Tag Archives | IT Management
The Bachelor Inn

Has “No Real Time Info Available” Replaced “Lack of Money” as CSPs’ Biggest Woe?

By on June 6, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

It wasn’t clear to me which message was more poignant, given I’d just spent the week with dozens of communications service providers (CSPs) at TM Forum’s Management World conference in Dublin (#mwd12).  It came down to, “What’s the biggest woe for CSPs today?”

It all started as I was walking along the River Liffey – which is no longer “whiffy” I am happy to note.  I made my way across Ha Penny Bridge and then along Bachelor’s Walk, and then noticed above the door at the famed Bachelor Inn a quote from George Bernard Shaw that struck a chord with me given the plight of many CSPs:  “Lack of money is the root of all evil” (from Man and Superman, 1903).

All traditional CSPs have seen a decline in revenue from their fixed-line phone services, and this “lack of money” has been the route to evil for many transformative initiatives these CSPs might have otherwise pursued.  Fortunately for some CSPs, that decline has been offset by a rising demand for newer services, such as mobile phone, mobile data, broadband Internet, IP TV, streaming music and video, and machine-to-machine communications.

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It's about the people

User Experience is Ultimately About People

By on May 30, 2012 in CA Technologies on APM

Here at this address and around the Service Assurance group, we talk a lot about end user experience, how to measure it and how to ensure that customers are getting a good one. We’ve even got a product that helps do just that. We talk about a lot of technology when it comes to end-user experience monitoring, but the important thing to remember: It’s all about the people.

When it comes down to application performance and the majority of IT systems, it’s about the people. Flesh and blood humans. That’s the part argument made by Dennis Drogseth of Enterprise Management Associates in a recent CIO Update column titled “How to Create a Value-Centric IT Organization.” Because humans are the main consumers of IT services, looking at business outcomes ranging from revenues to process is essential to ensuring success. It’s his belief that business should be “humanizing IT”:

I would argue that refocusing your organization around your consumers is the only way you can show value for you and your organization going forward. And it really isn’t so hard once you make the quiet inward assumption that IT is about human beings, after all.

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IT is the Best of Times and the Worst of Times

By on May 15, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

IT is often a tale of two cities.  Similar to Dickens’ classic opening lines, IT can be both the best of times and the worst of times, a place of reason and one of foolishness, a place upon which every part of the business depends and a place where nothing really matters to the business.

A good example of this is when that dream project comes along; the one that will take careers to the next level because it is so strategic; the one that is sure to change the competitiveness of the entire business. But, just when the project gets interesting key project team members can’t focus on it because of an unexpected surge of repetitive tasks, mundane tasks that, if they are done well, no one will notice, but if done poorly, everyone will notice.

You know the kind of tasks I am talking about. These are the kinds of tasks that often wouldn’t even be required if maintenance had been done properly in the first place or if the change requests had been implemented completely instead of one or two checks being skipped.

They are the kind of tasks that IT staffs hate because the tasks force the staff to turn away from interesting work to spend time and attention on tedious work.

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CA Executive Insight

Speak to the Business in the Language of the Business

By on May 8, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

The expression ‘Lost in Translation’ has a special significance for me. I was born in a region of the world where cold meant any time temperature drops below 85 degrees Fahrenheit.  At the age of 10, I left the familiar for a place where winter temperature dropped below freezing, people wore things that looked like they just came off of large furry animals, and I had to learn English to survive.

As someone who’s now fluent in two languages, I have an insight a person who can’t speak multiple languages may never have. Language is about connection, trust and relationships. To be fluent in a language is more than knowing the right amount of words. It means being able to understand the nuances of the culture of that language and with that understanding, the ability to connect and gain trust.

The separation between IT and the business has many parallels to my early life experiences with learning a new language and adapting to a new culture.  IT and the business have distinct cultures and ways of communicating. For IT to be able to bridge the gap between the two cultures, the language spoken has to illustrate IT’s understanding of the value system of the rest of the enterprise.

Changing how IT communicates its contributions with the rest of the enterprise starts with changing the information it shares with executives and business stakeholders. IT’s strategic role in enabling business success means IT is also a rich source of high-value metrics that are early indicators of success or failure of business results.

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Watch video

Managing Complexity to Help Customers Manage IT

By on May 2, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Technology by definition is designed to make life simpler, but in the era of cloud computing, compliance and more, technology can often add complexity to IT and business environments, causing end users to shy away from using the tools designed to make their lives, jobs and days easier.

The IT industry looks to correct this complexity problem with best practice frameworks such as the IT Infrastructure Library, or ITIL, but compliance demands by way of Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA just to name two, outpace even the most adept IT organization. That’s why pureSCM works to reduce the complexity its clients encounter when managing IT environments. By adhering to frameworks such as ITIL, COBIT and Six Sigma and coupling that know-how with service desk and other IT management solutions from CA Technologies, pureSCM makes smart IT practices attainable for any organization.

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Mobile Technologies, Devices Challenge Enterprise IT

By on January 5, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

With record numbers of people receiving smartphones, tablet PCs and other mobile devices this holiday season, IT departments can expect to see more of these devices in the work place and they should also anticipate end-user demand around mobility to increase.

The onslaught of such devices is already a cause for concern among IT professionals. Recent data proves IT organizations worry about the management challenges of mobile technology. CA Technologies recently polled visitors to ca.com and among 433 respondents; one-third indicated the biggest challenge with employees using their own mobile devices to perform their job was “sheer variety.”

Another layer of complexity comes with allowing these devices to access applications and other resources on the network without putting the environment at risk. More than one-half (53%) of some 729 respondents in a CA Technologies survey indicated that security was the biggest challenge their organization faces with mobile technology. The second highest concern among this pool of respondents was mobile readiness.

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Smartphones Under the Tree

By on January 4, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Based on the number of tweets and Facebook status updates from people sharing they received a new iPad, iPhone, Kindle Fire or other device as a gift, it seems as if smartphones and tablets were the gift of 2011. And early numbers seem to back up my anecdotal evidence with some 6.8 million Android and Apple iOS devices activated and nearly a quarter of a billion apps downloaded on Christmas Day alone, according to Flurry Research.

This largesse of devices entering the market will impact IT organizations in two ways: First, Web sites and applications — particularly consumer sites — must support these devices as users now expect to have a flawless experience no matter how they access services. If they type in your site’s URL or download and open your custom application from the Android or iTunes store, they want it to work and work well.

Second is the issue of these devices showing up in the work place. Though the vast majority of those holiday gifts will probably be used for personal purposes, a healthy number will also appear in offices, where they’ll be connected to WiFi networks as users want to connect to corporate e-mail and other resources.

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IT Management Resolution for 2012: Master End-User Experience

By on January 3, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

It’s that time of year again. The time when people resolve to be better about diet and exercise, and when IT departments begin looking at proposed projects and actual resources. In 2012, how can IT managers get the clichéd “more from less” and better serve the business without breaking the bank?

IT budgets could see an upswing in 2012, according to Maven Wave Partners and a PCworld post, but the figures most likely won’t impact the agenda for many IT managers tasked to speed services and optimize performance with the same or slightly more resources. And the task won’t be getting any easier with new technologies. Actually, the opposite is true: as new technologies come into the enterprise, IT managers need to devise better ways to guarantee optimum performance.

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Prognosticator Points to IT Service Quality as Priority in 2012

By on December 7, 2011 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

It’s that time of year again; the time when IT industry watchers make their best estimates of which technologies and trends will take off in the coming months. As 2011 comes to an end, 2012 promises more of the same in some respects, but one expert predicts IT professionals in the next calendar year will experience even more pressure to optimize IT services and guarantee high quality across cloud, virtual, hybrid and more environments.

Andi Mann, vice president of Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies, authored a post for vmblog.com in which he details the 10 top technology trends he anticipates for 2012. Talk and subsequent adoption of cloud computing continues but more in a hybrid sense for next year. Mann expects to see the demise of stand-alone virtualization management products in enterprise IT shops, and a new life for mainframes as cloud platforms. And among the 10, one prediction should get the attention of IT professionals responsible to manage IT service quality and performance. Mann writes:

Service Quality Will Be IT’s Responsibility Again

As hybrid IT proliferates, business owners will (again) realize they do not want to manage technology; they just want it to work. In 2012, end users will increasingly expect IT to take responsibility for service quality, regardless of who is buying, selling or delivering that service. IT will need to eliminate the blind spots in hybrid IT, actively support an explosion of devices, deal with complex cross-boundary services, and find a way to deliver a 360-degree service assurance across all facets of end-user experience.

Read all of Andi Mann’s virtualization and cloud predictions in the vmblog.com post here.

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IT Cultural Change and Real-Time IT Operations-Business Alignment

By on November 15, 2011 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert, CA World

This week at CA World, leaders from a variety of industries — insurance, environmental sustainability, manufacturing, investment services and banking —will be presenting case studies on how they are accelerating their transformation from technology-focused management to business service-focused management. Coming from different directions, they are all converging on the same vantage point: new IT operational processes that manage the IT environment as a unified system that delivers business services. And there are common goals: maintain desired service quality levels with less effort, less cost.

“Well,” you might remark, “isn’t that what IT is supposed to do, which I already know?” This may be so, for some, but a large percentage of IT organizations actually don’t work that way. Analyst research reveals that more than 50% of service problems are reported by end users before IT knows about them and that 82% of IT organizations resort to inefficient, ad hoc cross-silo meetings to compare notes to find root cause.

The common response in such meetings is, “Everything looks green in my area.” Meanwhile, end users and the business suffer as service problems persist for hours or days until the root cause has been found. But this is out of step with today’s IT-driven business. Triage and mean-time-to-repair must be dramatically reduced to minutes, if not seconds, for IT to run at the speed of business.

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Next-Generation APM: So Good It Just Might Make Oprah

By on November 14, 2011 in CA Technologies on APM, CA World

Rosie O’Donnell is back on TV, driving the feel-good variety format that she helped pioneer more than 15 years ago to new heights. The stand-up routines are funnier, the guests are A-list (for example, Russell Brand, Mariah Carey and Antonio Banderas), the Broadway-like productions are snappier, Rosie looks great – and there’s games and confetti. As Oprah’s new favorite thing, Rosie has a swagger in her step, yet commands the stage with a level of humility that makes her so unique, approachable and likeable.

Much like Rosie O, the CA APM team is walking with a swagger in our step this week because we just announced the industry’s first and only unified application, infrastructure and network performance solution that eliminates hybrid-cloud blind spots to put customers firmly in control of the end-user experience.

I’m at CA World 2011 in Las Vegas – the world’s leading IT management conference that attracts the A-list in our industry – where we have just previewed our next-generation APM solution to approximately 6,000 customers, partners and reporters. We believe our new APM solution will change the way you manage your critical applications and revenue-generating services. Here’s why.

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The Basics of Services

By on September 20, 2011 in CA Services

Standing before the court, the attorney turns to face the jury searching for the words to convince them of his case. What seems like a simple, common sense explanation is somehow lost in the frenzied pace a global economy has created.
“What we have here is a failure to communicate,” he begins channeling his best Eddie Albert impersonation from the movie Cool Hand Luke.
“It’s really quite simple. Why do it yourself when professionals can do it for you?”
An experienced litigator, he can tell right away he has lost a few of jurors who dismiss the notion they need help from others. Realizing he needs to re-group he decides he must explain why he believes what he says.
I sometimes get the feeling this is how a salesperson who sells IT management software and solutions feels when they raise the topic of professional services. It’s like when a man tells his wife fixing the clogged toilet will only take an hour only to still be there eight hours later while dialing the plumber in frustration.
Marketing professional services is no easy task. Frankly, the biggest value a customer receives by using a professional services provider is getting their Service Assurance solution implemented on time, on budget and done right the first time. Services providers deploy these solutions every day versus your staff facing it for the first or second time. There is something to be said for experience.
The funny thing is most organizations do not fully understand the value of services experts until after they experienced a stressful implementation with missed deadlines, budget overruns and many unhappy bosses. Implementation services deliver the people, processes and technology to ensure a successful implementation of your mission-critical solution.

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