Happy is the clam that gets to spend all day surfing the internet looking for interesting stuff. Sadly most of my working week involves actual work, but I do get to spend some time hunting out other blogs that cover similar ground to this one. So I figured it was probably worth adding a post listing these out, and adding new ones as I go along.
So this list is very much a work in progress and I’ll be adding more sites as I come across them. If you write a blog about ITSM, change management, HP, etc, then please let me know and I’ll take a look.
The Business Intelligence Blog by BI Guru
As referenced in another recent post, Maloy has some really interesting things to say about practical use of Business Objects.
The IT Skeptic
Reads a bit like the people so gloriously sent up over at Speak Your Branes (a personal and perennial favorite of mine) but actually has some interesting things to say.
Business Objects Tips This is the blog section of the Business Objects Tips site. It’s slightly self-promoting (something we’re never guilty of, natch) but there are some nuggets of interest in there as well.
I hate to dispel the myth that writing for Westblog is nothing but being fed eccles cakes by scantily-clad Revs girls, but what with the economy and all, those days of hedonistic abandon are long gone, and, actually, writing these posts can sometimes feel like a bit of a chore.
So happy is clam who discovers that someone else has written a really interesting piece on another blog, all about SaaS and ITSM, that can be brazenly hijacked and plagiarized for the purposes of Westblog… um… that provokes interesting thoughts about the things it mentions.
SaaS 3.0 and ITSM, Match Made in Heaven!!, is the piece, found over on Service Sphere‘s blog. Aside from the Guinness World Record™ for longest blog entry in history (seriously, I’ve read Salman Rushdie novels in less time), the piece is notable for the fact that it takes a long hard look at SaaS – the topic on everyone’s lips, seemingly – but only from the ITSM standpoint, which itself raises some interesting questions. After all, is the fact that we sat up and took notice of this piece an indication that other ongoing and general discussions about SaaS seem a little disconnected from ITSM? Is that because yes, of course it’s easy to see why it makes sense to have your word processing app or whatever in the cloud, but ITSM software is not the same beast as MS Word?
After all, you can send your mother a CD (or is DVD these days?) of the Office suite and reasonably expect her to be able to install it herself, with maybe only one or two panicked phonecalls about having read the entire user agreement but not quite understood all the technical terms. The same is patently not true for Service Manager 7. My preconception – and in this I may be completely wrong (it has been known, just ask my wife) – is that any software that requires significant deployment or installation assistance, will require it no matter what the delivery method of the software. And if that is the case, is that reliance on specific personalization at odds with what we think of as the SaaS model?
Well, I’m not the person to ask, because I don’t know enough to be able to present a cogent argument. If only there was some sort of link to someone else’s blog covering this very topic…
Tom
PS Does anyone else reallllllly want an eccles cake now, or is it just me?
Here at the Westbury campus we’ve been having a few discussions recently about who our target audience is; their desires, their hopes, their fears… And one of the really interesting things (well, interesting to us, at least) that came out of those discussions was the subject of Heath Robinson style ad-hoc solutions to the problem of pulling reports out of an ITSM database. It’s of particular interest to us, because these sorts of solutions are our competition, so we pulled together a list of the top three reasons why customers ditch the home brew and get with the out of the box. The list was pulled together largely based on anecdotal evidence, so there’s bugger all science involved, just our own experiences collated into a hastily assembled list.
So, in no particular order, here are the top three:
It’s going to cost how much?
You know how this one goes: someone high up in the company decides that measuring the performance of IT is probably a good idea, and this directive gets passed down the line until reaches that guy who has far too much time on his hands and far too much autonomy, and who decides it would be just peachy if he could use this as an excuse to test out some of those theories he’s been working on about data warehousing and middleware. Next thing you know he’s put the order in for a new liquid-cooled server room, twenty-seven new servers and a team of DBAs, programmers, BI experts and coffee-fetching monkeys to look after it all.
Most frustratingly, the system works, and the high up gets those reports he or she wanted, so it’s really hard to argue against the installation of Deep Blue. “That’s the only way to get that data out,” your prodigal wastrel will tell you, shouting above the noise of twelve dozen case fans whirring. The truth of the matter is that he’s probably just doing what many of us in tough times – he’s making himself (and his over-built system) indispensable.
I need that report yesterday!
Number two on the list is also about money if you apply the time = money formula that I learned from watching too many 80s movies. But time is one thing you can’t buy and many of our customers are impatient people. They don’t want to wait around for their reports, just because someone else claims to be busy. When there is a separation between the person who requires the report – and who knows just how important and urgent the report is – and the person whose responsibility it is to actually run the report, then you get a disconnect. And, ultimately, the person who needs the reports will think twice before requesting them because it’s going to be too much of a hassle. And the fewer reports that are generated means the less that organization is paying attention to the measurable performance of IT, which means that any efforts towards process improvement or ITIL are doomed to fail. Conversely, when the time lag between thinking about an aspect of ITSM that you might like to report on and actually seeing that report on your screen or in your hand is shorter, the desire to run new reports increases. Suddenly, you’ll start reporting on seemingly unimportant aspects of performance just because you can, and any increase in a culture of measurement has big ramifications for how well your IT department is run and how well it is perceived externally.
She’s Lost Control
The final point is all about control. Having a specialist BI team in charge of a tool that exists for your benefit – and not having control of it yourself – can be frustrating. It’s a bit like when your Mum wants to upload the pictures she took of Uncle Dave’s 60th to Facebook, but needs your help to do it. And rather than just let you do it all yourself in five minutes, she insists that she keeps hold of the mouse while you talk her through the steps; getting the pictures off the camera and onto her PC, then uploading the pictures to Facebook, then publishing the album and so forth. Not that the BI group / your Mum are necessarily incompetent, just that when instructions have to be relayed, the process encourages mistakes and the need for repetition.
And often that disconnect between end user and ad-hoc system is there for a very good reason, in that the system is just too complicated to operate, or doesn’t have user access security nailed down enough to be opened up to anyone outside the BI team. But that doesn’t stop it being frustrating.
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And of course, if I told you the answer to all of these problems was to use Westbury’s SMI Suite then this would turn into some sort of sly sales pitch. So I won’t.
More than 10 years has passed since GamingWorks first published their book IT Service Management From Hell: A Guide to Worst Practices. 10 years later there still appear to be too many fools in IT. In this series of four guest blogs, IT Service Management from Hell co-author Paul Wilkinson will be looking at the reasons and giving some best practice advice for solving this ongoing problem.
In our first blog we discussed the fact that the gap between business and IT seems to be growing and despite all the best practice frameworks we are not bringing IT under control. The first blog declared that the reasons were not the frameworks but the ABC of ICT. Attitide, Behavior and Culture within IT.
This second blog is entitled: Taking the first step in closing the gap.
Lau Tzu the great Chinese philosopher made a quote that very roughly translated goes “A journey of 1000 miles begins with the first step”. This is sound advice for those of us embarking upon our long, tiring, sometimes painful, journey with ITIL in an effort to bring IT under control and close the business and IT alignment gap.
ITIL v3 is the latest of the frameworks that claims to help address the alignment issues we mentioned and help IT organizations finally gain control, so I will use this as a starting point to show why ABC (Attitude, Behavior and Culture) is still a problem and what we should be doing to finally resolve it.
Well first of all let’s look at what ITIL v3 says about a Service. This to me is crucial. If IT people could grasp, embrace and fully understand this concept we’d have the gap closed in no time. A Service, according to ITIL V3, is “a means of delivering value to the business in terms of outcomes the business wants to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks”. If every single IT person could ask themselves the question ‘how does this activity contribute to business value’ or ‘how does my current behavior cause unnecessary business costs and create business risks’, we’d be a long way onto solving business and IT alignment. This is the crucial first step changing people’s attitude about what it is they do and why they are doing it? We can’t possibly be aligned when most people in IT don’t understand the business needs. Don’t believe me? In a series of global ABC workshops with more than 1000 IT professionals the number 1 chosen ABC ‘worst practice’ was “no understanding of business impact and priority”. We in IT do not know or understand business priorities.
Changing attitude is the first step. But what about now embedding this into ‘Behavior’. Actually make it happen. This is where the tools and frameworks come in. Adopting and implementing process based working is all about introducing new ways of working. New ways of behaving. The way in which we currently adopt and deploy the frameworks and tools is also one of the key fail factors as to why we are still failing. 70% of IT organizations are unable to demonstrate the value gained by implementing these types of improvements.
So where are we going wrong in our adoption of frameworks? And how can we ensure that we can adopt and deploy them successfully? In the next blog we will tell you how.
More than 10 years has passed since GamingWorks first published their book IT Service Management From Hell: A Guide to Worst Practices. 10 years later it would appear that the statement about ‘a fool with a tool…’ is still applicable to too many IT organizations. In this series of four guest blogs, IT Service Management from Hell co-author Paul Wilkinson will be looking at the reasons and giving some best practice advice for solving this ongoing problem.
Every year the gap grows. Which gap? On the one side the growth in the importance of IT to business operations and on the other side the seeming inability of IT organizations to bring IT under control and demonstrate value. Says who?
A recent Forrester report declared that only 15% of IT leaders said they were aligned. A full 80% of business managers stated the importance of IT in terms of lowering costs, improving productivity, acquiring and retaining customers, but felt that IT was poor in realizing these outcomes. One of the problems is that IT reports on IT operational excellence and not on business value. Apparently a key best practice for resolving this is to make business-value communications integral in everything IT does and ensuring that IT operations and IT project metrics relate to increased business value.
This is nothing new – business & IT alignment seems to the hype every year. The IT industry is inundated with ever more frameworks like ITIL v3, BiSL and CobIT in an effort to tackle the problems and bring IT under control, and there are an increasing array of advanced service management tools for automation and reporting. Despite all these ‘new toys’ we are still not under control? Why is this?
It is all to do with the ABC of ICT. What is that? ABC stands for the Attitude, Behavior and Culture of those involved in the use and management of IT. ABC is like an iceberg, much of it is hidden beneath the surface and yet it is capable of inflicting enormous damage to your IT improvement initiative, and more importantly to your business.
So why are we not under control? Despite all these frameworks and what are these hidden ABC worst practices that are standing between your ITSM improvement program and success?
In the next blog we will tell you the first step in closing the gap.
Chances are that your organization yearns for dazzling ITSM dashboards with sparkling graphics. Of course you would, who wouldn’t? Truth is however that if your organization does not have a solid foundation of operational ITSM reporting that strategic level dashboarding and scorecards are really nothing more than pie in the sky graphics.
To be fair, operational ITSM reports can be about as interesting as watching a plank warp. Apologies to the wood aficionados. But operational ITSM reports do provide something of great value; they are the foundation upon which to build the management and communication of your ITSM efforts.
Over the years I’ve seen my fair share of ITSM reporting environments and the disparity in quality and maturity is stunning.
On a positive note, quite a few companies have embraced the discipline of managing by fact. These companies are using ITSM reporting as a vital communication tool and a key part in their continuous ITSM process improvement. Interestingly enough, when asked about the state of ITSM reporting these companies will be the first to explain that ITSM reporting is an ongoing initiative and that there is much work ahead.
There are however many a company out there where, let me put this nicely, reporting is not a mature discipline. Typically such companies are running ITSM reports on the basis of “we run these reports as these are the reports that have always been run”. No business validation, no defined audience and often not even an understanding as to what the purpose of the reports is. Suggesting that it would be useful to sit down with the customer community to define customer reporting needs, will likely lead to a rapid exit from the room and a bee-line back to the ivory tower of IT. “There is no way we can provide the customer with the info they would ask for, therefore we won’t ask them”. A clear lose-lose situation that does nothing to improve the standing of IT department and its desire to better serve the business customer. When asked about the state of ITSM reporting, these companies will likely respond defensively “yes, we have ITSM reporting”.
There are very few shortcuts in life. Attempting strategic level ITSM dashboarding or scorecards without proper supporting operational ITSM reporting is like trying to run before you can walk.
I know, I know, hard to believe, right? Hard to accept that there are interesting things to be said about ITSM, BI and operational reporting that don’t have their alpha and omega right here in Westbury Towers…
Well, I hate to be the one to burst the bubble, but it turns out that someone calling himself BIguru (or is it Big Uru… not sure…) has been blogging about security within Business Objects. BIguru (or Maloy, as he seems to call himself in the real world) has written this piece, which combines a high-level, thematic view of the issues around BO security with specific examples of usage within the BO world. The actual application of security within Business Objects XI r3 is something of a black art which few can hope to understand, so it’s always useful to get a bit of insight from someone who, from the looks of things, is at the coal-face of BO every day.
The issue of security of operational data is, no doubt, going to become more important in the coming weeks, months and years as the world comes to terms with the effects of a financial crisis founded on non-regulation and non-transparency. I have a sneaking suspicion that corporate governance – already a burgeoning pseudo-industry in the noughties – is going to balloon into an obsession at the start of the new decade. Big players are going to bolt down every movable asset and bring in hordes of consultants to define security best practice in order to minimize financial risk wherever possible. And that means that even the weekly workgroup performance report is going to be audited for security soundness, so you need to make sure your understanding of BO security principles is up to snuff.
As we all know, Darwin proposed the theory of ‘survival of the fittest’. Species have to evolve from generation to generation, adapting to their environment to survive. Based on this theory and more than 20 years of talking about business and IT you have to conclude that by now, IT should know exactly how to incorporate business requirements and needs. Moreover, IT is crucial in surviving against the competition.
So why does this seems so terribly untrue? Why after 3 versions of ITIL, top of the bill process improvement consultants and the newest flashy service management tooling, most of the implementation projects do not deliver what the business needs? And what about continual service improvement/ASL/BIZL and more …?
From my experience the most successful IT projects and organizations start with clear goals set by people for people, motivated project members, managers and key employees knowing how to change behaviour. As science proves, success, attitudes, culture and motivation start with defined, clear objectives and changing your behaviour; walking the talk. And of course don’t forget to measure the success and to celebrate it.
IT started with people and every initiative and project still depends very heavily on the people involved. We need to start focusing on the central and most important asset, THE PEOPLE! IT for the business needs People for People and walking the talk.
Or perhaps it still takes a couple of million years of IT evolution?
I can’t help myself for writing a more marketing/salesy kind of blog today. The reason is that I’m constantly looking for that golden egg that explains the uniqueness of Westbury SMI Suite. One of the answers is: Westbury SMI Suite solved all the data warehouse issues for HP Service Manager/Center of maintaining the environment.
Let me give you an example.
One of our customers has developed a complete data warehouse solution specifically for HP Service Management. With this solution they solved all the nasty database / data model issues of Service Manager and even made the data warehouse relational. However, they are still interested in Westbury’s SMI suite.
Why?
Because maintaining this ever changing data warehouse environment is extremely expensive for them. Individual experts like database engineers (to modify the database), BI developers (to modify the Universes or Cubes) and ETL specialists to modify and develop the ETL layer are all required for making Service Manager fields/objects available for reporting.
With Westbury SMI foundation, reports are created from data stored in the dedicated SMI Database, whose structure is fixed. This enables Westbury to offer a standardized reporting environment, regardless of the (changing) structure of the back-end HP ServiceCenter software / HP Service Manager software database. SMI Foundation has been created in such a way that administrators can maintain the solution through a GUI, hence there is no need for any programming.
Again, I apologize for being so salesy in this blog, but it is so important for me to make sure that people understand the uniqueness of our solution. If Service Center and Service Manager customer really grasp our architecture, they will see that there is no solution like it available in the market.
Well, we have a new video available for you all to view, called SMI Suite: Behind The Scenes. It’s been a labor of love, involving a multi-million dollar budget, a crew of hundreds, a shoot lasting over six months and directorial tantrums left, right and center. Alternatively, it was done with a green screen and many many hours of painstaking post production. Not to ruin the illusion or anything.
The video is all about architecture, and as a companion piece to the video I wanted to write a blog entry about the same topic, just so the messages from the video are clear. After all, you might find it hard to focus on what I’m saying when you’re confronted with my boyish good looks in all their glory…
Sometimes we find it a little difficult to sum up neatly just how clever SMI Suite is, but we often find that when we get the chance to talk to experienced ITSM professionals in depth – and explain what’s going on behind the scenes, both with SM7 and with SMI Suite, that we almost always get a ‘gasp moment’ from whomever it is we’re talking to. It’s that moment when something suddenly makes sense and it usually falls into one of two camps. Either the person we’re talking to has just spent a month trying to understand why reporting from SM7 is so difficult, or they know precisely why reporting is so difficult, but were convinced that there was no possible solution. Remember the first time someone showed you the Rubik’s Cube? You probably thought that either there was no way a stupid toy could out-fox you, or you took one look and declared that even the greatest minds of our time could never crack such an intellectual nut. If I was going to stretch the analogy any further, I would tell you that SMI Suite is David Singmaster.
So we wanted to take some time to explain in some depth the key concepts around the architecture of SM7 and what SMI Suite does to solve the issues that the architecture raises.
First up is the simple fact that where Service Desk used a fixed, relational database to store its data, Service Manager uses a flat database structure. One of the upshots, from a reporting point of view, is the changeability of field names. So, say you have a field in Service Desk called “Priority”, the corresponding field in the SD database might be called “Priority”, or “Prty”, or “isd3y7j23hh2″ or whatever, but that back-end name would not change once it was set. Not so in Service Manager – everything is subject to change, even after initial setup. So if you were writing a SQL query to call that data, you would need to reference the field name, which might have changed since last month or last week or two minutes ago, and might change again in two minutes time. Also there’s a key difference in the way custom fields are handled – in SD they were custom only in the front end, so no matter how you renamed them in SD, the back-end fields were still called “CustomField1″, “CustomField2″, and so on. In SM7 custom names can be applied to the back-end as well.
SM7 also makes pretty extensive use of CLOBs, BLOBs and comma-delimited array fields, all of which are efficient ways for an application to store its data, but also efficient ways of making that data unintelligible to anyone or anything other than the application that wrote the data. You can think of it like a journalist who has developed his or her own form of shorthand to use when conducting interviews. It works great when the journalist wants to write up the article and can refer to the shorthand notes and quote the subject verbatim, but if the journalist’s editor wants to fact check the article and make sure the subject wasn’t quoted out of context, everything suddenly becomes very difficult, because the shorthand is gibberish.
If we accept that all of these factors make reporting from SM7 very difficult, then we’re going to need to see something pretty special from SMI Suite to solve these problems.
Well, actually, what makes SMI Suite so special is that it is designed, from the ground up, to deal with the particular challenges of SM7 – something that no other (and certainly no one-size-fits-all) application can boast. We already had a solid base in the sense that we had developed a robust, fully featured reporting solution for Service Desk – which, as you’ll remember, uses a fixed, relational database – so the challenge was really to get the SM7 data into a similar format as the SD data that we were used to reporting from.
So included with SMI Suite is a powerful ETL layer that parses the SM7 data into a separate, relational reporting database. And this isn’t just a straight dump, there are some pretty clever things going on, like data cleansing and translation of those BLOBs, CLOBs and array fields into a human-readable format. The mapping of data is based on the standard SM7 configuration, meaning that customers who make minimal customization to the SM7 implementation need only make minimal customization to the SMI Suite implementation. And for larger, more complex organizations with lots of SM7 customization, there’s a user-friendly, drag-and-drop GUI so the data mapping customizations can be easily and quickly without too much technical knowledge.
All of which basically gets us to the point where we started off with Service Desk, which is with good-quality data in a dedicated, relational reporting database, allowing us to bring in our years of experience in this kind of thing, which means standardized reporting universes, out-of-the-box reports and all the benefits of the market-leading BI software.
Which, when you think about where we were just four short paragraphs ago, is pretty awesome. Not only is it possible to run reports out of SM7, but it is possible for staff with no SQL query-writing experience, no database experience – in fact, no technical experience whatsoever – to write reports, refresh them, distribute them and so on. Which is really where SMI Suite sits head and shoulders above products like Crystal Reports or Cognos, which require you to directly query the SM7 database (potentially affecting performance), and to do so in the peculiar, techie way that the SM7 database understands. SMI Suite is all about dragging and dropping, it’s about using obvious and familiar terminology rather than interminable strings of code and it’s about adapting to the changing SM7 structure without you, the end-user, ever having to be aware of it.
So happy is clam who discovers that someone else has written a really interesting piece on another blog, all about SaaS and ITSM, 
You know how this one goes: someone high up in the company decides that measuring the performance of IT is probably a good idea, and this directive gets passed down the line until reaches that guy who has far too much time on his hands and far too much autonomy, and who decides it would be just peachy if he could use this as an excuse to test out some of those theories he’s been working on about data warehousing and middleware. Next thing you know he’s put the order in for a new liquid-cooled server room, twenty-seven new servers and a team of DBAs, programmers, BI experts and coffee-fetching monkeys to look after it all.
A fool with a tool is still a fool.
Well, I hate to be the one to burst the bubble, but it turns out that someone calling himself BIguru (or is it Big Uru… not sure…) has been blogging about security within Business Objects. BIguru (or Maloy, as he seems to call himself in the real world) has written 
As we all know, Darwin proposed the theory of ‘survival of the fittest’. Species have to evolve from generation to generation, adapting to their environment to survive. Based on this theory and more than 20 years of talking about business and IT you have to conclude that by now, IT should know exactly how to incorporate business requirements and needs. Moreover, IT is crucial in surviving against the competition.
Well, we have a new video available for you all to view, called SMI Suite: Behind The Scenes. It’s been a labor of love, involving a multi-million dollar budget, a crew of hundreds, a shoot lasting over six months and directorial tantrums left, right and center. Alternatively, it was done with a green screen and many many hours of painstaking post production. Not to ruin the illusion or anything.
