Rethinking Our Relationships

I was in North Carolina for three days of holiday over the weekend. Since the weather was sunny and warm, we decided to take a day-trip to the Outer Banks. This long strip of inter-connected islands is a summertime resort paradise. Endless miles of sand beaches and ocean surf provide plenty of opportunities for families to play beachside.

Unfortunately, a good many of the hurricanes that wash ashore in NC scrub the islands which make up the Outer Banks. Between high winds and rain, this area gets devastated on an regular basis. You see the effects in terms of the local architecture - all of the beachside properties are built on stilts ! The only thing on the ground floor is the storage for boogie-boards and beach chairs !

One of the casualties in Nag's Head, NC was a monument called Jennette's Pier. It extends a thousand feet out from the shore, and provides opportunities for sight-seeing and fishing. When a hurricane washed ashore in 2003, hurricane Isabel slammed the coast of North Carolina. The pier was washed out to sea - completely destroyed ! In 2009, a rebuilding effort was commenced.

The pier has been completely rebuilt. Some 300+ new concrete pilings were sunk into the seabed, built to withstand the forces of nature. On top of these pilings was built what can best be described as an ecological laboratory. You see, Jennette's Pier is under examination for Leeds Platinum certification.

A quick look at the pier shows off the three horizontal-access wind turbines, generating much of the piers requirements for energy. And one of the shade pavillions on the pier is covered with photo-voltaic cells for solar generation. But the use of renewable energy doesn't end there ! Next there are some eighty wells dug for use by the geothermal HVAC system. Finally, there are also a number wave-actuated generators, situated on the seafloor. As the surf comes in & out, these generators wave back & forth, generating up to 300 W of energy every minute !

Being a public facility, and funded solely by voluntary $2 donations, any opportunity to recycle is welcome. Most interesting to me is the sign in the public washroom, which depicts the toilet and reads "Please don't drink or bathe from this facility. This water is 100% reclaimed !". The same is true of the fish-cleaning stations along the side of the pier. Rainwater is collected in lage cisterns, and re-used for cleaning fish, deck-washing, vehicle washing, and yes - flushing the toilets !

While the pier was originally built to support local anglers, when it was rebuilt it was to become an educational facility. The effort to rebuild the prier provided an opportunity to "re-think" the pier, and it's relationship with the ocean and beach around it. Personally, I was delighted to see all of the green technology in use and described for the visitors.

 

ITSM - Defining the Service

This is the second part of my series about my client's ITSM project. Previously, we discussed the challenges associated with chasing shiny objects, and believing that the implementation of a product would solve the client's problems. All too often, ITSM projects fail, because the organization fails to differentiate between a Business-Critical Service and an application.

The first step of the project-plan is defining the Service. This means identifying all of the components which participate in the service. By the ITIL definition, a Service is comprised of People, Processes & Technology. Most IT Professionals will look at the Technology components first. Storage, SAN, inter-networking, and server hardware. Later, the applications which make up the Business-Critical application are considered. There can certainly be many applications involved - even indirectly. Consider how important DNS is to most IT applications.

An outstanding deliverable is the information ABOUT the service - it's owner, it's provider, it's consumers and such. These are key to a later Deliverable, when it's time to start identifying the Service Level Objective/Agreement (SLO/SLA). It is important to start defining these early, even if they may change later. Fortunately, a lot of this information is readily available, or can be discovered during the first phase, which is information gathering.

The key difference between an SLO and an SLA is the concept of the contract. An SLO is an objective the Service Provider will TRY to achieve, but there are no penalties for NOT doing so. In the case of an SLA, there are negative consequences for not achieving the agreed-upon objective.

Once all of the components of the Business-Critical Service are identified and catalogued, the next step should involve classifying the types of logging available. Typically, IT Infrastructure folks will monitor the servers and the applications under their care. They will select "best of breed" solutions which can collect LOTS of different metrics. These generally fall into two categories: Alerts and Data-Points.

Alerts are used to let the Operational Teams know if something is going wrong. These will get triggered if a specific server application ends abnormally, or if a threshold (such as CPU Cycles used) is exceeded. These situations can have disastrous effects on the Business-Critical Application, so the Operations Team needs to act swiftly to remediate them.

Data-Points are pieces of information, collected over time. During the collection, there is no requirement for intervention or action on the part of the Operations Staff. This information collects data ove time, allowing for trending analysis. These can be used or exercises such as capacity planning or show back/chargeback models.

Form a purely technology viewpoint, the tools available today can monitor pretty much anything you can imagine. It is tempting for Management and Executive types to suggest that they want to monitor and alert on everything. The more information, the better, right ? Wrong ! Remember that all of the information that is collected needs to be stored somewhere. The more points of monitoring, the larger the data-store, the more information that needs to be correlated. This effectively slows the system down, unnecessarily.

During the interview phase, it is critically important to capture the Stakeholder's objectives. These could be:

1. I want to shorten the time to resolve trouble tickets
2. I want to understand how much it costs for a Business Unit to use the Service
3. I want to increase the visibility of IT Operations to the Business
4. I want to be able to demonstrate the availability of the Service

Collecting information that doesn't satisfy one or more of these objectives is of little or no value. So in order to keep the data-store manageable, the points of monitoring & alerting should be kept to the confines of these objectives. If the objectives change later, you can always add to the points of monitoring.

 

 

Social Media for the Uninitiated...

I had an interesting moment at the airport in Charlotte, NC. I met a couple who were chatty & friendly. The woman gave me her card, suggesting that I "friend" her on FaceBook. Let's be clear here, it was a pleasant chat, at best. A couple of people, in a chance meeting in a public place.

But then she handed me her card. She does "home staging" in Charlotte, NC. I presume this means that she helps people prepare their house for sale. I explained that I live in Calgary, and that I didn't quite "see" how I would use her services...

She returned to the statement that I needed (her choice of terms) to friend her on FaceBook. She went on to state that it was her principal form of marketing ! While I am a FIRM believer in "word of mouth" advertising, I fail to see how friending this woman on FaceBook constitutes marketing !

If you read back to a previous post, you'll note that I am a huge proponent of using Social Media as a means of marketing your services or products. But she didn't seem to understand that FaceBook is for friends. Heck - I don't even live in the same COUNTRY as this person, and she is handing me business cards & suggesting Social Media as a means of conveying her message !

Talk about not understanding the medium ! Marshall McCluhan suggested that the Message IS the Medium. In this case, the woman didn't seem to understand her message, and worse, clearly didn't understand the medium that is Social Media !

 

Chasing Shiny Objects

Shiny Objects

As my ITSM project continues, I am once again forced to have a series of uncomfortable conversations with my client. It seems that a smooth-talking sales rep has convinced an Operational Manager that they can solve all of their "monitoring and alerting" problems by simply ripping out what they currently have, and implementing a shiny new solution !

Shiny Services

Another Operational Manager has been consorting with a local Services Provider, who promises that if my client simply outsources their monitoring & alerting to them, all the problems will go away. For a low monthly fee ! Just sign a PO Mr Customer, and we can get started right away !

What's a Service ?

Now remember that the ITIL definition of a Service indicates that it is comprised as People, Process and Technology. In the first instance above, it appears that Manager believes he can buy a shiny new object, and all of his problems will go away ! That might speak to the Technology, but delivers nothing for the people or processes. In the second instance, the Manager is hoping to be able to outsource to the Services company, thereby dealing with the people aspect. But the Technology, and possibly the Processes are not being addressed. As such, neither solution deals with the underlying desire to take a "service-oriented" view of the IT Operation.

So in order to address this project properly, we will need to address all three facets of a service: Technology, Processes and People. I have re-ordered them because that is the most logical to me. I see the steps as:

1. Interview the Executive Sponsors to determine what their objectives are. In essence, I like to ask "What business problem are we trying to solve ?"
2. Interview the Operations Managers to determine what they see as being success criteria for the project.
3. Interview the Operations Team Leads. They will provide deep knowledge of the environment, the tools, and the current processes.

Technology

These three sets on interviews will provide the information required for the first phase of the project : Information Gathering & Gap Analysis. The Gap Analysis artifact is the first real Deliverable of the project. Once complete the Gap Analysis will help define what Technology is suited for the overall monitoring needs.

Process

I am in the middle of developing a series of Process Diagrams. These are visual representations of the processes that Operations personnel must go through when a specific condition is detected and alerted upon. There are two diagrams per alert - current state, and desired state. Any gaps between the two are highlighted and root-cause analysis is applied. Typically, these types of exercises uncover communications errors, and/or inefficiencies in the processes.

People

Finally, the thorniest part of the project is examining the People on the various Operations teams. This gets sticky, because the objective is to examine whether or not the team members have the correct skills to perform the Future-State processes, with the tools highlighted in the Technology section. It is never intended as a criticism, but many teams feel threatened by this step.

Summary

So as you can see, an ITSM Project is a lot more than a discussion of how to monitor IT Infrastructure. It involves examining the People and Processes as well as the Technologies. Simply buying and implementing a shiny new technology won't adequately satisfy the objectives of delivering Service-oriented IT.

What's Next ?

In a future BLOG, I will examine the second phase of this project, which involves classifying the collected information into alerts and data-sets, with an eye to event correlation & reporting.