Vendor Forum
In today’s economy with sluggish job creation, there’s much talk about the change in skills required in today’s workforce. Drill down into the world of IT operations management, and there is an even greater shift happening, related not to the economy, but to cloud computing. The rapid adoption of private cloud architectures is creating ripple effects, not only on the way IT delivers services to its customers, but also on the types of skills IT requires to support these new architectures.
The other night after my football (pronounced soccer) match, we ended up in a fast food restaurant. I realized that the order taking was very slow, but in line with the actual delivery of food after you paid for your order. I remembered the novel The Goal and the Theory of Constraints, and immediately started looking for the restaurant's bottlenecks. It was clearly the kitchen. The front office, slow enough, was no slower than the back office. What does this have to do with monitoring? ...
The other day I visited a bank to introduce BSM concepts. The IT executives I talked to were very supportive of the ideas, and willing to move forward. But, they said, “How are we going to get this funded?” They had had a very bad experience in the past so they wanted to make sure they would be able to “sell” the BSM project internally. So I compiled some general tips that were useful to me in selling my products and ideas to customers, colleagues, and even to my wife (and she is tougher than all the rest, I tell you). It’s a Top 15. It’s like a Top 10, but 50% better.
I saw a survey in an interesting article the other day by ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick. McKendrick cites a new cloud survey for The Open Group. The survey indicated that many believe cloud will bring favorable ROI to IT shops, but they lack a mechanism to track results.
For a VP of operations, the cloud, virtualization and mobile communications are making BSM harder than ever. Unfortunately your business customers don’t care. They just want your services to work when, where and how they want them. And they don’t want them to cost too much either. But here’s the issue: while effective, the tried and true approach to BSM — focusing on monitoring and measuring end-user experience—doesn’t provide the type of insight that a VP of operations needs. Today’s IT environment is just too complex. You need higher-level insights that are possible with an IT performance system.
