Notes from BDIM 2010 presentations

For those who couldn't attend BDIM 2010 in person, here are some notes on the presentations, courtesy of James Cusick. Enjoy, and comment.

BDIM Workshop
Air travel disruptions in Europe forced schedule changes on half of the presentations. Program was shuffled to allow people on site to present in the morning and remote people to present in the afternoon.
Claudio Bartolini, HP
on Wisdom of Crowds applied to scientific output quality metrics
- How to measure publications
- In some areas frequency is higher than others
- Search for community aspects, social analysis techniques
- Conducted analysis of submission patterns to understand research publication patterns
- Wisdom of crowds, 90 minutes to rank order all submissions (20 papers?)
- Comparison of traditional review and wisdom of crowds
- Reviewed by 3 reviewers in traditional mode, also used 14 crowd members
- One finding was that crowd vs traditional put weight on different papers


Thomas Setzer, Munich Unveristy and Seimes

Automated decision support for VM data center
- Energy consumption in data center is 50% of costs
- 90% in running and cooling
- More servers more energy
- Pack VMs will reduce energy costs
- First virtualize then merge to hosts
- Need to insure aggregrate capacity demand does not exceed host capacity
- Can also tune server uptime to meet demand, ie, shutdown hosts at night
- Ad hoc planning means you need low thresholds, not optimal, need to plan more carefully
- Using a matrix calculation, you can find the optimal demand usage profile for the workloads
- Based on daily workload profile you may see variation in what can be co-hosted
- Specifically, what can be co-hosted in the morning cannot be in the afternoon
- With hundreds of VM workloads you cannot migrate this load manually
- The v1/v2 model can help predicate and plan timeframes on allocation of workloads
- The graphs in the paper indicate how many servers are required per combined workload


Naresh, on financial model and IT cost center benefit enabling center

- How to get money for projects
- How to specify cost savings based on project spend
- You can consider IT the same as any other investment model
- Scale, scope, efficiencies are value propositions
- Use discount cash flow and NPV
- NPV = DCF – Initial Investment
- See paper for examples of savings models
- IT should not be looked at only as cost center, need to look at investment area with returns

Vladimar

BDIM and Patents

- BDIM papers do not reference any patents
- Academic researchers tend to ignore the patent databases
- Often reinvent the wheel
- Sample of survey is small but shows under use of patents
- Keyword searching in a particular domain can be problematic, this reduces patent references


Indgo – Automatable ITSM Processes

- Must have flexible management tools in order to handle changeable business requirements
- Islands of tools integrated but requires more flexibility
- Service oriented management platform includes all management tools and processes
- Provided meta-model for management of incidents and management processes
- Using SOA and the meta-model this can provide tools for service management

Hanan Lutfiya

Trust based decision making: middleware approach

- Subjective assessment to exhibit characteristics with the role
- Computational trust from on line systems
- Trust calculation, belief calculation, evidence gathering
- The point is to understand the evidence and how predictive it is of future trust conditions

Marco Casassa Mont

HP Labs, Bristol

- Economics of access management – providing decision support for investments
- Decision points must be made around economic investment tradeoffs
- How much security focus does there need to be
- Understand preferences on strategy, model simulations on impacts, predict outcomes
- Uses IAM model
- Models indicated impacts of up to 30% savings and outcome improvements
- This approach has potential for the future to be able to understand economic value of changes


Marco (second short presentation)

- See paper
- This is an extension of first paper, focus on explicit tradeoff decision making


Sven, HP, poster presentation

- Business relationships and outsourcing
- As more outsourcing occurs, the skills of IT needs to change to manage acquisition and delivery
- Supply chain thinking around frameworks and IT delivery services
- SCOR is one such model
- IT contract management, financials, administration are being explored by tools in the framework and supply chain of IT
- Using key points, a concept graph is created, but associated functionality to action graph is requied
- This leads to logical guidance model of activities and tasks which can be automated or have a workflow conversation defined
- This allows for some intelligence to be layered on top of Sharepoint or Wiki’s to intelligently route work from a framework perspective (ITIL and Supplier Management)
- Some things cannot be automated, ie, negotiations, procurement decisions, however, this system guides this approach and contains the workflow for the process


Gleison Baioco

Configuration management ontology

- How to relate business processes and IT configuration management artifacts
- The ontological method answers these questions
- A conceptual model is presented, an object model for configuration management
- This presentation was hard to follow due to accent problem, also, presenter read from the slides directly and there was no value add beyond that

Thoughts on BDIM future

- BDIM comes from academic background
- Need to rethink market focus on content and purpose of community
- Main companies, HP, IBM are drivers from industry
- Lack of focus on TCO
- Current theme on service quality
- For example business transformation of cloud development



Questions on IRT paper

- How can you tell if things are better
- How do you know if recurring faults are being addressed
- How do you manage change flow to prevent deployment issues
- Do you have different criteria for approving changes or is there only one process for big or small changes
- HP has done some research on mapping and visualizing ITIL tower interactions to reduce inefficiencies
- Also, demoed the tool
- Questions on why not use a vendor tool
- Also, would it not create silos of homegrown tools

BDIM 2010 Best paper award

Best paper award of BDIM 2010 goes to:Decision support for virtual machine reassignments in enterprise data centers”, Thomas Setzer (Technische Universität München, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center), Alexander Stage (Technische Universität München).

BDIM 2010: So far, so good

Reworked the program (see also our BDIM site) to have presentations in person in the morning, and remote attendance in the afternoon.

I reported on our wisdom-of-the-crowds review experiment, lessons learned etc. Also made an ad for Maja and my upcoming Enterprise Crowdsourcing workshop in Vienna. I'll have to blog about it soon.

We had presentations from Thomas Setzer and Naresh Kurada in our first session on BDIM models. Now a very interesting presentation underway from James Cusick, describing his group's first hand experience and lessons learned in implementing incident management and problem management. One of the interesting comments he made was that they implemented every alert coming from HP Business Availability Center (BAC) as an incident. But then because BAC sends too many alerts - and retracts some - they had to make tradeoffs between having to log everything and getting the logging frequency right. The system is quite low traffic (2-3 incidents per day) - but they document things extensively

Blogging live from BDIM 2010

Live from BDIM 2010 - the workshop has been badly disrupted by the ask cloud - six of the presenters were from Europe and Brazil, and can't be attending in person. We are making arrangements as we go to have them present remotely. Watch this space, and connect to the BDIM facebook group: Business-driven IT management - http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=168301777899&ref=ts

Enterprise Crowdsourcing workshop.

Maja Vukovic from IBM research and I are organizing the first Enterprise Crowdsourcing workshop, co-located with the International Conference on Web Engineering - ICWE 2010 to take place in Vienna, Austria on July 5th or 6th.

Submission deadline is in two weeks, any ideas/preliminary results/position statements are welcome. Should be fun.

IT support conversation manager - HPL technical report

http://library.hp.com/techpubs/2010/HPL-2010-46.pdf




There is a push in the enterprise towards facilitating
processes from best practice frameworks (such as the IT
Infrastructure Library (ITIL)) to make them more repeatable,
efficient and cost-effective. Best practice processes provide
descriptive, high level guidelines rather than prescriptive,
precise process model definitions. They are meant to be
followed by people and may be adapted and enacted differently
in various realizations. Currently, ITIL processes are
supported by tools that hard code an interpretation of the
process logic, or by people who use productivity tools. This is
inefficient due to the rigidity of process logic encoded in existing
tools which does not allow collaborative and flexible
realizations of processes. Moreover, there is the issue of
information loss when people are only using rigid productivity
tools that force them to collaborate outside of tools. In this
paper, we present a light-weight conversation-centered
approach and a tool for dynamic and flexible definition and
enactment of best practice processes in a collaborative and
interactive manner. It addresses the issue of information loss
by using the concept of a conversation as a container of
information about the interaction among people in the context
of a process. It offers a process template definition language
and a semi-structured process model that supports flexible and
adaptive processes. We showcase the approach using an
illustrative use case based on best practice processes from
ITIL, namely incident and problem management.