IT Service Week

Yesterday I attended the first day of the ITSM Cruise to Excellence put on by the Local Los Angeles ITSMF group. This year it was held at the Westin in Long Beach rather than on an actual cruise boat like last year’s event. The conference featured guest speakers discussing ITIL v3, the federated CMDB, Service Catalogs, and how to measure ITIL performance. I was pleasantly surprised by the level of effort that the vendors made on their booths at the event. CA, IBM, Column Technologies, ASG, BMC, Frontrange, EXIN, Newscale, and Managed Objects all had well designed booths at the event. Two of the noted sessions were discussing the federated CMDB by ASG’s CTO John Conner and a workshop discussing how an actionable service catalog can benefit the business by Newscale’s founder and CTO Rodrigo Flores.

In Conner’s session, Federating Configuration Management Databases, he discussed some of the importance placed on a CMDB to describe what parts of the business are managed by IT. Conner stressed that IT organizations should push forward to become integrated components of the business rather than a cost center. He also stated that companies will always federate there data sources. Using the analogy of the United States governing it’s states in showing how a Master CMDB governs the underlying data sources.

In Flores’ workshop, an Actionable Service Catalog, he discussed some of the benefits an enterprise can take by putting forward an IT Service Catalog for the business users. He likened the IT Process owner to that of a product manager. Someone that describes the framework and develops requirements from the business to hand off to the delivery team or “Engineering.” One of his keynote take aways for the workshop was that, “We have to set expectations because if we don’t they will.” In this message he was referring to the end-users of the catalog and how Web 2.0, Google, Amazon, and other technologies will shape expectations placed on the business’ IT department in the coming years.

Overall, I was impressed with the vendor displays, however, since it was a smaller conference I think they could have pushed all of the sessions into one days rather than two. Most of the sessions seemed to be more of a pitch for their vendor’s products, although, it was good to get their perspective on the future of IT Service Management.

Yesterday CBS announced that it as agreed to buy CNET for $1.8 billion dollars or $11.50 a share. I heard a number of the stock analysts regard the deal as bad for CBS. They were arguing that CBS should have purchased a YouTube-like company that engages in online video rather than a conglomerate of techie review websites. I disagree. As I was mentioning in my last blog, Microsoft Looks Past Yahoo, I mentioned that the next hot buys for those companies looking to get into the advertising space will be internet content providers. CNET is one of the premiere content providers available on the internet. It has been around for quite sometime and has developed a large loyal base that trust CNET for news and reviews on products.

When CBS buys CNET they aren’t just getting a bunch of unique hits from new users of the site, they are getting a loyal fan base that has used the network of sites for 5-10 years. Content providers provide a medium for online advertising that surpasses the search advertising providers. Search advertisers focus on placement of banner sized ads whereas a content site maintains a visitor for a longer exposure and advertisements can be embedded within the articles or as splash pages. CNET was bought by CBS and more companies in the space are certainly left to be bought.

The buzz going around on enterprise blogs this week has been about this weekend’s retraction of the deal that would give Microsoft the popular search engine at $33 dollars a share. Today a few analysts discussed the deal on CNBC’s Squawk Box and 2 of the 3 analysts stated that Microsoft will move on past the Yahoo deal and look for other purchase opportunities.

A recent Tech Crunch Blog Article stated that AOL might be on the map for software giant. The article goes on to tell that Time Warner is looking to sell the ISP and that the corporate culture of AOL would match Microsoft’s culture better than Yahoo. I argued in a comment that Ask.com might return a better return on investment for Microsoft. Ask has a Search Advertising department that has not been able to compete with Google or Yahoo, however, many unique hits utilize the search engine along with it’s content network on the About.com network. I feel that Microsoft should make a move to acquire not only just a search engine but also a content network that will engage the audience and produce better return for search advertisers. AOL would make a good fit as well, however, Microsoft may have to pay a premium.

Last week I wrote a blog about what the cost of Twitter’s downtime means for a business in terms of revenue. This week I’d like to dedicate a small blog about capacity planning. Many of us in the United States are following the Presidential campaign more closely this year in the past than last because it is the first African-American candidate and the the first female candidate running not only for the democratic nominee but the chance to become President.

In addition, a number of changes have occurred since the last presidential election that make this 2008 election even more interesting. With approximately 215 million Internet users in the United States, a candidate must have a website operational for voters to review information about plans, policies, and contribute to the campaign.

I analyzed the domains of the republican candidate John McCain and the two Democratic candidates Obama and Hillary Clinton on compete.com. It was interesting to see that the growth of the traffic to the domains ranged from 434% - 826% of an increase in traffic from 2007. What do you do when your traffic increases 800% within one year? Most web-tier server deployments take 3-6 months in the enterprise from the time of planning to production stabilization. Thus when a candidate or company prepares to release big new to the press they need to have the proper architecture in place or run the risk of losing potential web visitors.

I analyzed each of the domains from an outside look to determine what each of the candidate’s technology teams have done to prepare for the high volume of unique visitors.

barackobama.com
Obama’s site reached a peak of 3 million unique visitors in February has the most unique visitors of the three candidate sites. According to Netcraft, the site was registered by godaddy.com and hosted in a Linux environment by a provider called Panther Express Corp. Panther has moved the site to at least 10 different IP addresses since it’s original location. This probably means that they were not originally scaled for the traffic and as traffic to the site increased they moved the domain to more powerful systems. The website is hosted with PWS Web Server on Linux. The site’s last reboot was 155 days ago so the uptime of the site has been available for the past 3 months without any downtime.

Full report on NetCraft

Another interesting thing I found about Obama’s site was that there is a sub-domain hosted by a different hosting provider with a different operating system and location. The sub-domain photos.barackobama.com is hosted with the FreeBSD operating system and the Apache 1.3.37 Web Server. They have purchased three IP addresses from Pair Networks to host the photos subdomain. When I go to this URL it forwards me to the flickr site for Obama with his campaign photos and more. So without knowing the internal architecture of the domain I’d imagine that this URL is just a forwarding URL and the main site hosted by Panther contains all of the site data.

Full report on NetCraft

hillaryclinton.com
Clinton’s site peaked at 1.5 million unique visitors in February. The domain was registered back in 1997 with Network Solutions and is hosted on one IP address with a Windows 2003 Server using IIS 6.0. The netblock is owned by Paul Holcomb from Palo Alto, CA. The last reboot was 23 days ago and most likely they are using Windows Clustered Services to maintain Clinton’s traffic on IIS and a load balancer between the IP and the Host.

Full report on NetCraft

Clinton also has a sub-domain hosted by a different company. Clinton’s contribution site, contribute.hillaryclinton.com is hosted by a company called Rackspace in San Antonio, TX. The site uses Apache 2.26 with the SSL module on Linux. Again, like the parent domain, this site is hosted on one visible URL so they could be using a load balancer as well.
Full report on NetCraft

johnmccain.com
McCain’s site has the least traffic of the three and peaked at about 750k visitors in the month of February. The domain was registered back in 1998 at godaddy.com and is hosted on an IP block owned by SMARTech Corp. McCain’s domain has the most interesting domain history in that the site was originally hosted by Blue Gravity Communications in 2005 on FreeBSD with Apache Webserver and then moved to SMARTech to be hosted on a Windows 2003 Server with IIS 6.0. The site was then moved again to another IP in the SMARTech server farm, but on another Windows server. Netcraft did not have an uptime graph for the site.

Full report on NetCraft

Conclusion
That was a lot of raw data. What I’ve found is that all three candidates are relying on hosting providers to manage and maintain their websites. Also, it appears that candidate’s have opted to split portions of their site to be hosted on two providers. Who has the best configuration? Well it would be tough to judge the architecture just by using NetCraft and Unique Visitor counts, but I’d say that hillaryclinton.com has made a good decision by splitting the contribution website to be hosted on a separate provider than the rest of the domain. This allows the hosting provider to manage the secure site separately from the rest of the domain. Most likely all three candidate’s are using a Load Balancing hardware device to divide the unique visitors amongst a cluster of servers.

What should a Candidate To-Be do to prepare their architecture for the traffic?
1.)Don’t attempt to host the site yourself, but rely on providers that have experience hosting and scaling large websites.
2.)Ensure that your Contribution website is secured and using a Web Server that utilizes SSL
3.)Use a Load Balancing Device to move traffic from one clustered node to another. If you have your site hosted by a reputable provider they will do this for you.

What does your availability cost your company? This weekend Twitter has been unavailable and leaving it’s users to look for alternatives. Techie blogger, Robert Scoble, makes a statement in his blog that a number of Twitter users are moving to a competitor site called FriendFeed. FriendFeed integrates its feeds from YouTube, Yelp, Flickr, and Twitter. Scoble goes on to argue that many former Twitter users are converting to FriendFeed due to Twitter’s unreliability. With Colin Devroe reporting a downtime of over 12 hours on his blog.

So what does availability management mean to your company? Have you been able to calculate what your user’s expectations are for availability? If you look at the last month’s 894,000 page views of Twitter (source: compete.com) then you can assume that downtime of more than 1 hour would be very severe to future business.

I calculated the cost of downtime for a hypothetical company making $10 million dollars a year in sales revenue.

$10M Annual Revenue
$1,141.55 Sales Revenue Per Hour (10 M / 8760 hrs in a year)

If you multiply that by the 12 hours the tweets were unavailable, the lost revenue would have been $13698.60. This may seem like a small number to the annual revenue, however, if those numbers continue over the course of a year your customers will no longer be doing business with your website.

Here are three things that your company can do to reduce downtime:

1. Implement architecture that utilizes clustering and load balancing strategies to maintain high availability for your end users.
2. Determine Service Level Agreements and train your Support Staff to escalate high priority issues such as a public website being down.
3. Develop a disaster recovery plan and improve your ability to recover from downtime quickly when it does occur.

These strategies can be implemented when you integrate a best practice strategy such as ITIL within your IT operations department.

Here is a Google Gotcha I found out today on the Natural Search Blog.

Go to Google.
Type in Chuck Norris in the Search Page
Hit I’m Feeling Lucky.

In the April 2008 edition of Harvard Business Review, David J. Collis and Michael G. Rukstad, wrote an 11-page article entitled “Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?” While the article specifically focuses on business strategy and decisions that the CEO makes to give the enterprise an overall strategy, some of the concepts could be applied to IT Strategy for an enterprise’s technology department.

“Most executives cannot articulate the objective, scope, and advantage of their business in a simple statement. If they can’t, neither can anyone else,” states the article and follows as their main argument. The article then compares how the CEO of Edward Jones, a St. Louis based Brokerage, uses a simple strategy that all 37,000 employees can understand and articulate to their customers. By using a simple strategy that is under 35 words in length the company has grown to become the fourth largest brokerage firm in the United States and they are on the Fortune’s list of top companies to work for in 2008.

Some of the problems are:

• Mixed Direction from Executive Management
• Customers are frustrated with company not clearly defining their purpose statement
• Should we not cut the price to maintain our strong brand image at the risk of losing the customer

I found these problems resemble many of the same issues the CIO faces when developing an IT Strategy. Often IT Strategies are loosely based on best practices such as ITIL but are too complex for every IT employee to understand and articulate to their customers, the business.

Often IT Strategies are complied of things such as we desire high availability, low total cost of ownership, or being on the forefront of technological systems. With 3-4 different strategies rolled into one canvas, employees from the help desk to the server rack are sent in multiple avenues of direction and are not as productive as expected.

This strategy begins by building a simple purpose statement. If a strategy has a disorganized purpose statement or something so complex that not all of your employees can understand the mission, then it would not matter if you had an IT budget the size of the US Fiscal budget; your strategy will fail.

Strategy begins in each Department

But building an IT Strategy can also take place at the departmental level. Of course, IT may have an overall strategy to supporting the business, it helps to define exactly how each IT unit aligns it’s services to the business. The similarity would be, “Our company provides consumers with low-cost bicycles and high quality customer service.” as the Company Strategy and then the marketing department would have their own strategy, “Our marketing department provides the business with a positive brand image demonstrating our exceptionally skilled customer service staff and low-cost in the marketplace.” You notice that the marketing department strategy aligns with the business strategy. Then further within the marketing department they have a research team that provides market research on the pricing of bicycles sold in the United States by competitors. This department would have a strategy as such, “To provide accurate reflection and research to the business that maintains our brand image of being a low-cost provider of bicycles.” Again, the statement is kept simple but also aligns itself to the company strategy.

Building an IT Purpose Statement

When it comes time to develop a strategy statement, compile a list of what are the most important purposes that IT serves for the business that you are supporting. After you have compiled the list, cut the list down to the three main purposes and these will make up your reason the business NEEDS technology to accomplish it’s business goals.

For our example we are going to use an e-commerce company that sells bicycles online.

Company Statement: “Provide a low-cost bicycle to budget cautious consumers.”

IT Operations Department: “Monitor, maintain, and supply high availability for the high volume of low-cost bicycle sales by our business.”

Everyone in the department should fully understand the strategy and be able to articulate the strategy to their customers in the business. This is where internal branding comes in and can help get your message out to the business users.

With a clear purpose statement, your department will be on the first step to developing a strong strategy that can
better support the business.

I recently saw a Question posted on LinkedIn called Where will IT be in 5-10 years?. This question was then followed by a series of questions about the future of COBOL to off-shoring IT. I’m posting my responses to IT Service Week since I feel some of the outlook would be of interest to technology managers looking to the future of IT.

What new roles will become important?
Roles that define new innovative ways of achieving business results in creating sales revenue and cost savings in labor. Roles that align technology with business.

What roles will fade away?
Anything that can be automated will be automated. Roles such as setting up accounts, troubleshooting simple issues, and manual process roles will be either eliminated or fading away. Individuals in these roles will be re-allocated to roles that manage this automation or improve the automation. What once took a team of 9 to complete will now take 1 person to manage.

Will COBOL still be here?
Yes… Legacy systems take many years to move off of… but technology managers should not focus on the technology used but the return on investment of that technology. If a system built in COBOL is still delivering a return higher than the cost of not developing a new system then why should they get rid of COBOL?

Will Project Management be the same?
I think a higher responsibility will be placed on Project Managers to not only deliver projects on time and within budget but they will also have to start showing the value of their projects to VPs and the Executives making budget decisions.

What will methods, software, hardware lookk like?
Hardware that is cheaper than PB sandwiches and Software that is more expensive than caviar…. We will eventually move off of a software based system and more of a service oriented architecture. Ironic…. but Citrix Services and Windows Terminal Services was ahead of its time. The cost reduction of NOT having to deploy installed services to individual desktops will be a great reduction in cost. As bandwidth and disk space becomes cheaper and security concerns increase…. it may benefit some organizations to move their infrastructure to a terminal services based solution in some areas (i.e. help desk, support roles, admin roles, etc)

Will Americans carve out a niche or will all IT be offshored?
Certain tasks such as monitoring systems and maintaining databases could be off shored, but roles that require customer service or knowledge of American business operations will be very costly to offshore.

What positive observations/predictions do you have to share?

We are increasingly looking for new ways to standardize systems and processes. This is quite different than back in previous decades where everyone wanted to build their own system and their own “better” way of doing things…. now everyone wants to build interoperability between technologies. To get ahead in technology in the coming decades will mean that your organization is an information contributor and not one to suppress information.

Tomorrow (March 18, 2008) AJAXWorld kicks off in New York. The conference will feature 80+ technical sessions, Keynotes, Power Panels and General Session Demos on the Rich Internet Technology and how to build front-end applications for users. What does it mean for IT Services? AJAX, Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, has really had a few years to mature since Jesse James Garrett made it popular back in 2005. Now, more than ever, enterprises are taking advantage of building AJAX applications to meet business critical situations.

An interesting technical session that will be available at AJAXWorld this year is Mission Critical AJAX: Making Test Ordering Easier and Faster at Quest Diagnostics by David Rapperport and Rob Tweed. The session will detail how Quest Diagnostics needed to create a mission critical service catalog for it’s lab techs to order new lab equipment and diagnostic supplies. Quest used the technology of AJAX to build a custom internal interface that would be reliable, stable, and achieve it’s mission critical service levels.

Not only Service Catalogs can take advantage of AJAX for IT Service Management applications. IT Service Desk applications such as HP Service Manager takes advantage of the web tier delivering a Change Management Calendar and Employee Self Service (ESS) Tier for an enterprise’s end-users to quickly get help when they do not want to wait on the phone for a Help Desk Analyst. LiveTime Service Manager, a Service Desk product for Small to Medium Businesses, is built completely out of Web 2.0 and AJAX technologies. Every year Pink Elephant gives out an Innovation of the Year award to the most innovative idea in ITIL. Maybe this is the year that someone integrates ITIL Strategies that effectively utilize the iPhone? I recently downloaded my copy of the SDK to start on a few little side projects. Imagine what the world would be like if your Desktop Engineers didn’t have to walk back to their desk to update an Incident Ticket? What if they could do it straight from their iPhone? Now that’s what I call Service!

The need to understand how your organization’s business works are the keys to your success. This statement would hold valid truths from the administrative assistant up to the CIO. Everyone in the IT organization MUST understand what it’s role in the business environment in order for that organization to be effectively implementing IT across the enterprise. I recently came across a slide show on CIOInsight that discusses the Top 10 Management Concerns of CIOs. In this report they interviewed CIOs from 112 different companies to find out what most CIOs are concerned about in the coming year. The top three rounded out at Recruitment being first, Aligning Business with IT as second, and Building Business Skills as the third most important concern for CIOs. This means that companies are facing an enormous demand for IT talented professionals that not only understand the nuts and bolts of IT Services but also how IT Services can provide value to the Business.

1. Understand Your Industry
Understanding the industry of your business is crucial to understanding how an IT department can provide services to it’s business users. Subscribe to trade journals, read competitors websites, download how-to articles, and make certain you have read the wikipedia article relating to your industry at least twice. A great source for anything about everything is About.com. About features micro sites about particular topics with real people with subject knowledge in the various category. From understanding Supply Chain Management to the latest widget you can build with PHP is available on About. Trade journals are great also. I subscribe to a number of them to really understand how each industry is using technology in their own worlds. A couple I would recommend would be GovTech, for government related industries, and QSR Magazine for the Quick Service Restaurant Industry. Yahoo has a great directory to help you out if you are uncertain which trade magazines fit your industry.

2. Develop Business Skills Developing those functional business skills taught in college to Business Majors make you much more effective in your delivery of IT Services. Think of how many project decisions are won and lost based on a technical presentation of data? How many promotions are given based on the word smith of a performance review? How much publicity can you drive for your project across lines of business? Developing the skills of negotiation, presentation, and business writing will most certainly help your campaign. If you don’t have those skills try enrolling into an MBA program at a University or taking a course at a local community college. Toastmasters International is also a GREAT way to build your presentation skillset. No one will force you to take these courses, you will have to put in the effort on your own.

3. Take on projects that allow you to interact with Non-IT users When we deal with people that speak the same IT jargon as we do we tend to lose track of reality. Every chance you get to present a technology topic to someone non-IT is another step to developing great business savy skills. A number of times it helps to completely explain your mission to a neutral party. When I took a Geography course back in my freshman year of college, the professor stated that the best way to know that YOU understand a topic is to be able to explain it to someone not in the course. The same holds true in the IT world. If you can explain how a database works with storing a restaurant’s financial data you are one step ahead of the curve. There is no real course to obtain these skills other than experience. Get on projects that allow you to interact with Accounting, HR, Marketing, and other departments. Prepare an elevator pitch about how your role on an IT project impacts your business, industry, and the world.

Understanding how your functions as an IT Professional effect the Business on a minute-by-minute basis will greatly effect your career and bring some job satisfaction. So the next time you are at the bookstore pick up a copy of the latest trade journal and get the move on. The time to align business and IT is now.