Brent Sullivan

Cloud Automation Buzz

2009-11-09T15:29:00.004-06:00

Like the old saying “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” automation has a lot of buzz because it is solving IT problems, lowering costs and improving business outcomes. Kris Alcantara’s article “Is Automation the Next Buzz Word?” provides a synopsis of a panel discussion at the 4th International Cloud Computing Expo. In that panel, participants said,

• the term “virtualization” will likely fade into the background as automation becomes a higher priority
• automation by nature carries “tremendous amounts of power and efficiency” and enables businesses to do all the right things, including implementing security
• “The funds to do things the old way is not there,” German (CEO & CTO of Stoneware, Inc.) said. “It’s going to spur a lot of innovation and new ways of delivering IT resources.”

Let’s discuss each of these in a bit more depth.

Automation becomes a higher priority in cloud implementation than virtualization. Let’s call virtualization a victim of its own success in this case. We really can’t think about cloud without thinking about virtual servers, storage and networks, all accessible via API’s. What will be important is the ability to work with the virtualization ‘flavor’ used by the cloud client and cloud provider. Automation steps forward here because it can abstract away the differences in technology and let the process execute. This means you don’t have to add skills or technology, you can leverage the skills and technologies you already use. The key to automation succeeding in this role is for it to be truly independent and meet the requirements of RBA 2.0 as described by Gartner analyst David Williams. Intelligent execution and technology abstraction are the keys.

One of the big problems in Cloud security is simply the ability to work with the security schemes of each of the toolsets you have to work with. Think about it, to execute and document all of the work associated with a cloud bursting action, how many tools will you have to log into internally and with your cloud vendor. We’re all waiting for some standards to develop, but for many of us the time to adopt cloud is now and we have to do the best we can with what we have. That means working with the security infrastructure of each of the task tools that will support the process of adding capacity in the cloud. Automation can handle both the negotiation of each tool’s security system today and add in support for standards as they develop.

In the end it always comes down to the money, doesn’t it? You’re spending 70-80% of IT resources on routine tasks that just keep you treading water. Automation is an innovative way to execute the routine process that deliver the services you offer today, while freeing up your sharpest people to innovate the services you will deliver tomorrow.

Increasingly, IT vendors are adding automation to their product lines, but this serves more to tie together their acquisitions than it does to do what you need done—integration, orchestration and automation of IT processes that cross the IT silos that exist in your production environment.

Opalis works with market leader VMware Vcenter to provide true end to end process automation and to connect Vcenter to your service desk, change management, and configuration tools. We also work with Microsoft (but don’t trust everything you read on the internet). Links to more information on both of the solution sets are at the bottom of this article.

Automation is more than buzz. Whether your cloud plans call for VMware, Microsoft, Amazon, or any one of hundreds of others, Opalis can keep Cloud from being the next way your scarce IT resources are wasted. Opalis will make cloud the dynamic, low cost road to business success.

Have a look at these resources for more information:
Webcast: Control Virtual Sprawl

Case Study: Global Financial Institution Automates VM Lifecycle Management
Whitepaper: Virtualization Meets Automation
Webcast: Opalis and Microsoft Automating the Dynamic Data Center
Whitepaper: Extend Management Tools to Virtual Services
Webcast: Controlling the Cloud from the Cloud

Biz can only optimize for 1 of 3 things

2009-10-01T11:01:00.000-05:00

Cost
Quality
Speed

Think about the last few business cycles and where the emphasis was. In the 80’s and early 90’s it was all about Quality. TQM and the threat from Japan were big drivers for action. As we moved into the mid 90’s and the internet boom we all talked about time to market and first mover advantage (I’m more a believer that the early bird may get the worm, but the second rat gets the cheese…). For the last year or so the emphasis has all been about cost. Most businesses can only focus on one of these at a time. It’s the businesses who manage for nail 2 or more at the same time that break away from the pack.

I’m also reminded of my first Product Management job. My Engineering counterpart, a more experienced guy, sat me down and said “This is how it works. Your job is to tell me that you want a certain list of features by a certain date at a certain level of quality. My job is to tell you to pick any 2”.

The reason I’m so excited by the IT Process Automation market is that it truly lets you have your cake and eat it too (and eat if first).

Cost – Automating routine actions and complex sequences takes labor out of that equation, making it less expensive. ROI is generally well under a year. The other side of this equation is that you can now do the things on your “to do” list that you couldn’t get to before because you were busy keeping the ship afloat. Now you can do those things the business values.

Quality – You’ve pursued ITIL or COBIT or ISO20000 or 6-Sigma. How do you ensure that processes are followed every time? Automation is the best way, particularly if your automation solution also documents all of its work (in your Service Desk and Configuration Management System) and reports on its own execution. This last part is critical. Once your processes are automated and you have data on their execution, you can now improve the process based on data. Dr. Deming would be so proud.

Speed – with people bridging your tool and organizational silos there’s always lag time in processes. This lag time may be 90% of the total process time. It creeps into process execution time because the completion of one step of the task often become just an (unprioritized?) inbox item for the person who handles the next step of the process. This lag time is eliminated by automation.

Cost
Quality
Speed

You can have them all.

Can IT Align with the Business?

2009-09-25T10:45:00.005-05:00

All of the vendor hype around Business Service Management assumes IT can align itself with the business, but can it?

The PC revolution was started by the business and it is that revolution that triggered everything in our industry that has come after. Since that day when somebody brought in a PC with a spreadsheet or word processor, though DOS sharing, NetWare, Client/Server, internet, mobile computing and social networking, IT has been trying to catch up. Problem is we haven't been trying to catch up with the business--IT's been struggling just to keep up with the technology.

In a conversation with a well-known analyst a couple weeks ago, she told me her research shows that 30% of “IT spending” is done by the business, not IT, and that amount is growing. IT is being by-passed 30% of the time because IT lacks cred with the business.

You have to let go of what you are to be what you can become. The problem is IT can’t completely let go because we can’t hit the off switch on legacy systems. Another problem is that IT is stuck at the task level of automation even though we’ve pursued ITIL and other process methodologies. There’s also the problem described in the Sloan Management report on the IT Alignment Trap. What can we do?

We can start by aligning our efforts with the things that are valued by eliminating work we do that the business places no value in. Here’s a (generous) view of how our effort in support of the business stacks up.

The overwhelming amount of effort in IT is spent on tasks, most of which are repeatable and many of which have been defined via your efforts around ITIL or other process development/definition work.

Look how far away those tasks are from anything that directly delivers business value. You know that 70+% of your efforts are spent here and you know that the business does not value this. Do you want to be outsourced? If these tasks are repeatable you should automate them and spend the time higher up in the pyramid.

To get your workload to look more like the chart below, you’ll have to make fundamental changes. Because so much of the routine tasks and process work your team does is related to existing systems that can’t simply be turned off you have to automate them.

Run Book automation can automate routine tasks in IT that live within your IT silos. Limited purpose automation is being offered by the Big 4 vendors to tie their suites of acquired products together to support a more process focused IT infrastructure. The risks of pursuing this strategy are outlined here, here, and in a report from Gartner titled “Will Vendor Initiatives Deplete the Value of RBA?”. Start talking to the vendors. Make end to end process automation your focus because that gets you closest to business value. If you find a vendor who can automate tasks within silos and the end to end processes, so much the better.

With the IT processes well in hand you can turn to presenting your services to the business. One way to do this is via a Service Request Management system and Service Catalog. These can be really powerful when those tools leverage the process automations you’ve built—now you’re automating IT Service request and delivery, now you’re directly in contact with the business.

Is there an option other than automation? Sure. Your other big option for freeing your team’s time up to focus on things the business cares about is to outsource the lower level tasks and process automation work.

The question you need to ask is which path—outsourcing or automating—will better build your credibility with the business? Follow the timeless wisdom of Caddy Shack, “Be the ball Danny”.

News from itSMF Fusion

2009-09-24T14:36:00.003-05:00

I was only able to attend yesterday but Glen O’Donnell of Forrester gave a great presentation after lunch. He hit several themes that came up in my conversations with other attendees and presenters.

If he said it once he must have said it 5 times “If it is repeatable automate it” and “if it’s not a competitive differentiator, why are you doing it? Outsource it, or better yet automate it”. IT has no automated processes—most shops have only automated tasks.

We all know that >70% of the average IT shop’s effort is simply to keep the lights on. And we know that the business doesn’t value the status quo (unless something’s down). The business values new capabilities that drive revenue or cost control. And yet, IT is mostly stuck in a rut. What to do?

Become a hero.

Not the kind that current incentive structures encourage (I was a bit flattered that he riffed on the firefighters by day; arsonists by night theme I discussed here).
Here’s Glenn’s advice on being a hero:
· Be pragmatic
· Innovate
· Automate the automatable
· Become a metrics junkie (measure what matters to the business, not speeds & feeds)
· Tie incentives to the metrics
· Change; don’t be changed

He emphasized that automating end to end processes enforces ITIL discipline, reduces errors, accelerates process execution, and frees your people to innovate.

Glenn recently did a paper making the case for why NOW is the time to start automating processes. It’s available here.

Signs are out there that the economy has bottomed out. What are you doing to prepare for the next uptick in your business. Automation cuts costs so you can weather weak economic times and allows you to focus on what matters to the business as things improve.

Top 2 IT Priorities

2009-09-02T14:01:00.004-05:00

According to Gartner, Service Desk Tools and RBA should be IT Ops top priorities for implementation. Service Desk Tools are largely a replacement market, with more than half of all IT shops having already implemented one (or more). RBA is early mainstream and is only just now getting onto many IT shops radar. Here’s a chart from the Gartner Article “Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management”(sorry the image quality is poor):

IT Service Desk Tools are ranked highly because they are the focal point of process definition and process improvement in IT--particularly for people:people processes like approvals and escalations. Run Book Automation, also known as IT Process Automation is ranked so highly because it helps run IT as a business. With RBA, outcomes are more consistent and accomplished at the lowest possible cost. What’s more, all outcomes are measurable and documented to make compliance tasks simpler and less costly too.

Another way of thinking of RBA is as a way to supercharge the value of the investments you’ve already made it IT tools. You’ve chased inefficiency out of the tasks in IT Ops and with RBA you can chase inefficiency out of the way you link tasks together into processes.

With virtualization projects, compliance concerns and headcount caps all squeezing your capabilities, isn’t it nice that there’s a way to take what you already have and make it even more efficient and effective?

Product Automation, Workflow Automation and Process Automation

2009-08-24T15:30:00.001-05:00

It’s “official”. The automation bundled by the big 4 vendors IS NOT IT Process Automation. So says David Williams of the Gartner Group in his August 14 paper entitled Will Vendor Initiatives Deplete the Value of RBA? He draws a distinction between vendors using the RBA capabilities they’ve purchased to solve integration problems within their suites and end to end IT operations process automation, or RBA. In this post I’ll dive into the distinctions between those, and between ITPA and the workflow contained within the Service Desk tools you likely already own.

IT Process Automation has two key subcategories. The first is end to end IT process automation in support of a business process. In most shops, this means integrating, orchestrating and automating existing task tool silos like service desks, change management, configuration tools, event management and the like. The second is automating repetitive tasks within those silos. Let’s take automation within a silo first.

Task tools have made IT efficient within silos allowing fewer people to do more work with fewer errors. This is all obviously goodness, but it hasn’t eliminated routine, time robbing tasks. Two good examples come from Event Management and Database management. When events are first captured, some of the first activities include filtering, correlation and triage. Some Service Desk products offer these capabilities as part of the product or as add-on tools. If you haven’t already purchased those capabilities, those are tasks IT Process Automation can tackle, but aren’t the focus of this post. What those tools don’t offer is initial investigation that’s where I’ll focus. In most shops, valid events are routed to the operator most skilled with that type of incident/problem. Invariably, that black belt will have a sequence of things that she checks and scripts she runs to collect information before doing anything that is specific to the reported symptoms. This sequence is ideal for automation. IT Process Automation can listen for valid events (and may also be the software that determines the event is valid) and run the diagnostics prior to opening up the ticket. In this way, the first time a person sees the ticket, all of the basics are done and it is time for a person to do what only a person can do—exercise judgment and creative problem solving.

In database management there are routine sequences of actions in CDL and ETL jobs. In many organizations the run book for this job takes 40 man hours per week and looks like this:

Accept Request – The input for the process.
Validate – Check readiness for the process. This includes checking for available disk space, etc.
Dump – Create a backup image of the database.
Copy – Transfer the backup image to the target.
Load – Restore the backup .
Cleanup – Delete all temp files and dumped DB images.
Verify – Check to make sure the new database is the same as the original database. Close process (notify end-user).

These routine actions can all be automated, freeing a significant amount of time for work the business places a higher value on. See the Opalis case study HERE (National Building Supply) that goes into greater detail about these types of processes.

End to end IT Process Automation in support of a business process integrates, orchestrates and automates overarching processes that are supported by multiple task tool silos. The more evolved IT Process Automation products can also discover the information within the task tool silos, share that information with other task tools involved in the process, and take actions based on that information—like triggering a process, completing fields in a form to document the process, or changing the execution of the process based on context. Compliance and Change Management is a good example. The trigger could be a change request or an event. The tools that are orchestrated could include event management systems, Service Desks, CMDBs, configuration tools and compliance scanners. This is the “big bang” area for IT process automation and why Gartner now rates it as high in priority for IT Ops implementation as the Service Desk itself. Ensuring consistently accurate, low cost execution of these complex chains of tasks is a big opportunity for improving service to the business while lowering IT operational expenses.

Product Automation is the solving of a vendor problem, not a customer problem. Vendors like HP, CA and BMC are offering what at first looks fairly attractive—the bundling of their acquired RBA capabilities with tools such as server configuration and service desk. This may include templates for limited purpose automation of tasks executed between the tools. This clearly solves the vendor’s problem of integrating their acquired RBA, Service Desk and server configuration tools. The limited purpose automation they’re offering may solve a limited problem within customer IT shops but it ignores the larger opportunity for IT Process Automation and may lead to vendor lock in and higher costs. If your shop is like most shops, you have tools from HP, BMC, CA, IBM, Microsoft, EMC, VMware, and others. The larger opportunity for IT Process Automation is to span all of these tools so that your automation mirrors your processes. With all of these vendors in your shop, if you took advantage of the limited purpose automation now being offered, you’d then have to integrate your automations and have automation experts to do that. That’s just trading one problem for another. Gartner’s advice? “Purchase a stand-alone RBA tool and use it as the primary automation integration engine, if process automation is what you seek.” This is from the same document referenced earlier—read the whole thing (requires subscription or purchase of this document).

Workflow Automation contained within Service Desks is sometimes confused with ITPA and RBA. Folks often say “I already have automation—it’s built into the Service Desk tool I use”. Service Desk tools often do have great workflow automation for people to people processes—approvals, escalations, and the creation of task lists and the monitoring of the task list’s execution. What ITPA and RBA excel at are the system to system or people to system processes. How does the task list in your Change Management system get executed? People either work with the target systems directly or people use a configuration tool to make the changes. ITPA can execute the task list and update the Change Management system.

ITPA, vendor bundled limited purpose automation, and workflow are 3 different things. Being clear on the differences is one key to successful outcomes.

Avoiding the Trough of Disillusionment with RBA/ITPA

2009-08-03T15:14:00.001-05:00

Gartner recently published a hype cycle showing RBA/IT Process Automation at the Peak of Inflated expectations. Next stop—the Trough of Disillusionment. Can that be avoided? Yes. This post discusses how to avoid the Trough.

The first thing to understand is that the trough applies to a technology segment and the expectations of the market as a whole. It does not apply to every vendor and every buyer—it’s all about aligning expectations with product capabilities. You can be individually happy with your purchase while the market is at the nadir of the trough if you are clear about your expectations and make a good product choice. Let’s examine a couple expectations people may have as they consider purchase at the Peak of Inflated Expectations.

I can choose bundled capabilities for specific uses today and expand them later
I can select an overall automation fabric today that will work with my installed tools to automate end to end IT processes

Either of these can lead to disillusionment.

If you select today for a way to automate end to end processes using your installed tools here are the things you want to look out for:
· Packaged support for the tools already in your environment. The more field delivered or customer built components that are needed the greater your total cost.
· Difficulty in changing as your environment changes. Point to point integrations will become costly in the long run. Look for the ability of the product to discover, share, and act on the information within tool silos to reduce effort if you change workflows or swap one tool for a new one from a different vendor.
· Workflow development and maintenance—how much coding and scripting will be required for the tasks and workflows you intend to build?
· Level of automation delivered. Some products are built around the notion of an operator approving each step in a process; others are more fully automated and rely on triggers with only occasional need for a person to intervene.
· Demonstrated scalability. Architecture slides are not only boring PowerPoint content, they don’t tell you what you need to know—how many transactions will I run and how many does the vendor have running in the real world?

BMC, CA and HP are bundling limited purpose automation with their Service Desk and Server Configuration tools. Connecting the device configuration tasks to change management processes is an example of this type of integration and automation. One would expect that when these companies connect their tools to one another that the cost is free/minimal and that the functionality is entirely out of the box. This makes them look like a no brainer proposition but there are at least three things to look out for.
· Are the assumptions about cost and out of the box functionality for even these limited use cases valid?
· When I want to extend these products beyond limited purpose automation, how much will it cost (software license fees, professional services, training, etc.) to extend these packages beyond their initial limited purpose into an end to end IT operations process automation solution? Does the vendor offer packaged products to integrate with your existing management tools?
· Vendor lock-in. The last thing you want to do is end up with multiple IT process automation tools that don’t work with each other.

Taking the long term view of planning and strategy is the way to avoid the Trough of Disillusionment. Start with the end in mind, check your assumptions and get production references.

IT Process Automation meets Business Process Automation

2009-07-29T11:06:00.003-05:00

The Opalis automation fabric is typically used to automate end to end IT processes in support of a business process. In the past 2 quarters we’ve seen 3 cases where customers are using Opalis to directly automate a business process. Is there a coming clash between IT Process Automation and Business Process Automation (BPA/BPM)? I’ll describe two of the use cases below.

Q1 Financial Customer – see also http://budurl.com/EuroBank -
As a result of acquisition activity, this bank had multiple account databases they wanted to pull together. They got quotes from several global consultants for the work involved in bringing together the information. Their expectation was that they’d need a small army of people to do the work. Some data fields could simply be moved, others needed to be translated from the acquired bank’s terminology to this bank’s terminology. The proposals called for hundreds of people to do the work over several months. In addition to the people costs, space and infrastructure would have to be provided.

The Opalis automation fabric includes a publish and subscribe data bus that was key to getting the work done more efficiently. In the same way that Opalis can transition one service desk to another by discovering data fields, publishing the information in them and transforming the information for a target service desk, so too was it able to bring the customer databases together.

The job was done by a group of 10 people working part time to define the processes Opalis would automate—a headcount saving of at least 275 people. This team also dealt with the exceptions and errors, which were 1% of the total rather than 32% of the total in trials of manual conversion activity. Lastly, the job was completed in 2 weeks, not 4 months. You can do your own math on that ROI.

Q2 Publisher – this is the second business process they’ve automated in addition to IT Process Automation for desktop config control and incident management.

This online publisher has two business processes automated by Opalis. The first accelerates the time to revenue for new customers. Here’s how it works—the publisher collects fees for the content on their website as soon as it goes live. The previous manual process for posting content took up to 2 weeks. With Opalis, the process takes minutes. The publisher sees revenue faster, and the customer gets the benefit of their content posting faster—a win:win.

The new business process is around content validation. The publisher employed 50 people to cross check and validate the content on their website. This was a simple, but lengthy and error prone process they were able to automate with Opalis. Now a single person is able to make a judgment call to resolve any discrepancies found in the automated cross-checking and validation that can’t be automatically remediated.

Is there a coming clash between Business Process Automation (BPA) and IT Process Automation? Perhaps. Fundamentally they do very similar things—automate repetitive tasks and processes that may require logic but do not require judgment, planning or creativity. Both often tie together individual applications that complete tasks into an end to end automated process. BPA tools tend to come with a user interface that overlays or replaces the interface of the underlying applications. Opalis takes advantage of the existing interfaces. BPA tools also tend to create brittle point to point integrations and data transformations while the Opalis publish and subscribe data bus provides flexibility.

Opalis isn’t currently focused on the BPA/BPM market, but we’re happy anytime our customers find a new way to increase their return on investment.

What IT Operations Processes did your competitors automate last quarter?

2009-07-27T09:59:00.003-05:00

This post is simply a partial listing of customer descriptions and the uses cases that drove purchases of the Opalis Automation Fabric last quarter. The format for each will be:
Industry / new customer or additional licenses / Use case(s) / Integration Packs

Manages Service Provider / additional licenses / monitor HP Service Desk tickets then initiate remediation of compliance and availability or performance problems using BMC BladeLogic / HP Service Desk, BMC Bladelogic

Telecom & MSP / new customer / Green IT, Incident Management, Provisioning, Change Management / ServiceNow, VMware, HP ILO

Managed Service Provider / additional licenses / cross-silo IT Operations Process Automation / BMC Remedy, Tivoli Workload Scheduler, HP ILO.

Managed Service Provider / new customer / Change Management, Incident Management, Provisioning / BMC Remedy, HP OV, BMC BladeLogic

Publisher / additional licenses / automated a business process that verified content of publications, manage remote worker desktop configuration and incidents / Tivoli Storage Manager, Microsoft SCCM, ServiceDesk Express

Financial Services / new customer / Incident Management, Change Management / EMC Smarts

State Government body / new customer / Incident Management and automation of routine manual tasks related to DB and file system / NetCool

Financial Services / new customer / Change and Compliance Management / CA ServiceDesk

The Publisher is an especially interesting use case that I'll drill into in a follow-up post. In the last 2 quarters, we've had customers using the Opalis Automation Fabric to automate business processes. I hope you find these use cases as interesting as I did.

Why so many Managed Service Providers as customers? IT efficiency is how they attract new customers and maintain their profit margins.

What the heck is an Automation Fabric?

2009-07-23T10:19:00.002-05:00

Someone was searching for this term on this blog and I wondered how many times I’d used the term without defining it. Turns out I used the term in 2 entries without defining it. Let me correct that.

The need for an automation fabric stems from several things:
· IT Professionals want to reduce operational expense and risk by automating complete processes that span multiple automated tools
· IT Tool providers have done a poor job of integrating their own stuff
· Even if IT Tool providers had done a good job integrating their own stuff, nobody wants to be a single vendor shop. To automate end to end IT Operations Processes, at some point you have to connect tools provided by different vendors.

What then would be the warp and woof of an automation fabric? That underlying structure should have threads that connect actions and threads that connect information.

Threads that connect actions
Most IT shops have invested in tools that automate tasks—managing assets, monitoring systems, configuring devices, managing incidents or requests and the like. This investment has made those tasks more efficient and less error prone. The problem for IT Ops has been that IT processes are made up of several of these discrete tasks that need to work together. The leading vendors of these task tools have grown by acquisition and thus the task tools don’t work together well in an end to end process. People connect one task tool to the next. Sometimes their actions are channeled and monitored by the Service Desk workflow tool. That approach yields a system that is indirectly automated at best, and beset by the latency, risk and cost inherent in all human action. Service desks automated the person to person workflows like escalation and approval. The automation thread and the automation fabric we’re discussing here automates system to system workflows.

Threads that connect information
Each of the task tool silos contain information and may be federated components of a CMDB. That information is important to getting good results from the process and has often been a key reason why people continue to act as the interfaces between the task tools—they can integrate the information into the process. Being a person in IT, I have a vested interest in people being in IT -- and not just as one of the two beating hearts in a lights out data center*. For IT to be valued by the business it must focus its people on doing the things only people can do—exercise judgment and creativity, and plan for the future. These threads carry information from one task tool silo along the process to another tool. The thread uses the information as a trigger for action, or processes the information in a logic gate. This reduces the amount of human activity in the process to only those decisions that require judgment. Automation can handle the logic. That reduces latency, risk and cost in the overall process.

Self aware?
No, we’re not there yet, but the fabric being described would be very expensive if your had to do all the work to weave into it information about itself—what task tools are a part of this process? What information is in them? The fabric must be able to discover these things and publish it to the system of threads that share the information currently trapped within the silos along the process workflow.

Discover. Share. Act.
These are the attributes of an automation fabric:
· It can discover the information currently trapped within the task tool silos.
· It can share that information with the other task tools (from any vendor) along the process workflow.
· It can act on that information, using it to trigger a new action or change the course of an action already in progress.
Having an automation fabric is the architectural underpinning of what the industry has called Real Time Infrastructure or Utility Computing or Dynamic Clouds.

*reference to a joke I heard told by an IBM’er at a data center conference. Goes like this:
In the future there will be only two beating hearts in the data center. One will belong to a person and one will belong to a dog. The person is in the data center to feed the dog. The dog is in the data center to bite the person if it touches anything.

Ticket Enrichment

2009-07-16T09:01:00.001-05:00

Folks like me who live and breathe IT Process Automation (at least during business hours) like to talk about using IT process automation to integrate, orchestrate and automate IT process that cross multiple tool and organizational silos because, well, it’s pretty cool. Simple cases though are the ones where folks get started and get their initial ROI. The gravy comes later. This post is about the meat and potatoes.

What happens when your monitoring system throws an event? You don’t immediately jump on every event. Either your tool has built-in filtering and correlation or someone has to eyeball the flow of events and use their experience to filter and correlate events to get rid of the noise. Once that’s done, the relevant events are typically routed to L1, where known problems are handled and info is gathered on new incidents. If you’re like most organizations, too many events then make their way to L2. At level 2, you typically have specialists “emails slow—give it to Jan”, “the DB is acting up—give it to Ralph”. Before those folks do anything, they probably have a set of things they investigate to develop the information they need to analyze the problem.

To this point, there has been nothing done that requires judgment, planning, or creativity. Most IT shops have been told that they have to “do more with less”. The simple fact is that we can’t “do more with less”. We will in fact do less with less. The question is what will “we” do? It’s an optimization problem. Only people can exercise judgment, plan for the future and engage in creative problem solving. We must optimize our operations such that those are the things we reserve our people for. Optimize by automating the routine actions that don’t require judgment, planning or creativity.

Enter IT Process Automation. Using IT Process Automation you can reserve your people for the things only people can do. Let’s look at the sequence outlined above using process automation.

Your monitoring system throws an event. If it has built-in filtering and correlation capabilities, those execute. If not, IT Process Automation applies policies to the events to filter and correlate. Relevant events and correlated information can be compared to a known problem database. Known problems are remediated automatically, orchestrated with Change Management systems. The steps taken are automatically documented in Service Desk system. For problems that don’t match known problems, routine investigative steps are taken automatically. The results of the investigation plus the original event and correlated data are used to populate a ticket that is routed to the correct support person. The first time a person sees the ticket, they are looking at a situation that requires judgment, planning or creativity. Congratulations—you’ve just optimized your use of your people. Looked at from their perspective, they’ve been relieved of the routine drudgery that makes up too much of a typical day. They’re doing what they do best.

Companies who use automation for ticket enrichment typically see an ROI on their IT Process Automation investment that is measured in months. Dow (formerly Rohm & Haas ) has reduced the number of tickets that go to people by 66%. 27% of all tickets are automatically remediated.

You can’t do more with less, but with automation you can get more done and keep your people focused on the high value actions the business values.

Live from Gartner IOM

2009-06-24T09:08:00.001-05:00

Great keynote presentation on disruptive technologies.

David Williams lead the discussion around IT Operations Process Automation/Run Book Automation. He used Incident Management (as discussed in the Dow/Rohm and Haas press release http://budurl.com/rohmdow ) as an example.

He went on to discuss how automating processes that cross infrastructure silos represents an opportunity for a major advance in operational efficiency but that many organizations do not have anyone responsible for such processes. Odd isn’t it? With all the push around ITIL and process definition, so few people are actually held responsible for cross-silo process success. His position was that the person driving ITIL in an organization should be the person investigating IT Process Automation/RBA.

Are you responsible for cross silo processes? I’d like to hear from you–please connect with me via the comments function.

He also put out a warning that the big 4 vendors will use ITPA/RBA as a Trojan horse to drive the sale of more of their own products and that those vendors are little incented to provide automation beyond their own product set.

This could lead to a serious problem if you adopt automation from a big 4 vendor–if you buy one of their ITPA/RBA products, you’ll still need a product from another vendor to automate processes that are supported by tools from multiple vendors. If you do that, how will you manage multiple automation products? The answer is to work with an unbiased vendor to begin with.

Cloud has also been a big topic here. Don’t forget to sign up for the Opalis Cloud webinar here http://budurl.com/cloudweb, or if you’re at Gartner IOM, come see our presentation with Dow on Thursday morning.

Firefighters by day; arsonists by night

2009-06-23T16:07:00.002-05:00

Our Business Data Centers – Transformed
IT professionals have transformed the way business is done. We have automated business tasks and linked those tasks together into complex and dynamic workflows. Accounting, HR, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Sales, Customer Support, Customer Loyalty and other business operations have been automated and integrated. The systems can automatically respond to changes. The productivity gains and opportunities for process improvement from these systems powered economic growth for the last two decades. We’ve done quite well for the business. So what?

Firefighters by day; Arsonists by night
What about the data center itself though? It is the last bastion of task silos. Specific tasks are automated, but they’re not connected into complete processes. People connect the silos. When business conditions change or the system performs poorly, people scramble to determine the cause and put things back in order. In most IT shops the workers are “firefighters by day arsonists by night”. Days are spent reacting to changes and incidents. “Black belts” respond to problems with “their” systems. About 80% of the problems they respond to during the day were caused by changes they implemented overnight—changes with unexpected consequences.
The reality is that the work that takes most of our time in IT is routine and repetitive. The business wants us to focus on using IT to drive business innovation and growth but we’re narrow experts, stuck spending 60-80% of our time on routine actions.

Why?

Because that’s how we incent our people. We reward IT staff for being good firefighters. We give praise to the person who logged on in the middle of the night and ran a ‘magic script’ to fix a problem. We encourage our people to become deep but narrow in their expertise. And then we wonder why IT’s contributions to business success aren’t recognized and all too often IT jobs are outsourced.

Making the Change
IT is in a resource squeeze. Our complex world is being made rapidly more complex by virtualization and cloud computing. At the same time, many IT shops are forced to reduce staff due to economic conditions. Automation is the only way forward. “But I can’t automate yet—I haven’t bullet-proofed all of my processes yet” I hear you say. That’s where the change comes in.

Your people know your processes. Incent them to be process builders, not firefighters. This is an “on the bus, off the bus, or under the bus” situation. The status quo is untenable. Here’s your roadmap for change:

Have a frank discussion with your staff about the need for change
Provide an incentive plan for building processes
Automate the processes they build
Put your best process builders on the next project the business is asking for
Ask your best process builders for proposals on how the business should be using technology

By following this path, you’ll “do more with less”. More importantly, the business will recognize the value you deliver.

A 30% Change doesn't come from tweaking what you're already doing

2009-06-23T16:06:00.002-05:00

What are the dictates you’re getting from Senior Management during these rough economic times? What changes are you planning? How will those changes position your team and your company when the economy eventually turns positive?
Incremental change isn’t really change at all. When we cut back an area by 10% we are denying ourselves a level of resource. We motivate our teams to “suck it up”, “get by” and “do more with less”. But, as Don Juan said in the Carlos Castaneda books, “Denying oneself is an indulgence. The indulgence of denying is by far the worst: it forces us to believe that we are doing great things, when in effect we are only fixed within ourselves.”
If you want real change, if you want to gain competitive advantage by reducing operational expense and reinvesting that in IT that supports the business, you’ll have to do things in a fundamentally different way. You have to change what you do, not just how you do it.
In an IT shop, you have to change what you are. Are you a cost center that responds to requests from the business and tries to contain costs? Are you a group of ‘smoke jumpers’? Are you process builders and consultants to the business? How do you change from one to the other?
Some companies are making the change from ‘firefighters’ to process builders and they’re reaping big rewards. See http://www.opalis.com/upload/pressreleases/OpalisRohmAndHaasPressRelease.pdf or http://www.opalis.com/Case_Studies_Request.asp?cs=RohmAndHaas.pdf

9-Layer OSI Model

2009-06-23T16:05:00.000-05:00

We’re all familiar with the 7 layer OSI model, right?
7 Application Layer
6 Presentation Layer
5 Session Layer
4 Transport Layer
3 Network Layer
2 Data Link Layer
--LLC sublayer
--MAC sublayer
1 Physical Layer
Like many models, it’s good as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. The first 7 layers exist to enable interoperability and change. The final two layers exist to inhibit change. In any organization, the two most important layers are the 8th & 9th layers. Unless you can navigate the 8th and 9th layers you will never be able to drive meaningful change in your infrastructure.
The 8th and 9th layers are Religion and Politics. These are the layers that inhibit change. If you want to drive real change you must be willing to challenge the prevailing “Religion & Politics”. Careers are made and broken based on how you negotiate these layers and I’m not positioning myself as an expert here, but I can offer a few pointers.
How can you successfully challenge and change the prevailing “Religion & Politics”? Build the business plan/case and socialize it. Your team and IT as a whole should have an overall business plan—what’s important, how you’ll get it done, how you’ll measure success, and the resources you need to succeed. This business plan needs to be centered on how IT impacts the business. Too often in the past IT has viewed itself and been viewed by the business as a cost center. Reality Check—cost centers get outsourced. If you’re currently a cost center your first step is to become the most efficient and effective cost center you can be. Once you’ve done that you can start aligning IT with the business.
An economic downturn is the best opportunity to make strategic investments. Don’t cut to meet expense targets. Restructure and retool. Whatever you do now to weather the economic storm must also position you for the sunny days that will return. Cutting is expected and won’t be rewarded. Strategic restructuring that positions you for success when the economy improves will be.
Busines Plan advice from Guy Kawasaki – http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2007/07/24/guy-kawasaki-how-to-write-a-business-plan-ten-questions-with-tim-berry
With an overall business plan in hand you can focus on the making the business case for the capabilities you need to execute the business plan.
Business Case Development models from Microsoft (includes guide and data collection worksheet) http://www.microsoft.com/business/enterprise/value.mspx
Don’t try to build either of these plans in isolation. Identify the other stakeholders in the change you want to drive. Do some ‘back of the envelope’ calculations of what the change would mean to the stakeholders and start with an informal discussion of your thoughts and calculations. If you get a positive response, enlist them to help you build out the plan. If you get a negative response, nurture them while you pursue more positive stakeholders.
Ideally, you’ll get the stakeholders to carry most of the workload. Guide them. When it’s time to present the work to the decision makers who can fund you plans, have the stakeholders present the parts that relate to their area. They will be most credible to the decision makers and will be fully bought in when it comes time to execute. As Lao Tzu said “A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” You’ll have a solid team behind you and senior management will recognize your leadership.

Why ITSM tools haven't delivered hoped-for efficiencies

2009-06-23T16:03:00.000-05:00

Tens of billions of dollars have been spent over the past decade and a half on ITSM suites and the task tools within them. Reducing errors, lowering operating expenses and delivering value to the business are the common justifications for those purchases. The task tools have certainly reduced errors and there’s a lot of value in that. But if a customer was hoping to lower their operating expenses, they probably haven’t seen the return they were expecting. Why? Because they’ve only automated tasks, not processes.
IT Operations, like any complex organization, is made up of multiple silos that have to work together. Any IT process touches several silos and relies upon several tools. The task tools—e.g. server or network configuration, service desk, asset management, change management, event monitoring and the like—allow you to be effective within their narrow boundaries. Most folks recognized a problem/opportunity here—we need to share information across the tools.
CMDBs arose and one of the things they’ve done is provided a single source of truth for the information needs of the IT organization. Now Service Desks, Change Management tools and Configuration tools can all share the same information about items within the environment. Many of them feature workflow that ensures the people to processes—approvals, escalations, etc—go smoothly. That’s good, but it doesn’t solve the more basic problem. Now you just have automated tasks that share information, but you still haven’t automated the overall process. You haven’t covered system to system automation. People still connect the silos, but add no value to that process. Worse, this routine work takes them away from more valuable work—planning, judgement calls, responding to new situations—things that only people can do.
Think about your own operations—where does lag time and error creep into your processes?
Does the next silo understand the context for that new work in their inbox? The priority? Do they get all of the information they need to complete their task?
With most of the lag time and errors in IT processes coming from the hand-offs between task tools, automating the process is the best place to find reductions in operating expense and errors.

IT Alignment Trap

2009-06-23T16:02:00.000-05:00

A 2007 MIT Sloan report – Avoiding the Alignment Trap (see a review here http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=615 ) points out that IT Operations must first make themselves efficient. They must understand, improve, define and consistently execute their own processes. Once those processes are efficient, they can then move to aligning.Aligning inefficient processes with the business is the recipe for disaster. The study finds that organizations that align IT with the business before making IT efficient have 13% higher IT spending and 14% lower 3-year sales compound annual growth rates. Companies that focus on efficiency first and then align have 6% lower IT spending and 35% higher sales growth.
At Opalis, we see customers get the benefits of automating their processes. By becoming efficient, they reduce costs and can redeploy their people to tasks that build alignment with the business. The business starts to see them as valued partners. This partnership is not possible when IT Ops spends most of its time fighting fires (See “Firefighters by Day; Arsonists by Night” on this blog).Only by driving efficiency through automation can companies find the time to build alignment that drives value for the business.For the latest news in how we’re helping Microsoft customers gain these advantages, see http://budurl.com/OpalisMSFT or join our webinar at http://budurl.com/webinarMSFT

What do you mean you can't automate because you don't have defined processes?

2009-06-23T16:01:00.000-05:00

You get stuff done everyday right?
W. Edwards Deming said that the front line people understand the processes and management doesn’t. If you think you don’t have processes you must be in management
My introduction to Total Quality Management and Dr. Deming was in the late 1980’s. I was working for a small Houston company that, as a result of our focus on customers and quality, earned a slot on the Inc. 500 list in 1991. 4 of us went to a 3 or 5 day seminar lead by Dr. W. Edwards Deming himself and a month later we closed the company for 2 days and sent every employee through a crash course on TQM at the American Productivity and Quality Center. Then the work began.
We identified several critical business processes and documented the steps and interactions with other groups. This work was done by the people who executed the process every day. It was not an ivory tower exercise. The result was that we identified and cut out unnecessary work and immediately improved our processes.
We lowered our costs and improved business performance. Is your IT shop being asked to lower costs and improve performance for the business?
IT can and should do the same thing American Business Technologies did. Start with a handful of critical, repetitive processes. Your front line people can and should do the work—they know what they do every day. Get it documented. The payback is almost immediate and the cost is minor. Whether your organization chooses to then take the step of automating those processes or not is a separate question.
Stop paying your IT Ops people to be firefighters and start paying them to be process builders. This can be a formal incentive program, a contest between teams, or a recognition evening of pizza and your favorite beverage.
In the last major recession, the companies who focused on and investing it their core competencies came out strong. What will you do?

Sustainable Advantage and ITSM Process Automation

2009-06-23T15:51:00.003-05:00

When many folks think about automating ITSM processes, they’re thinking about ways of getting consistent outcomes at a lower cost. They tend to get that pretty quickly if they’re using a modern tool. That’s the first ROI for ITPA/RBA. What many don’t expect is the second payback—sustainable advantage.

IT can view this advantage in two ways – one is the sustainable advantage in-house IT has over outsourcing; the second is the sustainable advantage IT can deliver to the business. What, exactly, am I talking about?

Allow me an analogy. IT has done a fantastic job of automating many business functions. The work IT did to deliver the business automation provided by the likes of SAP, Oracle, and others was the engine for much of the productivity improvements of the last 2 decades. The automation of discrete functions provided some efficiency, but the biggest bang of efficiency and effectiveness came from the ability to better understand and tune business processes once they were automated. As a customer once told me “If I get competitive advantage from my General Ledger, I’m doing something illegal. Everyone is automating the basic functions. That’s now table stakes and all of my competitors have or will have the same tools. Sustainable advantage comes the ability I now have to focus on my process and to make the processes my business uses into world beaters”.

It’s time for IT to focus on IT so that it can better support the business. In many shops the ‘table stakes’ have been met—they have a Service Desk, they have Configuration tools, they have Change Management, they have Event Management. Here are the next steps:
Define – your processes in terms of the steps taken to support a change required by the business. Don’t think about IT tasks in isolation. What is the sequence of IT tasks required to support a change the business wants?

Automate – your processes across the task tool silos and organizational boundaries.
Measure – your processes and compare them to desired outcomes and business KPIs.
Improve – your processes based on the information gathered through the measurement of automated processes.

Continually improving your processes is the only sustainable advantage. Everything you can buy to improve your outcomes can be bought by your competitors too. Your sustainable advantage will come from within your organization. Automating processes and measuring them is the foundation. As the Stoic philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius said, “Dig within; there lies the wellspring of all good. Ever dig and it will ever flow”.

Will Cloud be the next way we squander scarce IT resources?

2009-06-23T15:47:00.003-05:00

Dyanamic. Elastic. Federated. Coin operated. Cloud is gonna be great, isn’t it?
There’s a lot of buzz around cloud, but if cloud is going to be anything other than the next way we squander IT Ops resources on routine yet intricate and time consuming tasks, there are two things we have to talk more about.
The Decider & the Doer
“When you need more capacity you’ll use cloud bursting to dynamically add capacity within the cloud, federating that environment with your physical, virtual or internal cloud environment”
“When disaster strikes—or appears imminent—you’ll use cloud covering to migrate workloads to the cloud”
Nice concepts, but how many people will I need to do all of this? What tools are available to help? In other words, I need a Decider to determine when to take action and a Doer to take the actions (and hopefully document them for compliance audit purposes). If cloud is to become something more that the next big idea that dies because it is too labor intensive, then cloud will have to be created by the intersection of Virtualization, a Service Governor, and an open Automation Fabric.

The decider will need to be able to apply logic to a complex set of system performance metrics and/or SLA metrics, and/or end user transaction response times. This ability will be used to automate the decision to take advantage of that pool of resources in the cloud to maintain compliance with a Service Level Agreement. The next step is to actually do the work needed to expand into or across clouds and document every step taken. Most companies are just getting their feet under them in creating and managing dynamic physical and virtual infrastructures. As they build processes and apply automation to both the tasks within the processes and the processes themselves, they should be thinking about the usefulness of the approach they’re taking when it comes to cloud.
The automation fabric and service governor need to work together in something like a Quality Management cycle. They will work with physical, virtual and cloud resources, understand how well those resources are performing, and take actions to deliver SLA compliant services to the business

William Gibson said “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed”. Both the problems of the cloud and the solutions for the cloud are already here. If you’re planning to attend the Gartner Infrastructure Operations Management Summit in Orlando, June 23-25, please join Opalis and The Dow Chemical Company. Dow Enterprise Systems Management Architect Seneca Louck and Opalis CTO Charles Crouchman will be discussing “Cloud Computing and Pragmatic Starting Points”
Have a look here to see how Opalis is working with Microsoft on Physical, Virtual, and Cloud management http://www.opalis.com/upload/pressreleases/OpalisMMS.pdf
Drop by here to register for the upcoming Opalis webinar on managing the cloud https://www304.livemeeting.com/lrs/8001702728/Registration.aspx?pageName=dbf00fb6kljp6g4c

IT Operational Maturity & IT Process Automation

2009-06-23T15:38:00.003-05:00

IT Process Automation (aka Run Book Automation) can be useful at any stage of IT Operational Maturity. This post is a brief outlining of the types of task automation and process automation that can be accomplished at each stage. First, let’s look at a couple maturity models.
Gartner maturity model:
• Level 0, Survival — Little to no focus on IT infrastructure and operations.
• Level 1, Awareness — Realization that infrastructure and operations are critical to the business; beginning to take actions (in people/organization, process and technologies) to gain operational control and visibility.
• Level 2, Committed — Moving to a managed environment, for example, for day-to-day IT support processes and improved success in project management to become more customer-centric and increase customer satisfaction.
• Level 3, Proactive — Gaining efficiencies and service quality through standardization, policy development, governance structures and implementation of proactive, cross-departmental processes, such as change and release management.
• Level 4, Service-Aligned — Managing IT like a business; customer-focused; proven, competitive and trusted IT service provider.
• Level 5, Business Partnership — Trusted partner to the business for increasing the value and competitiveness of business processes, as well as the business as a whole.

Here’s CMMI:

Rather than attempt to reconcile the differences, allow me to simplify these models even further –
Low – reactive & task oriented
Medium – process oriented; becoming proactive within IT, but still reactive to the needs of the business
High – processes improvement oriented; proactive within IT; proactive with the business
OK, so what can you do with automation at each of these simplified Infrastructure and Operations maturity levels? Here’s what I’ve seen Opalis customers do:
Low – automate routine operational tasks. These tasks are typically within a single organization. Common examples include log & file management, ETL database jobs and the like. Routine incident investigations are often automated as well so that every operator can deploy the skills of your best operator. Think about it, if every time there’s a problem with System X, your black belt for System X always gathers the same 20 bits of information, why not automate that data gathering?
Medium – creating closed loop processes. These processes span tool and organizational silos. The most common of these are Incident to Remediation, connecting event monitors & service desks (sometimes change systems too), and Change Management, connecting change and configuration systems (sometimes service catalogs and compliance audit systems too). These sometimes run in a completely automated mode, at other times the process waits for a human action, like a Change Board approval, and then jumps into action again, triggered by the approval.
High – event & KPI triggered automation. Companies at this level are using complex triggers and branching execution logic. The triggers are no longer simply operational parameters being exceeded or an output from a target system, but are tied to business KPIs and Service Levels. This is also the level where the most overlooked but most important aspect of IT Process Automation kicks in–the ability to measure and refine processes. I’ll dig into this a little deeper in a post next week.
Many companies think that unless they’re at the later maturity levels, there’s no payback to IT Process Automation. The reality is that even companies’ whose vision is for highly complex automation start with simple task automation. Those simple tasks become building blocks for more complex automation, deliver fast ROI, and build familiarity with the toolset—all requirements for long term success.

Next Generation IT Process Automation

2009-06-23T15:23:00.001-05:00

From Integrate, Orchestrate, Automate to Discover, Share, Act
Early RBA (Run Book Automation) and ITPA (IT Process Automation) tools were sometimes more difficult and complex than the problems they set out to solve. Good thing some of the tools have grown up!The first generation of these tools were able to link a series of actions together. The best of the first generation could also provide productized integrations between target systems (Service Desks, Event Monitors, etc) and respond to complex triggers. At Opalis, we talked about the ability to Integrate, Orchestrate and Automate.Next generation automation adds to those capabilities the power to Discover, Share, and Act.Discover – find data the systems within the workflow can make available.Share – provide a publish and subscribe capability for making the data available throughout the workflow.Act - dynamically alter the execution of a workflow based on events and data.
Let’s take a more detailed look at these three areas and what they mean to customers of modern ITPA tools.
Automatic Data Discovery – the ability to connect, discover and expose changes in target systems (e.g. a new service desk field or CI entry) eliminates the risk of processes breaking when systems change. This is critical for companies deploying virtualization solutions where the virtual systems move, and for companies looking at federated cloud environments.
Publish/Subscribe data bus – the ability to pass data between target systems makes it possible to integrate systems in minutes, without symbolic variables or scripts.
The ability to create workflows that change and branch based on status (e.g. completed/failed, dev/test/prod) and data (e.g. field content, computer name, path, string, etc) published on the data bus means human decision making can be captured.
Form-Based Configuration becomes possible with Discover and Sharing. The ability to configure workflow logic without hardcoded scripts lowers the time and cost for process development and maintenance.
Engineered Integrations – the ability to deliver vendor specific, reusable workflow actions, which are maintained and supported by the vendor. Script-free integrations lower services cost, which make customer implementations faster and cheaper.
Process Lifecycle Management – the ability to migrate workflows from test to dev, or across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. Customers do not have to re-write processes.
SDK – advanced Software Development Kits are a sign of mature technology. Providing the ability to extend RBA to any application, by wrapping existing CLI, XML, Java or scripts to create a workflow action with a form-based interface means customers can rapidly extend process automation to home grown and small market share applications.
These next generation capabilities are opening up new opportunities for companies to become more efficient and effective through automation.