BSM Views

Like fault lines, demographics have a nasty habit of shifting. The next shift on the verge of crashing into the collective consciousness IT is the retirement of the baby boomer. For years IT departments have run off the collective mind share of the boomers, but soon those minds will be in Florida, wearing velour track suits, and playing golf everyday. Already cracks are appearing, and you see evidence in things like the surprising demand for programmers of arcane languages like Cobol.

As IT departments recognize this, strategies are changing. Already there is an increased interest in Knowledge Mgt to start preserving that tribal knowledge before it disappears. However, must greater change is needed, and only through embracing greater automation will IT departments cope with the shift. For the all automation of modern IT departments, a large portion of work remains repetitive and manual, and much of the current automation is simply integration between systems. Enter Run book Automation (RBA) (Wikipedia), which allows many traditional manual tasks that exist to be orchestrated and automated in a flexible and effective workflow.

In one organization I know, high priority tickets with 30 min resolution SLAs are often received. In some cases, the first step for these tickets is a manual status check of 6 servers, which often takes several minutes, and makes it a challenge to maintain the SLA. Through Runbook Automation, this process can be orchestrated, and automated so that the servers have been checked by the time the technician has opened the ticket.

While Run Book Automation is new, it has great potential and is experiencing quick adoption. Much of this adoption is likely spurred by datacenter automation, but increasingly organizations are looking to RBA as a flexible way to automate the repetitive tasks that dog the techs of today. For more info, check out The Potential of Run Book Automation whitepaper.

A while back I mentioned a company called Blue Line Graphics that was developing some great tools to visualize and management Atrium CMDB Data. Their newest product, the CMDB Workshop, is now in beta. It provides an efficient front end to manage large amounts of CI Data, and can be downloaded for a test.

Has ITIL become a commodity? The concept seems to have penetrated most IT departments, and has possibly reached critical mass in North America. There large numbers of practitioners exercising their craft and, at times, they seems to be tripping over each other for business. So supply seems high, this likely just means that adoption is going very well, and is most organizations are jumping on board. However, many of those organizations now want instant ITIL gratification, and are looking to adopt the success of others. Thinking about the Technology Adoption Cycle, it would seem that many companies talking ITIL these days are in the Late Majority Followers stage, trying to catch up with the rest of the pack.

In addition, there are now models on the market that enable this organizations adopt successful existing processes. As long at the organizations buy into the existing process, the model claim to take the ITIL implementation from multiple months of white boarding to mere weeks of practical configuration.

The observations are somewhat anecdotal, but if the ITIL practitioner supply is high, models are now in the market, and companies are looking for instant gratification, ITIL may now be a commodity.

Not long ago I came across a sexy little CI Viewer that I want to share. The company, Blue Line Graphics of Houston Texas, has one product in production, the CMDB Analyzer, and another in development. The CMDB Analyzer on first look, seems to be a well designed, adaptable front end for the Atrium CMDB. The integration was straight forward, and accomplished in minutes. The CMDB Analyzer comes with necessary features like launch in context feature and data export.

Blue Lines Graphics CMDB Analyser.

Blue Line Graphics’s other product, The CMDB Workshop, is still in development, but looks destined to increase capability with new functional like data model creation.