Links List 11.21.08

Posted November 21st, 2008 by Joe Pendry

CA unveiled their cloud strategy this week. One of the benefits they listed as a need for virtualization management was employing change management for dynamic virtualized environments. The CA Service Desk Manager’s change management function helps to govern approval of data center automation policies. Change mangers can analyze how automated policies are complying authorized configurations through the CA CMDB’s automated application discovery function and tracked automated changes.

The downtime winner of the week is Twitter! Sporting a new downtime image, Twitter experienced a significant amount of downtime this week. SMS delivery problems are speculated to be a reason for the downtime, since the Twitter Status blog did not indicate the reason for the database efforts.

ITIL v3 recommends using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure the effectiveness and efficiently of the ITIL process. The problem is ITIL is not a regulatory for measuring services. The business values of the KPI service are utility and warranty. CIO provides a seven step improvement process to identify KPIs for a service. The steps include defining what you what you should and can measure; gathering, processing, then analyzing the data; presenting the information and finally implementing corrective action.

According to Michael Keen, Director & Senior Solutions Architect for the Enterprise Architecture Group at Alliance Technologies, enterprise architecture is just as important as IT governance. He says that enterprise architecture shows how all the components of the enterprise are related and it provides a framework for supporting and automating business processes, especially with change. Keen claims that clients should not ‘set and forget’ enterprise architecture because it is a dynamic, disciplined and ongoing process. If enterprise architecture is properly envisioned and implemented, it will enable IT orgs to respond to change rapidly.