ITIL Version 3 is a quantum leap for the best practice framework. It looks at IT as a business process, requiring substantial business input. ITIL V3 is about the best practices needed to run the business of IT. Many find this concept daunting. The good news is that many of the ITIL Version 2 processes still exist in V3, just structured into a business process approach instead of a technology approach. Those familiar with TeamQuest ITSO processes and best practices will have an easier time with the difference as ITSO has been promoting this type of change since 2005 – more than 2 years before ITIL V3.

So what is the value in doing the work, especially if you have already implemented ITIL V2?  First, let me say that ITIL V3 is not for everyone. Many organizations’ culture is counter to ITIL V3 principles so failure would be fairly certain.

For example, cultures where business and IT are housed in separate ivory towers aren’t ideal candidates for success. You know what I’m talking about. The blame game begins at the castle bastions, where accusations are hurled like arrows. This is an extreme example, but I wanted to get my point across that without discussion and collaboration, moving to ITIL V3 will most likely fail.

For those with a viable culture, ITIL V3 will improve the lines of communication. IT will be operated like a business and report results like a business. This will result in IT being accepted as an equal. IT expenditures will be viewed as investments rather than expenses. Those who have already successfully implemented ITIL V3 report huge successes in using IT services to improve business performance and excellent working relationships with business units.

Since many have said that reading the new books is a prescription for insomnia, I have recently written a white paper that gives the reader a high level view. It also explains how TeamQuest solutions continue to facilitate some of the ITIL V3 best practices. Download it now. There is no charge to do so and you need not register to download.

Please let me know of any changes to improve the content. I look forward to your comments.

Until the next time…

Best Regards

Ron

I recently had an article published on SearchNetworking.com regarding the translation of network usage into costs. This article explains how one of the ITSO (IT Service Optimization) best practices can be extended beyond the server space.   

The process is the same whether addressing server, network, print or other IT infrastructure service. This ITSO best practice covers identifying the components of an application, IT service or business process; collecting the usage data from the individual components; aggregating the usage into workloads or ITRs (IT Resources); allocating fixed, variable and overhead costs equitably and then reporting the results to senior IT and Business management. 

IT infrastructure usage is communicated in business terms at the end of this process so the organization better understands the value of IT.  

Experience shows that ITSO best practices can be extended across the organization. All it takes is a good understanding of ITSO and a little creativity. What have you done with ITSO? I would like to hear about it.

Until the next time…

Ron

This survey was taken at the 2009 TeamQuest Technology Summit, April 28-29. We asked attendees to choose their highest priority for 2009. And the winner… Overwhelmingly, it’s virtualization. Is that a surprise? Well, no, but I have two questions. Why is cloud computing so low with a paltry 7 percent and when will processes such as ITIL finally get their comeuppance?

Virtualization - 68%
Virtualization has been the teacher’s pet for the last couple of years. The news articles, analysts and businesses continue to sing its praises. We’ve branched out though. Instead of focusing on server virtualization, we’ve moved to desktop and application virtualization. What’s next? How else are you exploiting virtualization capabilities? Will virtualization continue to be the class favorite?

ITIL - 14% 
Ahhh yes. The processes that work well for IT, but have yet to translate to or get buy-in from the business side. ITIL is a tricky one for me. I see its value. ITIL isn’t easy. ITIL can demand a cultural shift and buy-in from IT staff. ITIL has several processes with just as many starting points. What are you to do?

With the mantra “do more with less” being trumpeted about companies and IT staff, one would think more businesses would welcome some sort of process to improve the delivery of services. Those of you who have had success incorporating an ITIL process or two should share your secrets with other readers. How do you get buy in from the business side?

Green IT - 11%
It’s good to see Green computing working its way up as a priority, but there’s more we in IT can do. I’m talking more than server consolidation. Ron Potter has a few ideas for data center and systems management professionals.

Cloud Computing - 7%
Cloud computing has captured the interest of the IT world in much the same way as virtual servers. It’s a great conversation piece, but its priority seems to be pretty low. Why is that? Is it due to security reasons? Are organizations concerned with someone else being in control?

Craig

In a poll of IT professionals at the TeamQuest Technology Summit, 85 percent said they were either reactive or more inclined to be reactive in their IT environment.

Maybe it’s the nature of the beast. IT is under demand to produce “more with less” and deliver always-on services. Marketing has a great idea and wants to run a campaign. Are we sitting at the table when marketing pitches a resource-taxing promotion on the company’s infrastructure? Do we allow ourselves enough time to test? Are we given enough time to plan for the campaign?

Some say you can’t sell prevention. But you can sell success. By proving that IT must be part of the strategic leadership on revenue-generating items, the company should have fewer hiccups, decreased headaches and more opportunities to capture revenue.

We’re all after the same thing – success for the company and happy customers. IT, by being ready (i.e., proactive), can help improve a company’s chances by using proper processes to improve revenue-generating and customer-facing opportunities.

For those of you who have had success at being proactive, how do you do it? What needs to happen to move toward being more proactive? Is it better software, processes, or people? Is it a combination?

We want to hear from you.

Craig

Steve Henning briefed the TTS audience on the partnership between his company Integrien Corp and TeamQuest. Integrien offers advanced analytics as a solution to over-alerting by monitoring software. Typically, firms receive hundreds of alerts. One example he gave was of a company which received hundreds every hour. In such a climate, alerts eventually get completely ignored.

Integrien proved its value at one large customer by conducting an analysis of historical data and then laying out what its system would have advised concerning the IT emergency that had been experienced in that period. During that emergency, hundreds of alerts from its existing monitoring system had failed to zero in on the real issues. With Integrien, a handful of alerts highlighted the exact problems and would have warned IT up to three hours in advance of the actual crash.

Integrien has chosen to tightly integrate its software with TeamQuest in order to offer the best of capacity planning alongside intelligent and predictive alerts. Integrien is in the midst of rolling out its solution along with TeamQuest in a large financial institution.  Craig

At the TeamQuest Technology Summit, John Miecielica of Metavante gave an informative talk on how to combine performance management and capacity planning with monitoring. He explained how much easier it used to be to do performance testing when you only had one server attached to its own storage with a defined set of users. Nowadays with virtualization, it’s a lot tougher as multiple users and apps are sharing a common infrastructure.

He gave an interesting example of an application that was suddenly exhibiting performance issues, yet had no change in traffic patterns and was running the same workloads. The application and infrastructure staff insisted no changes had been made. Performance monitoring indicated a change in IO and how it was serviced, yet the SAN team said there had been no microcode changes, new apps or major changes in storage subsystem. The issue had been caused by another team that had loaded an application on a shared server.

They had been very happy with the success of their implementation and had no idea of the consequences.

Yet a heavily virtualized envirnment makes such events inevitable. It takes tools like TeamQuest to provide enough visibility to detect and prevent similar occurrences.

Craig

The afternoon sessions at TTS were very informative.  Rey Rios gave a great session on ITSO and ITIL.  He discussed the differences, and similarities, between ITIL V2, V3 and ITSO.  Then he explained how TeamQuest products supported the frameworks and best practices.

Mark Manness and Scott Johnson followed Rey.  They discussed the upcoming changes to the VMWare agent and TeamQuest Model as it relates to modeling VMWare platforms and guests.  It was very informative and all are awaiting the releases.

Leonid Grinshpan of Oracle discussed multi-tiered application sizing.  It was great presentation.  Not only did he give us insight into modeling Oracle, he discussed step-by-step processes on how to build prototyping models without and system data, how to validate them and apply what-if scenarios.  I thought he did a great job of showing us how we can prototype new applications before they are built.

TTS seems to get better every year and this year is no exception.

Until the next time…

Ron

Jacques Lehoullier, senior architect for product selcetion at ING Canada (soon to be known as Intact Financial Corporation) gave a breakout session on how to expand AIX capacity from a fixed physical base. He laid out the fact that rapid growth led to increased hardware costs, higher logistical costs and delays due to floor space, electrical and cooling issues. The data center had literally ran out of space.

The company investigated virtualization as a solution, but worried about the risks due to having many applications running on one physical server. It upgraded from two IBM P595 servers of 64 CPUs each to four P590+ with 16 CPUs each in a virtual environment consisting of four CPU pools.

IT at the company consulted with Gartner Group which recommended TeamQuest. This helped the company simplify reporting — from as much as a month to gather the performance and capacity data down to seconds — and enabled the company to decommission several old servers despite adding 100 more logical partitions.  

Craig.

I’m here for the 8^th annual TeamQuest Technology Summit (TTS).  Despite the economy there has been a good turnout with everyone in a good mood.  It’s hard to be otherwise here in Savannah, Georgia.  Blue skies and light sea breezes make for a wonderful, relaxed environment to discuss Capacity Management topics. 

The conference kicked off with a welcome by President and CEO Jerred Ruble. He brought people up to date on TeamQuest happenings since the last meeting. He also awarded the IT Service Optimization Award to Law School Admission Council (LSAC). 

Bruce Bachman, LSAC CIO, was here to accept the award.  It was well-deserved as LSAC made huge strides in improving services over the past several years. Congratulations to Bruce, Jerry Goldman, Technical Services leader, and all the people at LSAC who worked so hard to make their success a reality!!

Some LSAC highlights:

• Used ITIL/ITSO best practices to manage risks
• Beat Recovery Time Objective goal by 12 hours
• Beat Recovery Point Objective by 3.5 hours
• Project finished ahead of time and under budget

JP Garbani of Forrester had a great presentation.  He spoke on strategies to improve IT efficiency.  He covered some history as to how we got here from a Capacity Management perspective.  He then discussed how technology complexity has increased and covered how this complexity impacts the business.  He stressed the point that we can no longer afford to be reactive as too many staff productivity and customer revenue dollars are lost during outages.  He closed by saying we need to have predictive processes to minimize outages, reducing costs and improving customer service; something very important and timely in these trying economic times.  It was refreshing to hear him tout some of the very same ITSO principles we have been advocating over the years.

Well, I’m off to the next session. 

Until the next time…

Ron

We Capacity Planning managers expect and receive information from wide audiences within our organizations. These people have busy schedules just like us.  One best practice I have observed over the years is the use of common courtesy.  When someone, especially in the business area, gives me information that I need to complete a piece of work, I make it a point to thank them.  I let them know I appreciate them taking the time from their busy schedule to get this for me.   

What I have found over the years is that the next time I approach that individual with an information request; I get a much warmer and more cooperative response. Many times those people provide additional information that helps provide more accurate predictions of the future.   

A simple “Thank You!” helps strengthen business relationships and makes it easier to get the information we need to be successful; both personally and organizationally.

Try it.  I think you will be pleased with the results.

Until the next time…

Ron