IBM Watson because of the data explosion. Doctors can not keep up with this explosion and as a result, 1 in 5 diagnosis in the US are incorrect.
Between 44,000 - 98,000 people die every year because of being misdiagnosised, so it is crucial to get this right. (another sobering thought about how what we do impacts lives).
1 in 4 people will die of cancer and 20-44% of errors occure in the first diagnosis. So better diagnosis and treatment is far more complex than Jeopardy answers, but IBM Watson is learning about what it needs to do.
IBM Watson is going after cancer as a medical assistant. It's being packaged with "adviser cartridges" for different areas of different industries and will be in the cloud (public, private or hybrid - whatever works for the customer).
IBM Watson is about selling business outcomes.
The keynote sessions concluded with Grady Booch (IBM Fellow) interviewing The Woz.
Better than Frost/Nixon if you ask me! Here are some of the highlights (and it's all on the Livestream).
FYI, Todd Watson (aka @TurboTodd) will have an interview on his blog that is not to miss.
That wraps up another year of Pulse! Can't wait to see y'all next year in 2013!
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Pulse 2012: Day 2 General Sessions Recap
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ email@example.com Tags:  pulse service-management pulse2012 keynotes 2,653 Visits
* this is the third day of Pulse, but the second day of general sessions.
As a reminder, all of the general sessions (as well as a bunch of other programming) can be found on the Livestream site, including myself and Derek Botti talking about Smarter Hospitals in Healthcare.
Today's general session keynotes started with an excellent video with our Business Partners. Business Partners are one of the biggest value that IBM has as a vendor in the market. They are what make IBM who we are (them, and our customers).
Scott made mention, and this is pretty cool, that we have co-founded cloud-council.org/, a cloud open standards customer council.
Steve Mills (Senior Vice President for Group Exec for SW IBM Software & Systems) started with some excellent discussion about how Smarter Planet solutions are increasing demands on IT, but IT budgets are growing less than .8% per year.
The rate and pace of change and complexity is increasing, not decreasing. The stats Steve showed on his chart were mind boggling.
Steve then made a very interesting move and used a chart from last year that shows IT operating costs are greater than the asset costs themselves. So much of that money goes into labor and physical infrastructure.
Sprawl is driving cost and IBM is actually at the forefront of doing massive consolidations for our own data centers.
We're still on the journey, which consists of virtualiztion, consolidation, service management (W00T!) and of course cloud.
Some of the numbers that Steve showed: 5,700+ servers consolidated. 15,000 applications reduced to 4,500. IBM has 110 pedabytes of operational data and 92% of our servers are now virtualized in strategic hosting environments.
Much of this was accomplished with System z and Linux (mainframe, ftw!).
The IBM Integrated Service Management Program used by our team led us to better VCA in our own data centers (hint, hint).
To quote Steve, "Linux runs like a 'scalded dog' on the IBM mainframe."
IBM uses Tivoli for our own data center consolidation and it's working quite well. Linking back to some of the thoughts yesterday, cloud is about better economics and that's achieved through sharing.
Steve is a fan of Business Analytics - one version of the truth and finding the problem quicker and information-centric decision making (360 degree view of our clients) thru master data management (System z plays a key role here). System z - tuned to task, designed for data and managed with cloud tech! Cost reduction, new service delivery with hybrid cloud.
He also posted quite a few client references. Like Nationwide Insurance who consolidated and run 680 Linux system images with $15M cost savings over 3 years with 85-9% server utilization.
It's worth checking out the Livestream to see some of these amazing client references (like how 75% of data stored is duplicative and how HealthNow is saving $5M per year by eliminating duplicate/incorrect mailings).
Next up, Bob Picciano (General Manager, Software Sales for IBM Software Group) and he was joined with some of our customers for a round table discussion. With him were:
For Rogers, cloud meant accelerating time to market to get services to their customers (which is important since they try to be the first to market with new services). It has also increased productivity and has made the QA process more efficient with standardization playing a key role.
Key risks as they moved to the cloud were the unknown effect of migration. What changes would need to be made once they migrated? How would legacy environments be taken into account. Also, the "hype curve" and the negativity associated with cloud (with security in particular) was something that they had to work through. But as much of a challenge as the cultural shift was, at the end of the day it's about results from the people and processes. Not the technology used to get there (like Steve Mills talked about).
With GE, they're trying to consolidate and optimize their office campuses and the challenge there is keeping up with the business units.
At GE - if you're not with me, you gotta catch up.
The team that works on their smarter physical infrastructure needs to make sur that they're in-line with the business needs but they're also managing the risk. Financial risk, environmental risk as well as ensuring that they can accommodate growth.
At Erie 1 BOCES, endpoint management with "bring your own device" (BYOD) has turned their job into the wild wild west. Even worse, with the economic crisis in education, there are changes that are being forced that haven't happened before in their industry.
Sharing, for example (which Steve talked about) has become the norm. Because they share, they now have a more robust network and are trying to consolidate to use the resources to collectively find solutions.
Jill and her team are trying to manage the endpoints consistently and effectively and keep the teachers in the classrooms (which was an extremely sobering point).
Not to be outdone, Tony from Equifax started with a very real fact. "We have everyone in this room's data."
So, security is pretty important to them since their business about all the data that they have (and bringing greater analytics to this data).
Security is a race. Nobody can do everything first. So the key is having a plan. IBM has been a key partner for Equifax in putting this plan together.
Tony talked about what David discussed; bringing the business into the conversation early. Asking them first - what do you want from your security?
As the transformational journey of security occurs, it's important to know what to expect: that there will be a massive increase in security getting worse.
Greater visibility means that you start to see everything (which is ultimately a good thing).
For 2012, Equifax is looking for real-time proactive intelligence with security. Security Intelligence facts Tony gave: past breaches are usually found 60% found months, years after they occurred. 86% of breaches are not found by the company. In the case of 100% of breaches the information about the attack vector was in the logs.
IBM Security is helping Equifax get the real-time/gamechanging security intelligence they need and the Security Intelligence that understands and changes baselines.
Then Bob asked about what next year's key topics might be. Here were some of what was mentioned:
(our customers are awesome!)
Jamie Thomas (VP of Strategy and Development, IBM Tivoli) was the third speaker.
Some of the content contained in Jamie's keynote can also be found in the announcement roundup blog post.
Jamie reiterated what a number of the keynotes talked about with regard to the market transformations happening around IT. Cloud. Smarter Physical Infrastructure. Mobile. Security.
IBM SmartCloud Foundation, which is our portfolio for cloud, has the levels of Visibility. Control. Automation™ (TM). to create "clouds done right."
Jamie started to talk about the product portfolio and the new announcements specifically:
IBM SmartCloud Control Desk which is reducing the complexities around end-to-end processes for service desk and providing a holistic view to the complexities of service desk and smarter physical infrastructures (bringing together the front-office with the back-office).
IBM SmartCloud Provisioning and IBM SmartCloud Monitoring have both been key offerings for our cloud portfolio and they are working together (see "Service Health for IBM SmartCloud Provisioning" on the ISM Library) to effectively manage the complexities of virtualization.
The bringing together of development and operations is also an important part of the portfolio and the plans to provide a beta of the IBM SmartCloud Continuous Delivery (and some useful workload patterns) and given emphasis with this thought - Infrastructure as code.
One of the announcements that is sure to be important for storage managers is the IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center. It integrates with TSM and is a crucial part of making storage more cost effective.
The hybrid cloud support that we talked about at Pulse 2012 is now part of our portfolio as well as the IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices.
Q1 Labs, and the recent QRadar integration with our security portfolio was discussed and it is sure to help address some of the issues brought up during the customer roundtable.
A plug was given to the 3 million interactions happening on Service Management Connect and it is becoming the place to stay updated on the latest development plans.
Jamie focused on our IBM Smarter Buildings solutions and the power of the Maximo and TRIRIGA portfolioS (which was also reinforced during so many of the sessions discussing smarter physical infrastructure).
Finally, Jamie gave an update on the cows in Brazil (from last year's general session keynote). 2 million more cows are being tracked with Maximo, though there might have been a bit of turnover...
While it was not a part of the general session keynotes, IBM released a new study surrounding cloud computing. "The Power of the Cloud: Driving business model innovation" is live and available for download.
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The Annual Pulse Announcements Wrap-Up
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ email@example.com Tags:  pulse service-management smartcloud announcements pulse2012 6,219 Visits
IBMers are hyper-aware of our clients and the issues that they address when they're on the job. So much so, that I've said in past blogs that the majority of conversations I have with my colleagues start with, "How does [blank] beneift our customers?"
To that end, everything we do revolves around questions like - how can we give our customers what they need to get their job done and stay innovative in their industry?
Questions like that get answered at conferences like Pulse 2012. It's where we continue to deliver value to our customers.
And, as mentioned in yesterday's blog about the general session keynotes from Danny Sabbah, not technology just for technology's sake. Providing real business value.
This year, we had a number of exciting announcements, many of them were collected in Announcement Letter on February 28.*
This particular blog is going to focus on the specific announcements we made around cloud, starting with SmartCloud Foundation.
IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center
Storage is "the next big line item" for IT, which is why the idea of improving storage efficiency has always been a hot topic.
Storage virtualization brings the promise of not only improving efficiency, but also providing levels of data mobility that are crucial to delivering modern services to customers.
The ideal solution for storage virtualization should be able to do both the virtualization/provisioning as well as the actual management.
And IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center does both and it's one of the most impressive things being shown on the Expo Center floor here at Pulse 2012. Not to worry though, the team has information on the website and the team talks about this as well as all storage information on our @ibmstorage Twitter account and the Storage blog.
IBM SmartCloud Monitoring and IBM SmartCloud Provisioning
If you were following our SmartCloud announcements last year, you saw these two solutions make a big splash in the market and we're continuing to add value to both of these solutions.
Today. As in right this second, you can go to the ISM Library and download the "Service Health for IBM SmartCloud Provisioning" that will integrate provisioning and monitoring so that you easily monitor what you've provisioned and be able to identify and react to issues in your environment.
To help further simplify how you provision, we've released a statement of direction for SmartCloud Provisioning that may provide enhancements with image lifecycle management.
New features that may provide the ability to control image sprawl, an Image Construction and Composition Tool as well as highly automated self-service deployment of virtual machines.
All of which translate into spending less time wrestling your virtualization and cloud environments to ground and more time working on innovation.
IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices (New)
Yesterday's general session keynote emphasized mobile.
Between "Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD) and organizations embracing using their own mobile devices for their employees, mobile is the new platform of choice. (which means it's probably time to ditch my IBM 5100)
As you know, our IBM Endpoint Manager solution is built on BigFix technology and it's been invaluable to our overall service management strategy for Visibility. Control. Automation.(TM) (VCA)
Today, we've taken the beta for mobile device management and released it as a product (Announcement Letter 212-065).
The best part about this mobile device manager is that it works with the existing Endpoint Manager solution. Meaning that you're managing all of yoru endpoints from the same place.
IBM Security Identity and Access Assurance 1.2
Last week, IBM Cloud Security Solutions was the award winner of SC Magazine's "Best Cloud Computing Security."
On January 31, we announced an update to one of the key pieces of this portfolio; IBM Security Identity and Access Assurance 1.2.
Security was one of the three areas of focus with regard to increasing complexity and new features deliver improved identity and access governance with open authentication standards, role modeling and lifecycle management, and a virtual appliance delivery method all simplify deployment and provides faster time to value for security while reducing risk.
IBM SmartCloud Continuous Delivery
Continuous Delivery is a topic that we have discussed quite a bit on this blog (it has also been known as "collaborative development and operations" or "DevOps").
The challenge of getting services to users is balanced by ensuring that speed does not come at the expense of governance and increased risk.
The strategy to bring development and operations teams together is often stalled when the tools each team are using don't work well together.
Per the announcement letter, "IBM plans to provide an extensible architecture for delivering and managing the entire application lifecycle, creating an environment that brings development and operation teams together with collaboration, automation, and analysis."
IBM SmartCloud Control Desk
With IBM SmartCloud Control Desk, IBM plans to deliver a solution for service catalog, service desk, and IT Infrastructure Library™ (ITIL™) V3 based processes for incident, problem, change, configuration, release, and IT asset management.
This service desk offering will assist customers in process control center for managing change & configuration, assets, incidents/problems, service requests, SW licenses and more.
Software As A Service (SaaS) - IBM SmartCloud Solutions
The innovations happening with Smarter Planet, are quite simply staggering. One of the most interesting, and most visible, areas is in the Intelligent City solutions.
You've seen these solutions in market and in any number of places in the past, but now Intelligent Operations, Intelligent Transportation and Intelligent Water also have SaaS offerings that allow customers to quickly get started, since there is no hardware to procure or installation services to contract.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - IBM SmartCloud Enterprise - Object Storage
Last quarter, we announced SmartCloud Enterprise, and this quarter we have added a very compelling new feature; object storage.
Object storage enables you to upload and share files of any size from anywhere in the world; supporting millions of users, billions of objects, and exabytes of data.
It's a nice bookend to the SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center in that it gives customers options on how to solve their storage issues.
Back To Visibility. Control. Automation.™ (VCA)
This is a lot of "stuff" with regard to features and functions. But what does it mean for you, as a customer?
I keep going back to the Danny Sabbah general session keynote because it really hit home the message so well.
"Providing information on all platforms is table stakes these days."
Cloud done right is about mobile + cloud. The infrastructure must deliver value back to the business. We must simplify, standardize and automate.
Cloud done right is about delivering VCA:
Cloud computing and VCA means less time (and resources and money) working on your infrastructure issues and more time being innovative.
To find out more about any of these solutions, contact your IBM sales rep contact your IBM sales rep or one of our Business Partners using the Business Partner Locator website.
* some of the new announcements are statements of direction and they are noted as such here and in the announcement letter. (and see the announcement letter and the bottom of this blog as the standard disclaimers apply).
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encrypting and decrypting your ideas - aka talking to people
ivor macfarlane 2700022KPS firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  service-management itil abc itsm pulse ivor 1 Comment 4,277 Visits
Just about my very first experience in IT – brought onto a project as a customer 'expert' – was listening to the IT guys debating how to make use of the data we already had on the old system. In my naivety at the time I had thought computers used 'computer language'. Quickly I realised they were more like people than I had suspected – that there were lots of computer languages, and each computer spoke only one of them, and could make no sense of the others.
Now, in the interceding years (some 27 of them L) great progress has been made – we expect computers to talk to each other. This almost universal technological communication ability sometimes blinds IT people to the fact that human communication has not evolved similarly.
Until we perfect direct thought transference, all the communication we do, whether written or spoken, texted, tweeted or painted on the walls, relies on a two stage process. First you put your ideas into words (usually words and sometimes also gestures or pictures – or a combination of all three). Then someone else has to take those words etc and turn them into thoughts inside their head. There is always an 'encrypt/decrypt' section to human communication.
Now that can get messy, confusing and create all sorts of mistakes in delivering the message. You probably wouldn't design it that way. In fact in a pure IT context we would be looking at ways to deliver direct communication in a standard format from one system to the other. But people don't work that way; it is what we have and we need to work with it.
Communication isn't just about being accurate; I think it is better measured by whether it is useful. In IT, people still manage to get the communication spectacularly wrong by not thinking about the whether the customer (or client or user) is equipped to decrypt the message. As one example, here is an error message I got on my screen the other day, apparently intended to inform me why the software couldn't do what I had asked it to do: "Unable to contact the target back-end forwarding host (proxy target)". I presume that made perfect sense to the person who set the software up to deliver that. They were maybe a great programmer, but evidently not a human communications specialist.
It's easy enough just to dismiss this as one more version of 'Computer says no', but why is it no surprise? Maybe it's because we still seem to think it OK to throw our jargon at others who don't share it. Or maybe we forget they don't know what we do. Actually, to be fair this is not only an IT thing – ask anyone who has been caught on a French train having failed to quite understand the printed message exhorting them "composter votre billet". (And if you don't already know but intend to travel on a French train, trust me, you need to find out what it means, but it isn't a French word that they usually teach you in basic language classes. A classic case of encrypt/decrypt failure in a service management situation that has nothing to do with IT.)
The technologists amongst us love the challenge of integration, communication across platforms etc. but there is recognition that this is expensive and should be unnecessary – an area where standards and commonality help everyone. Why do we forget our most common encrypt/decrypt situation – getting a message from one mind to another.
I hope that the irresistible tide of universal cloud adoption and pervasive social media communication will solve all these troubles – and allow us to concentrate on the people issues more. But so far the social media snowball doesn't seemed to have reduced jargon – quite the opposite. Those of at a certain age are now totally incapable of understanding what are children are saying, even when they give us access to their on-line worlds.
Actually, this is fresh in my mind now because it forms a little game we will play during my talk at Monday 5th March at Pulse – our big SM event in Vegas next month. I plan to have people encrypting and decrypting during that session. I am interested to see how they get on, and hopefully to make them realise there are some simple tools we can use to make things better. Nothing magic, and the same techniques we demonstrate in the simulator. Mostly they rely on establishing common ground – establishing communication channels and learning what will work, by finding shared understandings, and by relying on more than words alone when it makes a difference.
The best part about all that is that from the outside it might look like gossip and drinking at the bar – but we realise it is building business critical communicating platforms and channels. The message that things can be both fun and relevant at the same time is also part of the session.
So, if you are at Pulse maybe you will be able to come along at 6pm on Monday. If not I hope to get the chance to encrypt/decrypt with you at another event this year. And thank you for your efforts in decrypting this message, I hope it wasn't too difficult – and I hope it has some resemblance inside your head to the one that was in mine.
seeing ourselves as others see us - and vice versa
ivor macfarlane 2700022KPS email@example.com Tags:  pulse itil service-management ivor itsm 5,176 Visits
Perception is the only truth you believe
That's a paraphrase of many quotes – but whichever famous quote peddler you choose, it is surely a mantra of sorts for successful service management. To me it neatly addresses two key points:
I had some first-hand instruction on this recently that helped my understanding. Both were a little funny at the time but maybe with some serious messages.
Firstly two different perceptions of what must have looked very similar situations to a detached observer – driving last year down a fast dual-carriageway[1] road. Both times I was on my way to my father.
So – good guy or bad guy? Depends on what you know, and that depends on what you are and what has happened somewhere else.
The other one, I feel the need to share all hinges around those daily gifts we get form our dogs. Each day I take our dog for a walk in the field behind the house. The field is just the other side of the fence and hedge around the back garden, but to get there you have to go out the front, down the road through the alley and back – about 300 metres or so. Now dogs, being dogs, use the daily walk for relieving themselves and people, being only people, are left to pick it up in plastic bags and carry it. But since our walk takes us back down the other side of that garden fence, rather than carry the little bags round the field, I toss them over the fence and into our garden, to pick up and dispose of when I get back. So, I am doing this when I realise I am being watched, by another man out walking his dog. Thinking about it afterwards he just sees someone flinging doggy doo over a fence into someone's garden. He did not speak, but did manage a look that clearly had me well below pond-scum in any kind of social acceptability league table.
OK, so some examples of skewed judgement based on incomplete knowledge, we all have lots of them – and please feel free to send in any good ones that have happened to you.
Very few of these matter in everyday life – we shrug and move on and usually never see the misunderstanding or misunderstood person again. But when it matters we need to establish communication to get some idea of the events that drive perceptions of those who we will interact with long term. This is why we know things about those we live with and care about – their favourite colours, the foods they like and dislike, which football teams they support and lots more. That is worth doing because these people matter to us, and because this makes both their life and ours more pleasant.
So apply this to work, how much more
pleasant – and easier – will your life be if your customers are happy with you,
if they understand what you are doing and you understand what they care about.
That simple idea is at the core of a lot of my work these days – in the
simulation games and the presentation at events. It certainly underpins the
talks I am slated to do at IBM's Pulse and itSMF
If I go back to the first set of two bullets I wrote at the start of this piece, they are trying to say that you need to know how your customers – and maybe other stakeholders – are feeling today. This will drive how you address things. So customer perceptions influence prioritisation – standard best practice stuff. What I was trying to point out in my driving example was that those perceptions and attitudes are anything but fixed. Just because you know what mattered yesterday, doesn't mean you know what will matter today or tomorrow. There are clues and signs you can look for – find out what things affect your customers attitude and monitor those yourself. Again that is something we can do fine at home – we are aware of some of the influences that change attitudes and perceptions on our loved ones – be that exams the next day, football on the TV tonight, or a fight with a friend.
Maybe what we need is more formalised gossip at work – because it is often the conversations that don't seem to be about work that tell us most about how our customers will react – and more importantly how they want us to react. One thing the 21st century has brought us – big time – is new ways to gossip, or should that be freely and rapidly exchange more information than we ever dreamed was possible. So, maybe this is just one more business benefit of social media, one that delivers its success by not being so obvious?
Actually, I don't care how you gather more understanding of your customers concerns and perception influencers use every means you can. You could do worse than simply going to visit them, talking and listening. Set yourself a target perhaps – name one thing that would change your customer's priorities, and then ask them if you are right.
[1] = 'divided highway' in American.
Conference time: Real, virtual, both or Vegas
ivor macfarlane 2700022KPS firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  itil ibm ivor pulse service-management itsm 2,612 Visits
I Call It "WTI: What The Innovator" (Live At Pulse 2012)
Noah Kuttler 110000SVNJ firstname.lastname@example.com Tags:  woz gradybooch pulse pulse2012 service-management innovation 2,243 Visits
If you have spent five minutes with me, you have probably heard me rave about the "WTF" podcast from Marc Maron.
It is the first topic of discussion when I talk to a friend of mine (second being Doctor Who).
The reason WTF works is that you have a veteren comedian (Maron) who knows the questions to ask. Who understands the journey. Who can have the types of discussions that lead to places you and I wouldn't think to go.
Maron is on the short-list of great interviewers. His podcast is one of the few times where the word "fascinating" really applies.
I tell you that, to tell you this.
Pulse 2012. It's right around the corner.
There are a number of reasons to attend (and if you read the Pulse Blog or follow #ibmpulse, they're too numerous to list here).
We announced that Woz is one of our keynote speakers.
Well, the format for this keynote is going to be a little different. He is going to be interviewed by none other than IBM's very own; Grady Booch (@grady_booch).
Grady is an innovator in the same vein as Woz. He was one of three individuals who invented UML.
As someone who worked for a company that relied heavily on UML (which I'm sure is the same for many readers), it's like "Memphis" Raines meeting Henry Ford. He's pretty much the reason a number of us are where we are in this industry.
UML. The Apple computer.
Grady and Woz were not only on the ground floor of technology revolutions, but they both built most of the foundations.
Between the two of them, they personify the type of innovation that we promote at Pulse 2012.
I can not stress this enough: innovation is the differentiator. It's what puts our clients in the leadership position in their industry. It's the thing that organizations playing "catch up" are trying to chase down.
Pulse is about not only helping you find the solutions to drive your innovation, but it's also about mindset. It's about thinking like an innovator.
Thinking like Woz and Grady. Getting you there.
And a keynote like this, with a real in-depth discussion between two of the best in the business. It's gonna be fascinating and you need to be there.
talking and listening to people
ivor macfarlane 2700022KPS email@example.com Tags:  ibm itil itsmf ivor tivoli abc-of-ict service-management 2,340 Visits
fashions and progress - but the basics stay the same
ivor macfarlane 2700022KPS email@example.com Tags:  tivoli ibm pulse itsmf service-management ivor itil 2 Comments 4,456 Visits
Well, we are well into 2012 now and we have just about got though the 'my predictions for 2012' phase and in to ordinary routines again. Whatever the predictions, like with most years I predict that 2012 will look a lot like an older version of 2011.