The GTUG Council and IBM: A Face-to-Face Meeting and Exchange of Ideas

Any successful enterprise relies on strong customer communications. Start with the idea that business success comes in proportion to customer satisfaction, and it follows that tracking the level of that satisfaction is crucial to the business. Without a continual stream of information flowing to and from its customers, the enterprise risks falling out of touch with customer interests, customer needs, and, most critically, customer pain points.

Toward that end, IBM has long sponsored the Tivoli Global User Group (GTUG) site, which serves as a touchstone for IBM Tivoli customers worldwide. This site, offers features ranging from topical webcasts to mailing list archives, and helps keep IBM products and services and IBM customers in close synchronization. Customers find it easy to get quick access to the information they need, and IBM can track emerging issues, address problems as they occur, and, in some cases, transform today's unfilled technology niches into tomorrow's business opportunities.

Moving From Web Space to Real Space
While the Web has certainly made it easier than ever for IBM to interact with its customer base, there's still no substitute for personal interaction. For this reason, the Global Tivoli User Group Council has been created. The Council is composed of appointed leaders from 20 User Groups spanning the globe, and it represents the overall GTUG population in monthly conference calls to IBM, in which new topics and concerns are presented directly to IBM staffers for consideration and response.

which was originally created as a revenue generator for the British government in the nineties, has recently been revised to version 3, and the new content focuses largely on what's involved in making the leap from traditional operations to a Service Management outlook.

What's implied by that leap? Traditional operations revolve around IT resources such as technologies and staff. Service management theory, on the other hand, suggests that IT should revolve around the fundamental services being performed for the enterprise. In this way, it becomes possible to precisely tailor IT so as to optimize the alignment between what the enterprise needs its IT division to do, and what that IT division actually does.

The 2007 Face-to-Face Meeting Recently, the GTUG Council met with IBM employees in Florida for three days to discuss these issues as they pertain to Tivoli solutions.

Rather than discuss Service Management subjects in the abstract, IBM took a unique path. A fictional company, Case Study Inc., was conceived, and its situation was discussed in order to illustrate these various technologies and theories.

Case Study was defined as a global company with more than eighty thousand employees and an IT division which had emerged gradually, in response to immediate needs, rather than in integrated steps as part of an all-encompassing plan. As a result, Case Study's IT services had slowly fallen out of step with the company's overall business goals, and satisfaction levels within the company had fallen. Fortunately, Case Study's imaginary CIO, the aptly-named Carla Computing, was described as having settled on IBM as the ideal partner by which to resolve these problems. By hiring IBM for both consulting and solutions, Ms. Computing hoped to transform the company's overall IT operation by improving Case Study's IT service levels, employee productivity, company morale, and ultimately, the fiscal bottom line.

To explore this metaphor, IBM staffers discussed, over the course of three days, all aspects of the requisite transformation at Case Study.

Putting Ideas into Practice for Superior Service Management
How relevant for the Council was this subject matter and metaphor? When asked, Council members were largely in agreement. Both the content and the discussion format delivered powerful information of immediately useful utility.

One member suggested that ITIL best practices, already recognized as useful, will now be increasingly important as his company moves forward. New IT services and processes, he said, are requiring new solutions, and he feels that IBM Tivoli products are well-suited. While his particular company has a mix of solutions from various vendors, he described that situation as unfortunate, suggesting that better results might be achieved through a more comprehensive portfolio from IBM.

Similarly, another Council member said that both the ITIL framework and Service Management theory were directly connected to his role, and that it was partly as a result of his company's selection of IBM Tivoli solutions that he could leverage Service Management ideas. He also felt there was a close reflection between IBM's fictitious creation Case Study, Inc., and his company, in that both are currently focused on traditional operational approaches, which are intrinsically reactive, and that they need instead to be moving toward Service Management, which is intrinsically proactive.

Through interacting directly with IBM Tivoli employees, he said, he was able to gain an improved understanding of the relationship between different Tivoli solutions and the logical services for which an IT division is responsible. Such enhanced understanding is certain to lead to improved customer satisfaction levels with IT when the ideas and technologies can be implemented—something he suggested was not far off in the future. As a result of the F2F meeting, he can develop a transformational IT roadmap that takes all relevant issues into account at both technological and business process levels.

Finally, it was his perception that IBM Tivoli has worked harder at creating and maintaining good customer relationships than other vendors in the system management space—thus not just discussing, but also exemplifying, IBM’s Service Management concepts.