Business-driven IT management workshop at LISA 08, San Diego, November 9th, 2008

Mark Burgess from University College Oslo, Norway and I are organizing a half-day workshop on business-driven IT management, co-located with LISA 08 - the 22nd USENIX large installation system administration conference.

The workshop will be held on November 9th. If you are traveling to San Diego to attend LISA 08 or any of the related workshops, please consider attending the business-driven IT managent workshop.

This blog is too boring

I'm experimenting with ideas. Reading back, all I wrote so far is a little (very much actually) on the boring side. I guess I'll mix things up a little, just for fun. The title stays the same, for the moment.

Danny Raz visits HPL

We hosted Danny Raz from Technion (on sabbatical at Google) today. He gave a very entertaining talk on cost aware service optimization,
based on joint papers with David Breitgand, Rami Cohen, and Amir Nahir.
The main message of his talk was that when one takes the cost of management into the equation, there are non trivial tradeoffs to be made. In particular, he presented alternative approaches to load balancing and how the optimal amount of monitoring overhead depends on variables such as load, arrival rate, and relative cost of transferring information between dispatcher and servers.

Tutorial al BPM 2008 in Milan

Vladimir Tosic, Patrick Hung and I (well, Vladimir mostly...) will present a tutorial on "Management of Service-Oriented Implementations of Business Processes: From Quality of Service to Business Value" at the Business Process Management (BPM 2008) conference in Milan on Sep 3rd.

Abstract follows:


Management (monitoring and control) of business processes is needed to ensure regular operation, attain or surpass the guaranteed quality of service (QoS), accommodate change, keep track of the consumed resources, and perform billing. Monitoring is used to measure QoS and/or business value attributes, while control is used to reactively/proactively ensure that the measured quantities are within desired (guaranteed) boundaries. To successfully perform management activities, a comprehensive specification of management goals is necessary. Management of business processes can be viewed from several aspects and at several layers of granularity. In this tutorial, we will discuss monitoring and control of service-oriented implementations of business processes, with particular emphasis on QoS management and maximization of business value. That is, we will assume that services implementing business process activities are using Web service technologies such as SOAP and the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and that they are composed using technologies such as the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL). By QoS we will mean technical metrics such as response time, throughput, and availability, while by business value we will mean both financial metrics such as prices, profit, and return on investment (ROI) and non-financial business metrics such as number of customers, market share, and customer satisfaction. The tutorial will first clarify the importance of these topics and why the widely used basic Web service technologies are not enough. Then, it will explain theoretical principles for specification, monitoring, and control of QoS and business value attributes. Examples of these principles are contracts (including service level agreements - SLAs), policies, intermediaries, probes, and multiple request queues. Next, it will provide a critical analysis of several important specification languages, research infrastructures, industrial products, and standardization efforts in this area. Currently there are many more results on management maximizing QoS than on management maximizing business value, but the latter promises better alignment between business and information technology (IT). Therefore, this tutorial will also present a brief introduction into business-driven IT management (BDIM) and will discuss possible approaches to extend QoS driven management solutions into business value driven management solutions. At the end, a number of open topics and resources for further study will be identified. After attending this tutorial, participants will have general knowledge and understanding of the challenges and fundamental concepts related to the specification, monitoring, and control of QoS and business value attributes of Web services and business processes implemented with Web services, the state of the art in the area, and open research issues. This knowledge can help them in making decisions about using some of the existing technologies and/or in conducting further research and development in the area.

BDIM lives on!

So business-driven IT management lives on through. Jacques Sauve, Kamal Bhattacharya and I are submitting a workshop proposal to IM 2009, fingers crossed. We will also be having a BDIM session at the USENIX Lisa 2008 event in San Diego, on Nov 9th (Sunday!), hosted by Mark Burgess and myself.

If you are interested in helping out with the organization of BDIM-related event please get in touch with any of us. (Do insist if you don't get a response the first time, as you probably know by now I'm lousy at emails).

Friend of a friend

I have created my foaf.rdf file. Now let's see what happens. The foaf project predicts that I'll have many friends soon...

Tutorial on IT Service Management and Business-Driven IT Management at NOMS 2008

Next Friday, April 11th, On the last day of NOMS 2008 in Salvador, Brazil, Jacques Sauve and I will give a tutorial on IT Service Management and Business-Driven IT Management (look it up at the conference website under program -> tutorials).

Here's a description of the tutorial. Join in, it should be fun. If successful, we could make a roadshow of it :)

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The importance and difficulty of managing IT resources and services is driving IT organizations to adopt best practices developed over the last few years. The paradigm being used to project IT to the enterprise and its clients, partners and suppliers is the "IT Service". The tutorial examines IT Service Management (ITSM) in its various aspects. The complete lifecycle of a service is covered, including service strategy, service design, service transition, service operation and continual service improvement. Best practices for service management are examined with the help of the very popular IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework in its latest version (v3).
Service providers are increasingly focusing on aligning IT services with business goals and, to that end, Business-Driven IT Management (BDIM) is currently in the initial stages of formalization and product offerings. The second part of the tutorial maps the state-of-the-art in this rapidly emerging field. The tutorial will cover definitions of BDIM, challenges posed by IT-business alignment and will provide concrete application examples as well as a description of current BDIM tools available.
The tutorial provides a mix of practical aspects, recent research results and descriptions of real tools concerning ITSM and BDIM.The attendee will understand and appreciate the terms ITSM, ITIL, IT governance, COBIT, and will gain familiarity with important IT processes dealing with service design, service transition and service operation.