just write click

I have a fascination with the “live” sites where you can visualize what’s going on across an entire site such as Twitter, Flickr, Digg, or Del.icio.us. It appears to be mostly for entertainment value, although I’m sure that researchers and journalists have these toolkits in their toolbelt when they need a fresh take on a story. I find it also sparks creative ideas or sends you along paths you never would have found otherwise.

Here are some of my favorites to watch. Check out the screenshots for a preview of what awaits behind the link. The map-based visualizations are enabled by Google Maps geo-developers, and they recently had a conferenced named “Where 2.0″ (great name).

• Twittervision - I managed to capture one from Austin, TX, while I too was hiding from the thunderstorms that were coming through. Since there’s often a rate of over 20 Twitters in the time period that this algorithm uses, I only tried a few times to capture one of my own twits. This is the 3D version with a glowing globe that spins around and then marks each twit. Very cool.
  
• Flickrvision - This is the classic view of the flat world map. This particular picture is of a chipmunk and I apologize for the poor screenshot quality but the layout that I’m confined to won’t like even this size of graphics, so I encourage you to click the Flickrvision link and see it for yourself.
  
• LiveMarks - This visualization lets you watch the bookmarks as they’re being added by all users of del.icio.us. One of the neatest visualizations that I believe was popularized by del.icio.us is tag clouds.
  
• Digg’s API contest winners for visualizations - This screen shows Digg Charts, which isn’t nearly as fun as the winner, Digg City, but it looks so much like a dashboard I had to include it. BSM Dashboard offers views not of popular stories but of high priority
  
• These aren’t “live” viewers, but TouchGraph offers neat visualizations of connections between objects, such as books or movies on Amazon, or connections between “web 2.0″ or major retailer’s websites via Google’s related links database.
  

Wow, I think we need these types of visualizations for all the connections that BMC’s products have because we have done so many integrations to get the BSM story just right. I suppose Topology Discovery has the closest match to these types of visualizations.

I’d better tear my eyes off of TwitterVision long enough to post this entry… what visualizations help you with your job lately?

Today I noticed a link from the bmc.com website to an identity primer of sorts, and found a bunch of information on how to run an identity aware business. Somesh Singh’s podcast is one offering and well worth listening to.

On an introductory level for web identity, I just watched the neatest presentation from OSCON 2005 — Identity 2.0 and how the concept of digital identity is evolving by Dick Hardt, founder and CEO of Sxip Identity.

I don’t mean to gush, but I have never seen a cooler dynamic presentation using screens with such perfect timing between slides (apparently he used Keynote but you could do the same with PowerPoint.) Just watch the first ten minutes or so and you will be amazed. Heck, after just two minutes my husband started watching it over my shoulder.

John Udell, screencaster master, says “I watched it twice, and greatly enjoyed it both times.” It’s hard to describe why it works so well, but he’s using one word per slide or one graphic per slide and a fast pace but the messages and concepts really stick with you. Great educational piece about identity management especially for the web but with lessons we all can learn about how serious identity management is for success with business service management. An enjoyable Friday afternoon break!

Eating your own dog food. The phrase comes from the early television advertising genre when people would ask, but will the dog eat the food? Today it’s categorized as a computer jargon phrase, well-documented in a Wikipedia entry, describing how software companies and other industries try out their own products, putting themselves in their customers’ shoes. I assure you that at BMC, our IT group often pops open cans of our dog food, or sips our own champagne, as Thomas Siebel prefers to call it.

My favorite essay on the topic has to be Joel Spolsky’s “What is the work of dogs in this country?” essay from 2001. Read both the Wikipedia link and the essay for all the nuances and pros and cons of eating one’s own dog food. I especially like Joel’s example of how the Juno executive wanted six pop-up ads until he experienced it himself and then backed off to two pop-up ads.

Similarly, I have heard people ask over and over again, this BSM stuff sounds great, but are you really doing it internally, BMC? That type of question is the heart of eating one’s own dog food. “Sounds great, but have you put it into practice? Show me.”

In the spirit of documenting how we eat our own dog food, I recently completed a white paper, “Implementing Resource Management Using Business Service Management Principles.” It’s about how our research and development lab schedules server resources for testing. This scheduling is no small task, especially in an Agile development environment with iterations that might go for 2 weeks or 4 weeks. The products we test also may need to be tested on 14 different platforms. I think the team used a half dozen BMC products and intend to use even more in the future, such as the advanced discovery and provisioning tools we have available. Products consumed so far, with more on the way:

• BMC Performance Manager for Databases
• BMC Performance Manager for Servers
• BMC Performance Manager Portal
• BMC Remedy Action Request System
• BMC Remedy Asset Management
• BMC Remedy Change Management

So take a look at the paper - no registration is required - and let us know what you think. This IT group, including talk.bmc’s own Steve Carl, is constantly looking forward to make their processes even more business service centered.

I was intrigued by the tagline on this new blog, g2zero: Better Code == Business, which I take to mean that better code is equivalent to better business. I wondered if they would be like-minded about the principles of our Business Service Management concepts, so I took a look. And, I was rewarded for my perusal with this gem of a post: Entries from the Software Failure Hall of Shame. It has several examples of software problems and their direct affects on the business’s bottom line.

Yes, software and IT services will fail, but your ability to react and keep the priorities of the business and the customer first will set the standard for your success. This Toyota Prius hybrid car example is an excellent one, showing that you can manage your incidents gracefully and proactively and avoid negative publicity. I have posted before about hybrid car technology so this was right up my alley.

The Toyota Prius engine management flaw. In October of 2005, the Toyota Motor Company voluntarily recalled 75,000 of its hybrid vehicles because a software glitch that may have shut down the engine. Given the high price of gasoline at the time and the rising interest from consumers in hybrid vehicles, the recall could have been a major blow to the manufacturer. However, due to Toyotas quick response, most consumers never experienced the flaw, and while the company may have suffered slightly from the negative publicity, it managed to avoid having its defect become permanently associated with the vehicle line or with hybrid safety.

Great set of examples. I plan to keep an eye on this blog.

Here at BMC, we have test labs that serve many product lines and the labs are located across the globe. Fortunately, we also have access to BMC tools that get the job done like BMC Performance Manager for Databases, BMC Remedy Action Request System with Help Desk, Asset Management, Change Management, provisioning, monitoring and discovery tools that help schedule the resources.

The IT folks (talk.bmc’s Steve Carl included) are doing a great job of going a measured step at a time and automating where it makes sense. It’s an exciting story and I hope to post a white paper or technical article about it soon. It’s like an investigative report on doing Business Service Management at BMC.

I’d like to hear your stories of provisioning and change management as it relates to test labs and other shared servers. Tell us the real headaches and IT Dirty Jobs when you have to manage varied resources. My example is making 14 different platforms available for testing, from Windows 2000 on any old hardware to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.0 on a zSeries 64-bit system.

I stumbled across The ITIL Skeptic’s blog today, reading on digg.com. An entry about the seeming impossibility of creating and maintaining a useful CMDB (Configuration Management Database) as defined by ITIL was an interesting read. But I suppose one answer is, don’t make it a behemoth, keep it manageable with federation? Or perhaps the heart of the argument lies in the definition from ITIL? At any rate, I found the post to be informative and thought-provoking.

The ITIL Skeptic chooses to keep his or her identity a “secret” but is apparently not a former BMC employee. I do appreciate a skeptic’s viewpoint as I continue to learn about ITIL and the CMDB since I still feel like a newbie on the topic. Plus, as a vendor we ought to be sure we pay attention to the skeptics.

Especially valuable to me as I continue to learn is the list of links included on the site. Here are the blog titles and links. I was going to offer up an OPML file with subscriptions but it seems that some of them aren’t syndicated, so I’ll work more on that later.

• ITIL Community Forum
• Wandering through Best Practice
• Fear & Loathing on the Road to ITSM Excellence
• Doug McClure’s blog
• ERP 4 IT
• An Expert’s Guide to Network & Systems Management
• Real World ITIL

We celebrated Mother’s Day in the U.S. yesterday, and I came across an article that I enjoyed. I thought I’d share in celebratation of moms and parents everywhere.

This USA Today article, Do moms make better managers? is a great read because it is brutally honest about both sides of the argument. (In case you’re wondering, the answer is, “It depends.”) My favorite observation from the article is the gender-bias-free one, which is, “You are the sum of your life experiences.” For me, working full-time while going to graduate school was a life experience that taught me how to prioritize and get more done on less sleep. The same can be said for me as a mom of a two-year old, get the important tasks done early (and know what’s important, as in, don’t sweat the small stuff.) To me, the funniest quote from the article is this one:

Denise Morrison, president of Campbell Soup’s U.S. soup, sauces and beverages division, worked while her daughters, 27 and 25, were growing up - and while Nestlé’s director of marketing, she was still able to squeeze in a stint as Brownie leader. “They were a results-driven Brownie troop,” she says.

Hee hee. Thanks, Diane, for sharing this gem!

Looks like Peter Armstrong is feeling like a proud parent when it comes to BSM. Yes! We’re all feeling that way with these new workflows and product integrations and Atrium CMDB maturation. Plus, the third-party integrations are getting really exciting.

Even salary.com is in the spirit, with a new calculator called the Mom Salary Wizard, as described in this article, Being a mom could be a 6-figure job.

Parent or not, paid or not, life experience, however and whenever we get it, is what I’ll celebrate today.

Talking about notifications on systems that matter, and going beyond notification to action

Here’s a light bulb that can send your cell phone a message when it goes out. Think about it - you could generate a household “to do” list via SMS! However, I think that Gizmodo is right, the light bulb application isn’t really for home use. I like the idea, but how about pushing it even further. Let’s see how you could. These comments at Engadget are quite good, with several business-service-management-sounding ideas that caught my eye. For example, shouldn’t the light bulb tell that it’s about to go out rather than “I’m out”? Why make the light bulb the smart part, instead, make the socket the smart part, since you don’t replace sockets very often? With light bulbs it’s pretty easy to detect that it’s out with a visual check. Seems like detection of darkness might be the better indicator. Also, how do you ensure your cell phone is working when the message comes through? Better yet, hook it up with a system that automatically orders and delivers more light bulbs when you need them. And that’s the connection to Business Service Management for me. Let’s keep pushing the information layers out of abstraction and into practical application.

Here’s another example from a home automation standpoint. It would be great to automatically generate a grocery list each week. You’d have to install a barcode scanner in both your refrigerator and pantry doors as well as your trash can. Yes, you can buy the smart fridge that scans barcodes, but I haven’t seen the smart garbage can yet that knows when you’ve thrown out a food container. There are plenty of smart appliances, like the microwave that knows how long to cook the food. Apparently kitchen trends are going in this direction. I do hope the smart kitchen designers will eventually catch on that your ultimate goal is the grocery list, or shopping, or having food renewed, or being able to generate lists based on recipes, and so on. It would be way cool to run a report on whether you could make your favorite recipie based on what’s in your fridge and pantry. Atwell, maybe you don’t want to justify that Sub-Zero fridge after all, unless it’s a smart one. This real-world kitchen application is similar to how IT’s ultimate goal is to further their businesses’ offerings in services and to help their business make winning recipes. How have you set your notifications and pushed them further out towards the systems that can help you solve the problem? Are you notifying on the crux of the problem, such as “It’s dark in this hallway”, or are you notifying on something more system-like, such as “The lightbulb is out.” Food for thought.

Guess I’ve got food and cooking on my mind, huh? Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Last week I talked about the journey along a route to value. Today I’ll point you to a tool to assess where you are on your journey.

I said last week that the Route To Value approach makes it possible for you to gain value from solutions, regardless of where your organization is on the IT maturity level scale or Route To Value milestone level. And then I discovered that you can evaluate the maturity level of your organization with the personalized BSM assessment tool on bmc.com. The lawyers will tell me to say that our methodology is independent of the Gartner Maturity Model and is not endorsed by Gartner. So I’ll say it!

Discussing what is a route to value, anyway?

I just started on a Routes To Value writing team this summer, and I had a lot to read just to try to wrap my head around a route to value. What is a route to value? Why were they created?

A Route To Value is basically a bite-sized, somewhat more manageable chunk of Business Service Management (BSM), showing you a way to attain BSM value according to your organization’s primary pain points. Trying to tackle all of these IT goals at once was overwhelming, to both our sales force and our customers. IT folks were asking, “Good grief, where do I start? I have this set of problems to solve, show me how. I can’t even think about implementing BSM until I get some of these other annoying recurring problems out of the way.”

Whether your organization is chaotic, reactive, or proactive, you can find value along the route, no matter what path you choose first. You can enter any route you want, focusing on the problems that plague your IT group the most.

This discovery along any route to value is what I’m calling an “Ah ha” use, similar to Real Simple magazine’s column on the same. Got only a sock to spare on board with you on a flight to the moon? As seen on the movie Apollo 13, one of the items they used to adapt their square filter into the round receptacle is a sock.

Here’s an example of an Ah ha use from BMC’s IT department. They needed to bring several databases into compliance for Sarbanes-Oxley audits. They are using BMC SQL-BackTrack for Oracle and BMC SQL-BackTrack for Microsoft SQL Server, but they found they could use BMC Remedy Asset Management to actually go out and look for the data sources that needed backing up. Ah ha! While database backup and recovery is along the Infrastructure and Application Management Route to Value, they discovered that an Asset Mangement and Discovery Route to Value helped them on their journey to their goal.

What “Ah ha” uses have you found for your software tools lately?