Published: December 30 2009, 09:50 AM | no comments
by CA Community

Cloud Computing promises to move all functionality into the cloud. At the same time the consumerisation trend is driving the use of consumer electronics such as of the shelf laptops, iPhones, MacBooks and home entertainment centers as access devices. Typically these devices will be cool, flat, inexpensive and it’s doubtful they will have a physical keyboard. But more interestingly – at least from a service management perspective – is that it will no longer matter how these devices are configured and even whether they run Windows, Chrome, Linux or some kind of mobile derivative. Many organizations are planning their upcoming transition to Windows 7 as the first step towards such a new consumerised, cloud centric future. Through this approach they aim to achieve short term efficiencies while at the same time reaping some of the future benefits already. 

Putting the words consumerisation and benefits in one sentence is not something that comes natural for a lot of IT departments. For a long time IT felt “microcomputers require micromanagement”. An idea that may be soon be just as dated as the word “microcomputer” itself. Let’s have a quick look at some of the things that are happening already.

More and more organizations offer webmail as a way to access their email systems. This enable employees to access their mail from their home PC, from an internet café while on vacation or from customer sites where our employees cannot plug in their laptop’s but do have access to browsers.  At the same time we see that the API of this webmail is used to set up access from personal phones and PDA’s. With the introduction of intranets and sharepoints many of the received mails however link back to content on the corporate network. So more advanced organizations are already offering instant intranet access, either via the standard VPN protocols supported by modern devices or by offering an “on the fly” VPN, where the VPN client software is installed via the browser during the first connection. A related trend we see is the use of multiple devices by one person. Not many corporations hand out multiple laptops, netbooks and desktops to the same person, but several executives are taken to the idea of an ultralight tablet for short trips and a solid laptop for longer stays, and I guess many of you reading this also have both a laptop and a desktop and maybe even a netbook or MacBook for on the side?  If it was not so much work to have the right data on the right machine, we would swap devices much more often, wouldn’t we?

But also on the application side we see several related developments. Traditionally enterprise applications required a specifically configured client (think client/server) and access was only offered to devices inside the corporation’s network. Most modern applications offer access from a browser. Originally the browser interface supported a subset of the functionality but more and more the full scope of the application functionality is available to browser based clients. This reduces the need for client specific configuration but more importantly it allows organizations to offer non-employees, who use non-company provided devices, access to these applications. These can be contractors, temp workers, employees subcontractors etc. And as a result companies have taken to offering access to these applications over the internet. Of course governing and enforcing who is allowed to have access and who is not, is still required. But access itself is no longer depending on physical availability of a specific configuration or specific client device. Offering access to applications irrespective of time or place is cloud computing as original defined by Ramnath K. Chellappa :“a computing paradigm where the boundaries of computing will be determined by economic rationale rather than technical limits.[1]“

The described consumerisation and cloud computing developments basically impact our move to Windows 7 in three ways. First, we may use multiple devices - sometimes on and sometimes off the corporate network. Secondly, most application logic will execute on servers in the cloud (not on our desktop) and thirdly, ideally our data and settings travel with us like a virtual desktop, instead of being confined to one physical device. However there is also a fourth thing to be considered, and – as always in IT - that is legacy. The above approach can be implemented in a green pasture environment, but what about the apps we bought 5 or 10 years ago and we still use every day. For those we will need a “transition strategy”. 

With some companies already moved over, how would you go about setting up such a strategy? One of our European colleagues created a simple seven step approach which starts with a small questionnaire to assess where you are with regard to each of these steps. The first step is to define your vision for your “next generation workspace”. This section includes questions on new possibilities such as virtual desktop infrastructures, support for roaming profiles and devices, virtual application streaming etc. 
 
Next step is sketching out a transition strategy in a Project Plan. Part of this project plan are the following areas: Compliance: do your current contracts and licenses allow you to take the planned approach; Training: what new skills (apart from Windows 7 skills) do you need to acquire; Financial: what will be the cost impact of this transition on your services and how will you charge for these services; Hardware & Software: What do you already have and what would need to be changed, bought, upgraded. And the final item is Management & Support of the transition and of the new situation going forward. Especially the changes in the area of support are quit profound. With user-owned “off the shelf” devices and applications predominantly running in the cloud, support will include even more self service and will require more  collaboration with your (cloud) service providers and seamless access to the support environments of the device providers.

Like mentioned, this may be the last desktop environment you provide. My kids already take their own personalized laptops and phones to school and fully expect to do the same when they join the workforce. The only thing they find cool about my company supplied equipment is the fact that access fees and subscription cost are covered. Now if we could only find a way to “consumerise” those too (starting at home).

PS If interested in the described step by step plan, leave me a note or a comment below

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Published: December 22 2009, 01:00 PM | 2 Comment(s)
by CA Community

This blog features both under our Service Management and Portfolio Management sections and revolves around a video we created earlier this year.

In the video a demand manager tries to convince an operations manager of the benefits of a portfolio approach. The operations manager is not easy to convince as he feels his approach of monitoring his hardware and software gives him good insight into what is going on.

Such a bottoms up approach, starting from the technical components we are running in our datacenter, is a common approach when implementing traditional service management (if we do not run it ourselves, it can’t be very important so we don’t need to support it, let alone document it). Cloud Computing puts a spanner into this logic. Starting from the components we run ourselves will give an increasingly incomplete picture.

Does that make the video less applicable? On the contrary! A top down portfolio approach now becomes even more essential. So suggest you have a quick look, if only for the undeniable entertainment value.  

BTW If you’re interested to see how Service Management, Portfolio Management and Cloud Computing are also coming together in terms of popularity have a look at my Cloudy Xmas trends blog.

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Published: December 21 2009, 11:57 AM | 2 Comment(s)
by Robert Stroud

Have you ever checked into a hotel that has a good reputation with exceptional benefits and once you have checked into the hotel you find that the service is below average? Last week I checked into a very nice hotel and the hotel was undergoing renovations and upon checking the Web site there was not mention of the renovations.  As you can imagine, my experience was not very good and although the hotel gave me some free services for the failure the initial experience had ruined my stay. I formed an opinion as a result of comments made at check-in that the hotel was not being transparent in to their customers.  The feeling that I had was one of disappointment, that I was being delivered little value, especially for the money I paid.

On the same trip, I was visiting a restaurant where the staff worked as a team to overcome adversity without impacting customer service.  Prior to arriving, the restaurant called me to let me know that they were a down a cook in the kitchen due to ill health. When I arrived at the restaurant the waiter took the order and communicated beautifully through the course of the evening. When an extended gap between the entree and main course became apparent, he inquired if he could bring something "complements of the house" to help alleviate the gap.  Needless to say the meal was one of the best I have had this year and the waiter who is the interface between the kitchen and the meal and his ability to recognize the situation was empowered to deal with it.

One of the traps that I have experienced of late especially in incident management is a lack of empowerment to those delivering support.  The standard process is that you call or email the Service desk and then the incident details are taken and more often than not someone will call you back a little later. Now if the problem is easily resolved it may be simply resolved while you are on the call but more often than not most issues today are a complex mixture of business and IT. The consumer doesn't really care about the process or the domain of control they simply want the service restored and business as usual restored.  This requires a focus not on the process but rather an understanding of the business service being consumed and the process for dealing with the incident process based upon that understanding. The result would be a change to the remedial action that is based on the quickest path to service restoration, leading to a change in the skill set with which we staff our Service desk.  A great example of this is a utility company in North America that understands this and has merged its various "desks" together. Whether you are requesting direct IT support or support for one of the many intelligent IT devices that are used in the business, you can call, email or request online the service\request and it is intelligently routed to an appropriately empowered agent. That is not to say there will never be escalation and every contact is resolved at the first contact, but certainly the customer satisfaction metrics are exceptionally high. 

In my opinion, we are all going to have to think about how we function and run our Service desks, especially as more "digital natives" enter the work place.  Digital Natives join the workforce with not only their iPods in their ears but also they are both technically literate (wanting and prepared to solve their own problems) and have little patience for long delays before service is delivered. They don't want to hear about process or experience lengthy delays while someone gets back to them.

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Published: December 11 2009, 09:30 AM | no comments
by Michael King

In my first installment of ‘Why Is SLM So Difficult To Implement', I discussed 3 of the many challenges that IT organizations and Service Providers face when implementing Service Level Management.  A colleague read this blog gave me encouragement for the blog (Thank you Amy J) and also challenged me to provide a solution to the issues posed in Part 1 (Again, thank you Amy J).  I told Amy that I would address this challenge in my next blog, but that didn't happen.  I will attempt to address the challenge in this installment.

I have been thinking about and discussing/arguing a solution for the challenges with implementing SLM for at least 3 years and unfortunately have not come up with a single solution.  I have found that there are multiple solutions to successfully implementing SLM.  From all of these conversations, I have found that the following activities are common to most of the solutions discussed.

• Embracing the cultural shift in IT and how IT interacts with the business - What I mean by this is that IT must accept that the culture of IT is changing and project an image, so to speak, of being a contributor to the profitability of the organization and its efficiencies. This can be done by working with their customers to understand how each side can optimally collaborate together to achieve identified corporate goals and strategies(For an anecdote on this process, check out this entry, ‘IT is From Mars and Business is from Venus - Use SLM to Help Improve Communication and Relations'). The outputs of this collaboration could be service offerings and processes that increase productivity and most importantly, a better understanding and agreement of the roles of IT and Business as they begin their renewed working relationship.
• IT creating stable and integrated processes for delivering value to the overall business - Like ERP implementations, successful implementation of ITIL processes and functions will be dependent upon IT reviewing their existing processes and functions and making adjustments and improvements to them. These adjustments and improvements will need to be done to increase efficiencies and integrations between and within the various ITIL processes. The following are examples of process integration:
  
• SLA warning or violations can create incidents in the corporate help desk system. These incidents could ultimately trigger activity in the Problem, and Change processes.
• When monitoring an enterprise system (SAP, email, etc) or customer facing subscription based system (an online trading system) SLA, the SLM tool needs to integrate with various systems and processes to activate the SLA monitoring process and to receive data for warning and violation analysis. These processes represent asset/configuration management, availability management, capacity management, incident management and their related systems.
• Performing impact analysis of RFCs on SLAs requires that the change, configuration and SLM processes are integrated.

Ultimately, the solution to successfully implementing SLM is directly related and dependent upon how the IT organization or Service Provider, MSP or Cloud Provider are focused and determined on implementing ITIL as a whole in their organization.

These are my thoughts, what are yours?

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Published: December 10 2009, 08:44 AM | no comments
by Robert Stroud

Block your calendars for September 19-22, 2010 when the next stop for the legendary Fusion 10 will rock the house in Nashville at the Gaylord Opryland! 

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