itsmbuzz.com RSS feed http://www.itsmbuzz.com 2010-03-10T00:24:12+01:00 http://www.itsmbuzz.com http://www.itsmbuzz.com/images/M_images/rss20.gif text/html http://www.itsmbuzz.com itsmbuzz http://www.itsmbuzz.com/content/view/68/39/ Many IT organizations are run through a culture of fear. The fear is of course costs. Stalin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin) might as well be running them for how effective they are. This article is of course targeted at business leadership. It's very tempting to appoint Stalin as your CIO. Stalin gets things done. Stalin always says yes, he's the consummate politician. However, for many businesses, IT is a core part of how customers interact with the business and can even be a differentiator. Do you really want Stalin there? Do you... text/html http://www.itsmbuzz.com itsmbuzz http://www.itsmbuzz.com/content/view/73/48/ BMC, through their Remedy solution have long been the 800 pound gorilla in the service desk market. Their acquisition of the remedy technology from Peregrine is arguably one of the most successful acquisitions in IT service management. It certainly transformed BMC and provided the platform for their successful BSM strategy. However, in the last few years the success was starting to loose its luster from more innovative competitors who could offer service desk solutions at a fraction of the cost and with more flexibility thanks to a SaaS delivery model. I know of a number of... text/html http://www.itsmbuzz.com itsmbuzz http://www.itsmbuzz.com/content/view/31/45/ With the recent acquisition of Tideway by BMC software, the last of the independent application dependency mapping tools is off the market. nLayers was bought by EMC, Collation by IBM etc etc. But do these technologies really provide value, or were they more of a 1.0 technology that everyone (especially the analyst community) expected these vendors to have? The concept of dependency mapping is extremely compelling. Wouldn't it be great if you could have an accurate map of how technology supports a business service, updated in real time? Wouldn't that be an amazing... text/html http://www.itsmbuzz.com itsmbuzz http://www.itsmbuzz.com/content/view/72/45/ Does a claim of having invented something really provide you with that much credibility in the market, especially when its patently obvious that the invention was done elsewhere? Having looked at other industries, its rather common for the 'inventor' to be replaced by newer companies who add efficiencies to the idea and do it rather a lot better. One could argue that the first airline to pioneer travel to the masses was Pan American, yet they closed their doors in the early 90's, out maneuvered and surpassed by more innovative competitors. Or take the car, 'invented' by... text/html http://www.itsmbuzz.com itsmbuzz http://www.itsmbuzz.com/content/view/71/39/ In the last few years, IT organizations that I have been working with are looking for integrated solutions around business service management, performance management and infrastructure management that allow them to quickly understand service quality and how the supporting IT is contributing to that quality. The acquisition of NetQoS by CA does make a lot of sense. It allows CA to fill in a gap in the areas where they can understand how IT is performing. But does it get them to that complete solution? I’m not so sure. The problem they have is that... text/html http://www.itsmbuzz.com itsmbuzz http://www.itsmbuzz.com/content/view/69/50/ The hero culture runs deep in most IT departments. In many places where I have worked, the staff who get the most kudos are the ones who need to pull the all-nighter to make things work, or have to be involved in everything for it to be successful. while there is always room for people who go above and beyond the minimum to get things done, ultimately the hero mentality is a big reason why so many IT departments are stuck in a reactive mode, constantly fighting fires then slapping each other on the back for a job well... text/html http://www.itsmbuzz.com itsmbuzz http://www.itsmbuzz.com/content/view/67/39/ Tivoli is responsible for many things. The eradication of the word 'framework' from any other vendor's marketing; Most likely the destroyer of more marriages than adultery or alcohol; the impetus of more companies starting up and claiming to do Event Management right. But what is ironic is now that they finally have a technology that scales and works, it would appear that they are finally reaping the rewards of all those half implemented solutions, user frustration and reputation. Given that the Micromuse technology was supposed to address all those shortcomings, it seems that the... text/html http://www.itsmbuzz.com itsmbuzz http://www.itsmbuzz.com/content/view/66/47/ Ebay finally announced the part sale of skype. It was always rather curious why they bought it in the first place. The announced reason around how there would be key synergies between their auction business and Skype seemed rather far fetched - isn't the whole point of ebay to buy and sell something quickly and easily over the internet without needing to pick up the phone? While there is still a lot of speculation around how the new owners will extract profit from the spectacularly popular service, there are a few aspects that could be interesting to explore... text/html http://www.itsmbuzz.com itsmbuzz http://www.itsmbuzz.com/content/view/61/47/ Economic downturns often serve as catalysts for the replacement of tasks that were formally done by people with some form of automation. A good example was after September 11, when the airlines were struggling, one area they all invested in was online and kiosk based check in systems so that they could have less employees per passenger.For some industries, they have been so successful that practically their only interaction with their customers is through IT, e.g. banks, insurance companies, online retailers etc. This means that in some cases the only contact that their company has with their... text/html http://www.itsmbuzz.com itsmbuzz http://www.itsmbuzz.com/content/view/65/50/ While many IT organizations embark on CMDB projects. Few succeed. Why? The obvious answer is that their CMDB turns into a junkyard and cannot deliver any meaningful value. Why does this happen? The first part is that a lot of CMDB projects start out without a clearly defined problem that they are trying to solve. Instead, they focus more on the supposition that ITIL says a CMDB is needed, and the vendors say a CMDB is needed, so a CMDB we shall have! Or alternatively, they try to be the silver bullet for... text/html http://www.itsmbuzz.com itsmbuzz http://www.itsmbuzz.com/content/view/63/39/ Over the last few years, Microsoft has entered the ITSM markeplace, both through their monitoring efforts (MOM/SCOM) and their upcoming service desk? But are they are real player and will they be? I'm not so sure. Its certainly true that MS have made a lot of traction with the monitoring solutions, especially at the low end of the market. Basic server monitoring is a commodity and they have been able to compete effectively on price. At the end of the day, this isn't really a sustainable model in a commodity market because somebody else... text/html http://www.itsmbuzz.com itsmbuzz http://www.itsmbuzz.com/content/view/25/50/ If the CMDB can claim one thing its that its been in the 'news' a lot - Nothing gets a group of ITSM consultants/practitioners going than talk about the CMDB, its value, different approaches and so on. But does the hype translate into reality, or is the CMDB just another one of a series of IT fads that explode onto the scene, but are forgotten only a few years later? Even with the more pragmatic approach in ITIL v3, the CMDB continues to be over hyped. Despite all its attention, I saw a statistic... text/html http://www.itsmbuzz.com itsmbuzz http://www.itsmbuzz.com/content/view/58/50/ One of the most damaging trends i've seen in a long time in ITSM is the propensity of some users to treat ITIL more like a religion than a set of best practices. In some sense, it's almost like the creators didn't realize the beast they've unleashed. I've been in discussions at multiple IT organizations where various processes, tools, changes are being made not because they make sense for the organization, but because of a misguided belief that "ITIL Says we should....." I've seen shouting matches over trivialities such as the meaning of Service Level Management, Help Desk vs Service Desk, Ticket vs... text/html http://www.itsmbuzz.com itsmbuzz http://www.itsmbuzz.com/content/view/56/50/ Last week I wrote an opinion piece (content/view/51/50/) around ITIL and I had some good feedback from a reader (http://twitter.com/DavidM2) about how ITIL v3 introduced some improvements. I see ITIL v3 as a bit of a mixed bag - there are some key improvements, but also some of the aspects I mentioned in the last article tarnished those improvements. So to present both the good and the bad, below are some of the improvements as I see them: The lifecycle approach to Service Management - This is the biggest improvement in my opinion. Services are not static, they are created,... text/html http://www.itsmbuzz.com itsmbuzz http://www.itsmbuzz.com/content/view/54/48/ There are a lot of reasons why businesses may be draw to SaaS based applications. One of them is that they can be a good way for the business to bypass an IT department that they view as being unsupportive or unreceptive to their needs. IT departments need to be aware of this trend because if not managed it could significantly change the way that IT is delivered to business users, and has the potential to end up costing the business significantly more money. IT departments need to partner up with the business when it comes to SaaS based offerings.... text/html http://www.itsmbuzz.com itsmbuzz http://www.itsmbuzz.com/content/view/55/47/ Security is a part of all IT environments, even if it is just simple passwords and a lock on the data center door. Most companies (outside of highly sensitive industries) have standard security policies. These policies, while perhaps being well intentioned, fail to take into account human behavior. Consequently, it could be argued that the achieve the opposite of what they intend - reducing security. For example: Password Settings Most companies have a policy of monthly password changes and require at least a combination of letters and numbers. What do most users do?... text/html http://www.itsmbuzz.com itsmbuzz http://www.itsmbuzz.com/content/view/53/39/ In most companies, ITSM tool selection is a big deal. Whatever you choose, you’re stuck with it for at least the next three years, and realistically even longer. You're probably going to have to change internal processes to fit in with how the tool works, and maybe even change the team. Given that IT tools have such an impact on the organizations that purchase and use them, a key part of any purchase decision should be how you can replace it - either because of the advent of improved technology, changing business requirements, or perhaps the... text/html http://www.itsmbuzz.com itsmbuzz http://www.itsmbuzz.com/content/view/52/47/ Good university programs should not only prepare candidates who enrol in them for their chosen career, but also attract the best and brightest into that particular field. I do not think that today’s IT degrees adequately do that. It is my observation, that the mindset of 'IT = programming' is still alive and well in many programs - Creating the perception outside the industry is to take an IT degree creates a transformation from a school leaver to an IT nerd with the pocket protector issued on completion. In working with many graduates, and hiring for a graduate program,... text/html http://www.itsmbuzz.com itsmbuzz http://www.itsmbuzz.com/content/view/51/50/ One of the things that initially interested me about ITIL was that it was a best practices framework that had come out of real use and was not simply a smokescreen to sell products and services. While it had its own strengths and weaknesses it offered a good knowledge base to the IT practitioner, and make his/her skill set much more portable between organizations as different IT shops started to standardize on the core ITIL processes (e.g. Incident, Problem, Change etc). However, these days it seems to have more of a hollow cynical feel to it, with commercial interests no... text/html http://www.itsmbuzz.com itsmbuzz http://www.itsmbuzz.com/content/view/48/45/ Forrester recently published a report (http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,54651,00.html)on Business Service Management, which was an update on their previous BSM wave, as significant changes had occurred in the BSM vendor landscape. Like the wave, while the report was very comprehensive in that it covered a lot of solutions, it didn't really give much guidance as to which BSM solutions are suited to what purpose, and which are really doing something else, but are branded as BSM. Indeed, they listed every solution they reviewed in the 'leader' quadrant during the wave, which reduces their credibility. The criteria they also used for...