The Service Management Soapbox

This Forrester report of mine was published on April 30, 2009:

 Knocking The NOC: Enter The New Operations Center

The operational hub of any well-run and complex organization is a strong operations center. In IT, this function is often fragmented into pockets that tend to be too isolated. Such isolation is a principal cause of much of the chaos that characterizes IT, therefore leading to an eventual crisis of punitive outsourcing. To address the increasingly complex needs for delivering business value, the IT organization must consolidate and streamline these functions. Combine the service center (aka, the help desk or service desk) with a command center and condense operational tool ownership within this structure. Approximately 80% of the IT budget is spent on operations, and a frightening proportion of this 80% is wasted by inefficiency. A properly unified operations center will prove to be the single most powerful weapon against operational waste in IT.

It is available on the Forrester web site. This report is for Forrester clients only. Its distribution is restricted by the terms of Forrester Research client agreements.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the most fundamental mechanisms of distributed systems. It is so basic and so widespread that it has become nearly invisible. As a service so obscured from view, it may seem inconsequential. Nothing can be further from the truth. It is, in fact, one of the main underpinnings of everything we do so it can wreak havoc when it malfunctions.

We just take it for granted that our DNS is functioning flawlessly behind the scenes, but is it? Many performance and availability issues are misdiagnosed because of our blind faith in DNS. It is without doubt one of technology’s great innovations, but nothing in IT should be trusted so blindly. It turns out many DNS installations are misconfigured.

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In early 2004, I published a META Group paper entitled The Expanding Operational Maturity Gap wherein I formally introduced the term punitive outsourcing. It has become one of my favorite wakeup calls to IT because it taps into that visceral paranoia invoked by any phrase containing the word outsourcing. Punitive outsourcing is self explanatory and almost always elicits a sober chuckle of resignation. It seems a lot of people reluctantly concur that their future is in peril unless something changes.

Fear is an effective incentive to improve. While outsourcing is an expletive to some, the only true reason to fear outsourcing is when it is used as an alternative to the internal IT organization’s ineptitude. This is punitive outsourcing. If you can’t deliver, business leaders will seek someone who can.

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One aspect of IT management automation that has frustrated me for years is the relative lackluster progress we’ve made in the area of performance. With all the other wonderful innovations we’ve made, I’m confounded that performance remains largely in the dark ages. This need not be. This must not be. We are finally beginning to see welcome changes in both available software solutions and more importantly, attitudes toward performance. If we hope to attain true service management, this must be a priority.

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One of the most commonly sought concepts in IT service management over the past decade has been service level management (SLM). Prior to widespread adoption of ITIL, SLM was most commonly associated with performance metrics for infrastructure elements (e.g., network devices, servers). Unfortunately, this perspective of SLM is wrong … well, it’s usually wrong.

What was (and often still is) wrong with this interpretation of SLM is that the ‘S’ was not defined according to the general interests of the service’s consumer. In fact, the service was usually arbitrary and related to infrastructure, not the consumer’s true desired service. This is akin to trying to measure the “nuts and bolts” of the service, not the service itself. Such an ill conceived perspective is wrought with all sorts of problems. As providers of the service, we must define the service according to what the consumer needs.

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