Doug McClure Tells a BSM Story

We had a conversation this week with Doug McClure, who is the Senior Managing Consultant for Business Service Management (BSM) and IT Service Management (ITSM) for the IBM Software Services for Tivoli (ISST) team at IBM Tivoli (part of Software Group (SWG)). Doug is driven to see clients be successful with their BSM strategies and solutions through his thought leadership, reference architectures, implementation strategies and engagement practices that focus on people, process and technology aspects of BSM. He currently leads the Virtual BSM Practice within IBM Software Services for Tivoli.

Doug shared with us his insights for implementing best practices for BSM, ITSM, and CMDB. We’ll continue this series with Doug next week with some insight from Denny Powell based on their conversation.

StackSafe: Where is the best place for an organization to start when helping their IT group adopt business service management?

Doug McClure: Any BSM initiative should begin by establishing top level buy-in through creation of a formal BSM Strategy for the company. This BSM Strategy personalizes how the company defines what BSM is, what value the company expects from it, and how it will use BSM as a competitive differentiator for delivery of its business and IT services, products, etc. If BSM is an IT only initiative, this will likely result in an IT centric solution severely lacking in the necessary business perspective. In these cases where IT doesn’t invest their BSM efforts with the business as an equal partner, the implementation ultimately becomes a “CYA” tool for IT and not achieve the desired value oriented expected.

The most successful place that I’ve seen this work originate is within a group that many companies have now that serves as a liaison between the various lines of business and IT. Sometimes this group is often seen as the gatekeeper to filter (and hinder) business driven requirements into the IT organization. In the ideal scenario, this group works very closely with the business and IT (usually staffed by business people and not IT people) to understand both the business side and IT side of complex business services and applications. Apart from the traditional IT components, what this group can do is help IT really understand the business perspective. Analysis of the impact on the business in business terms is only possible by collaborating with a group such as this. True value oriented Business Service Management becomes attainable when we get to this level of IT and business alignment, cooperation, collaboration and communication.

StackSafe: Does the adoption of social networking technologies help IT provide better service management to the business?

Doug McClure: When adopted unilaterally across a company with appropriate leadership at the top, adoption, use, and contextual application of social networking technologies has the capability to greatly increase the transparency, openness and honesty of the conversations internal to the company. If more people at the deck plate level are exposed to these types of collaborative discussions, it makes them feel more connected with the business or their day to day job knowing that they have a real purpose and directly impact the business or their clients in some way. Anything that makes communications, knowledge and information access easier for knowledge workers will have a significant benefit for business and IT service management.

StackSafe: What type of industry reaction are you experiencing in relation to the introduction of ITIL v3?

Doug McClure: Personally, I see these best practices projects occurring within respective silos within companies, but I do not see any significant discussions or adoption of ITIL v3 per se. This doesn’t mean they’re not happening, but clients I’m exposed to are not directly involved in those initiatives if they do exist. Unfortunately, the water cooler talk at many companies is that these initiatives are the result of compliance mandates rather than as an investment in establishing IT best practices such as ITIL v2/v3 as a competitive differentiator.

StackSafe: What is your opinion on the importance of a CMDB to business service management?

Doug McClure: What’s most important is having an authoritative source (or federated sources) of information that accurately and efficiently provides information about IT components, relationships and dependencies with the appropriate business service and application context. Most vendors offer CMDBs that are heavily focused on the configuration item (CI) and a configuration containment model approach. They may provide a token field here or there for capturing of information about how this CI relates to a critical business service or application, but this is by far not their strong point. Many will attempt to couple a Service Catalog with the CMDB to provide a contextual perspective on what services, applications, goods, products, etc. are provided to internal customers, lines of business, partners, etc. This is far from what’s needed for value oriented Business Service Management as the service catalog wouldn’t provide the robust dependency and relationship information needed to fully connect the dots or IT components to business services, applications, transactions, etc.

In my opinion we’re still in need of something that enables the business service management perspective. I like to think of it as a Service Management Database (SMDB). It’s probably something that consumes necessary data from various authoritative sources to then be the authoritative source for end-to-end business and IT service management, from resource monitoring to end user experience, governance and compliance to service level management. ITIL v3 mentions something called a Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS). The next generation BSM solution will be built heavily around something like this. There are lots of good ideas in the ITIL v3 Service Design book around this and other new concepts such as the Service Portfolio.

StackSafe: How critical is configuration management, change management, and release management to IT service management?

Doug McClure: It’s make or break here. You’re either doing something in these areas or you will be once you’ve had the pleasure of experiencing a significant business or customer impacting event. Obviously, these are at the root of most company’s IT service management improvement initiatives and why they’re so interested in best practices based approaches such as ITIL. That metric often touted (was it really verified?) that most outages are caused by your own people and associated IT changes gets thrown out there a lot by executives who are looking to ensure the “CYA” plans are funded and in place.

I think what’s most important is that companies take a KISS approach and figure out what works best for them. There may not be the need for some super formal change management process with three levels of approval and requests filled out in triplicate. Take Twitter for instance. A massively popular Web 2.0 service that has been recently plagued by availability and performance problems. IIRC, the folks behind Twitter number less than 20. Do they have the time for some formal, drawn out initiative? Probably not, but I’m pretty sure they’re COMMUNICATING and COLLABORATING behind the scenes in some simplistic way that lets other team members know what’s happening, what new code is being released, what testing will be done, what they’re going to do if something bad happens. They probably have something that works for them - documented and communicated common sense! They have their own way of doing configuration, change and release management.

StackSafe: How would you position the importance of data center automation in regard to effective business service management?

Doug McClure: Well DCA is such a broad area for discussion (btw, check out Ryan Shopp’s DCA Blueprint efforts) with many areas being targeted by new and established vendors. Regardless of what’s being done, everything within the four walls of that datacenter exists to support the business, its goals and objectives (make money, sell more, make more, etc.) and ultimately your customers, partners, etc. The millions of dollars that your company invested in the datacenter aren’t there for you to play with the latest switches, routers, servers or applications.

If it’s deploying a new operating system to a bare metal server, automating a patch deployment, deploying new virtual machines or any other fancy DCA whiz bang concept, you’d better have the context of the business in mind. How will this activity impact the business if something bad happens? What does this new virtual machine support? What services or transactions depend on this newly provision server? Who do I need to communicate with in the business if this automated task fails and the application doesn’t recover?

Think of BSM as an overarching umbrella that encompasses everything within that datacenter. It absolutely does not matter if it’s the physical plant, HVAC, PDU, network, server, application, LPAR, VM or the actual organizational silos, associated SMEs and operations teams, everyone and everything has the potential to impact the business and its goals and objectives.

Some vendors have beautiful messaging here, but taking a look under the covers may not be as pleasant and peachy as you’d hoped. The market is ripe for nimble start ups or open source initiatives to find ways to do it better, faster, cheaper and shorten the time to value. There are plenty of areas that can and should be attacked to smooth out the bumps within the traditional vendor offerings.

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Filed Under: Change Management, IT Operations, ITIL, Interviews, Interviews-Bloggers