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Highlights from the premiere service management event of the year
Billed in advance as the premiere service management event of the year, Pulse 2008 was a tremendous success if the attendance statistics are any indication: more than 4,500 total attendees; 69 countries represented; 500 IBM Business Partners; and 700 labs and 745 SWG exams completed.
What led to this success? Pulse 2008 was truly a blockbuster event, unifying Tivoli Technical User Conference, MaximoWorld and Netcool User Symposium, into a more comprehensive service management showcase than ever before. Attendees were able to interact with peers, learn from gurus, achieve technical certification and, in short, bring themselves up to speed on the latest and greatest service management developments.
Simplifying the many complexities of service management
At Pulse, IBM unveiled its latest developments in service management, and the event served as a great opportunity to discuss its vision and explore its solutions. Service management has been, to date, characterized by a broad mix of functions and processes spanning multiple roles. Integrating technologies and workflows so they can be automated across these areas in a closed-loop fashion is no simple task. For this reason, many organizations have addressed service management in a compartmentalized approach.
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While the business benefits of such an approach are considerable, they nevertheless fall short of comprehensively responding to client needs and providing best-of-breed service through fully-leveraged, cross-silo, inter-process automation. Further, in many cases, organizations have found that broad scope of service management disciplines and best practices means that even knowing where to begin is a challenging question.
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Just announced: Pulse 2009 comes to the MGM Grand, Las Vegas, Nevada, on February 8-12, 2009. Save the date and help plan the event by sending your feedback via the Pulse community.
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One answer to that question comes from IBM's new vision, unveiled at Pulse, of five straightforward entry points to enhanced and optimized service management. These five entry points provide the cornerstone of a modular approach that organizations can use to get started; organizations can identity and choose the entry point which correspond well to their specific service management needs, and select from a subset of consumable, starter projects.
Furthermore, significant measurable improvement can be achieved with surprising speed. In fact, it should be possible in one business quarter or less, as reflected by the countless successful implementations presented by customers at Pulse. For organizations looking to jumpstart service management on the road to service optimization, the IBM vision is thus a very compelling one.
Five entry points to get started
What are the entry points? The first, discover, takes an evaluative approach. Identifying operational resources, their interdependencies and how they support business goals is the basic idea. For organizations looking to get started in service management, one logical project in this area would be infrastructure discovery and mapping, which provides organizations with detailed insight into their deployed technology assets, so they can be leveraged for maximum business value.
The second entry point, monitor, helps the organization collect intelligence on the health of deployed technologies across operational domains. Among the projects under this entry point is event and performance management, which can help to reduce operational noise, and speed resolution of technology problems through integration of tools and analysis across domains — undoubtedly critical to ensuring the high service quality customers expect.
Protect, the third entry point, addresses security and data storage. Shielding core business information and services from damage or destruction, and ensuring that the right people get the right access to the right resources, is essential to almost any organization and its services. One project in this entry point, backup/archiving strategy development, helps by duplicating vital data so that it can be restored in the event of corruption or a disaster.
Integrate is the fourth entry point, and, here, the premise is to enhance business agility, to allow the business to respond and adapt better to changing market demands by managing and reporting the business consequences of changes in the technical infrastructure. Business service management is a project of direct relevance for this entry point; once implemented, managers can better tune services to meet client expectations by identifying on the cause and business impact of impending problems and making logical adjustments to the technical infrastructure.
Finally, the industrialize entry point helps organizations to reduce costs and inadvertent errors, while increasing performance, service consistency, and customer satisfaction. How is this possible? The answer is intelligent automation that makes the best business use of assets, even across domains and operational silos. Asset management is an excellent example of a project in this entry point; asset management solutions, such as IBM Maximo, help by providing a comprehensive perspective of all organizational assets, both on and off the IP infrastructure, throughout their entire lifecycles.
Automation provides a powerful opportunity to improve service management
The last entry point into improved service management, industrialize, may be of particular interest to many of today's organizations. Industrialized automation represents a significant opportunity to improve service delivery throughout the organization, and one which is, in many cases, largely untapped.
Automation is, for instance, at the heart of service-oriented Architecture (SOA) theory, which allows for the abstraction of key, underlying services and their delivery and redelivery to any service or business domain which requires them, even across silos. Furthermore, through automation, the deployment and management of new architectures, such as cloud computing, used to fulfill emerging business strategies such as Web 2.0 platforms, become accelerated and simplified. In short, automation represents an exceptionally compelling prospect for organizations that are seeking to improve current services and deploy innovative new ones—a powerful double win.
That the industrialization of IT formed the heart of Tivoli General Manager Al Zollar's keynote during the opening day's general session, then, is no surprise. Automation, in Zollar's speech, was shown as a foundation of improved, simplified service management across many classes of technologies, operational silos, business needs and multiple industries and sectors.
Furthermore, automation helps illustrate IBM's role in aiding organizations to achieve enhanced service management through new cross-solution integration. For instance, diverse new IBM Tivoli solutions are now empowered by the Tivoli Process Automation Platform, a common codebase that delivers shared features aimed at accelerating broader service management initiatives. One example, IBM Tivoli Service Request Manager, now leverages the Tivoli Process Automation Platform in two ways: through its service desk (trouble ticket) management, by which users report technical problems, and through its service catalog function, which gives users a catalog of services from which to select.
Also drawing on the power of the Tivoli Process Automation Platform is IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database, which serves as a repository of technical change information throughout the infrastructure, and IBM Tivoli IT Asset Management, an IT tool for tracking all IT assets, whether hardware or software.
How do these solutions now integrate to achieve simplified and improved service management? Consider a case in which a laptop is reported as problematic through the Tivoli Service Request Manager. Because of the common links between Tivoli Service Request Manager and Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database, IT staff are empowered with all the requisite relevant technical information. If a new laptop is required, current inventory can also be checked through Tivoli IT Asset Management, which is also directly integrated, sharing data and automating tasks across individual tools. Subsequently, a new laptop can be found, provisioned and deployed.
What's more, IT asset information of this type will also be useful to business managers chartered with tracking demand of assets and making budget-driven forecasts based on expected need. Thus, IT service management at every stage in the service lifecycle is directly enhanced and simplified through the Tivoli Process Automation-empowered suite of IBM Tivoli solutions—a strong example of how automation represents a serious opportunity for organizations to enhance both the quality and the efficiency of the services they provide.
But the latest versions of these three solutions, and their shared codebase, weren't the only new offerings announced by IBM at Pulse 2008. Also previewed were IBM Tivoli Business Continuity Process Manager, a tool to help make business processes as stable and continuous as possible through developing and testing a continuity strategy; a new version of IBM Tivoli Monitoring with integrated views for energy management, a major concern for managers as they attempt to minimize escalating data center costs, as well as features to throttle power utilization based on actual need; and enhanced security management through cross-domain federation of user identities and authorization privileges.
Pulse community documents and extends the experience
Of course, even these examples represent only a small fragment of the information presented by IBM at Pulse 2008. In a larger sense, IBM represents only one element of the total Pulse community, which is also made up of clients, IBM Business Partners and analysts—all offering unique perspectives and contributions.
For this reason, IBM has created a Web 2.0-style virtual community around service management, appropriately introduced at Pulse 2008. This community directly empowers everyone connected with—or even just interested in—the event by serving as an ongoing communications platform, an open forum that everyone can use to share relevant ideas and insights.
In addition to documenting and annotating the event itself in different ways, the community also represents an ongoing opportunity for professionals of all types, and across industries to interact around their service management topics of interest in the future. They can, for instance, make requests about future directions for the next Pulse event, suggesting new demos or even entire new classes of tools which might help them in the pursuit of improved service management in their specific environments. Because IBM professionals also form part of the virtual community, these users can be sure that their thoughts and remarks will be heard, and the overall feedback will be leveraged by IBM as it develops forthcoming events, services and solutions.
In this way, participation in the community can help users by extending and enhancing their business relationships, informing them about aspects of the event that they were unable to participate in themselves and, ultimately, improving the value of IBM offerings to come—all tremendous benefits.
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