I was asked recently about blogs or websites that discuss emerging technologies especially as related to IT and business service management. Now, when I hear the term “emergent technology” (Is emergent even a word?), the ones that come to mind immediately are engadget.com and gizmodo.com, but those are more for consumer products I’d say. There’s of course, Wired, but again that’s not necessarily related to managing desktops across a company or managing servers for accomplishing business tasks.

For some interesting reading, MIT has a Technology Review website but again, it’s all technology for all applications, not just for IT. Fascinating website, though. The list for 2007 is as follows:

• Peering into Video’s Future – The Internet is about to drown in digital video. Hui Zhang thinks peer-to-peer networks could come to the rescue.
• Nanocharging Solar – Arthur Nozik believes quantum-dot solar power could boost output in cheap photovoltaics.
• Neuron Control – Karl Deisseroth’s genetically engineered “light switch,” which lets scientists turn selected parts of the brain on and off, may help improve treatments for depression and other disorders.
• Nanohealing – Tiny fibers will save lives by stopping bleeding and aiding recovery from brain injury, says Rutledge Ellis-Behnke.
• Augmented Reality Markus Kähäri wants to superimpose digital information on the real world.
• Invisible Revolution Artificially structured metamaterials could transform telecommunications, data storage, and even solar energy, says David R. Smith.
• Digital Imaging, Reimagined Richard Baraniuk and Kevin Kelly believe compressive sensing could help devices such as cameras and medical scanners capture images more efficiently.
• Personalized Medical Monitors – John Guttag says using computers to automate some diagnostics could make medicine more personal.
• A New Focus for Light Kenneth Crozier and Federico Capasso have created light-focusing optical antennas that could lead to DVDs that hold hundreds of movies.
• Single-Cell Analysis Norman Dovichi believes that detecting minute differences between individual cells could improve medical tests and treatments.

Stephen O’Grady, the RedMonk analyst, tags several posts with Emerging Technologies so peruse the archives to your heart’s content. I especially enjoyed the post about Wikipedia being proposed as an aid to help the public prevent, slow and survive a deadly viral outbreak. Yeesh.

It seems that most of the categories for new technology are things like medical applications, travel applications, security, and personal technology. I would say that the concept of BSM itself is an emergent technology but it has matured beyond nascent for certain.

Advancements in security are certainly tied into corporate IT which is why I enjoy reading Jeff Bohren’s blog, The Identity Management Expert very much.

Are there other emerging technologies that solely relate to IT that I’ve missed?

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.

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.

I took some photos at the BMC Forum in Dallas October 2005

I had some fun with my digital SLR pretending to be a photojournalist. Here are some photos of activity at the forum.

Chip and Stephen work for Dell and Temple-Inland, respectively, in Austin, Texas, and they’re brothers. I had to ask them if I could play paparrazi and snap some shots.

Checking email between sessions like a lot of us were doing.

A lively discussion in the hallway requiring hand guestures and everything.

Another discussion after the Marimba 101 lesson.

Here’s a partial shot of the expo area where you can go see products in action.

Reporting from a conference room set at 60 degrees Fahrenheit, here’s your roving blogger reporting from Dallas

Blogging live is harder than it sounds. Fortunately the wireless connection is behaving in two of the session rooms I’ve been in so far. But, beyond the technology (which is the easy part), it’s difficult to take notes and figure out what to report on. So here goes. Let me know if you’d like to hear more.

There are plenty of sessions to choose from and at least five tracks. This morning I went to the BMC Performance Manager Roadmap and Strategy session with about 35 attendees. Sean Duclaux started with a trick question by asking for a show of hands. How many PATROL Express customers? (a few) How many PATROL Classic customers? (a bunch) How many BMC Performance Manager customers? All! We’ve changed the PATROL product name to BMC Performance Manager. Of course with a product evolving like this, lots of questions ensue. I’ll try to capture the questions and answers here.

Q: How do you decide which to use, agent-based or agentless monitoring?
A: Based on collection policies that you set, the agent might deploy automatically, perhaps by pushing a lightweight local presence onto the computer to be monitored. More on this below the question/answer set.

Q: What kind of pricing is available for people who are already invested in the PATROL Classic product line?
A: The licensing scheme has been completely redesigned in a few ways. One is that there’s a CPU metric, so if you want to monitor a server, it doesn’t matter if it’s Windows or UNIX or Linux — you can switch between them. Also there are tiers of deployment that are simplified, such as a departmental license. I’m sure I’m missing some layers here but the overall answer is that PATROL Classic is not going away, but you will see infrastructure cost savings as you upgrade and decommission old infrastructure.

Q: What technological help is available for upgrading our KMs?
A: The BMC Performance Manager SDK was just released in August and you can request it (it comes free with BMC Performance Manager). With this SDK you can create application classes and XML config files that will pick up all the info that your KMs do (as long as it makes sense to do so), and there are third party implementers being trained on the SDK right now. (OTL is in Austin this week for training, apparently).

Q: What about about the install footprint — how much disk space for this lightweight local presense?
A: It shouldn’t be a big space hog. Just looking at my own Marimba client install I’m seeing a less than 50 MB install, and Marimba is the one that gathers the most information, not a lightweight local presense. I’m guessing lightweight should be MUCH less than this.

Q: What about bandwidth, will it fill up my network sending data back and forth?
A: This is all configurable, but typically only when an event is raised will it be sent back. Of course if you’re going from PATROL 3, which apparently didn’t send data anywhere (I’m no expert on this but that’s what was said), you’re going to see a difference in network capacity.

Q: The Million Dollar Question (according to a guy in a UNIX-only shop) — will the RSM (Remote Service Monitor) run on a UNIX box or is it Windows only?
A: The product manager and architect are arm wrestling over that right now. The basic answer is that we (well, the architect) wants to do everything, but … a Windows RSM can monitor both Windows and UNIX, but a Solaris/UNIX RSM can only monitor UNIX, so we need to know whether that’s worth building — does it fit into the environment that you envision? UNIX doesn’t exactly listen well (ok, at all) to perfmon information, for example, so there’s no monitoring of Windows with a UNIX RSM.

Q: Will a lightweight local presence (LLP) incorporate auto recovery actions?
A: Even if you are managing a solution remotely, as long as dynamic connection can happen, we’ll let you do recovery actions for remote connections (not til after December though.) PATROL Express can do remote restarts right now.

The gee-whiz factor for me with the new direction is the combination of agent-based and agentless options. Both are available now with a single view point, meaning your PATROL Express data can be viewed alongside your PATROL data. You can apply a policy to determine whether you monitor something with an agent or not. Here’s an example of a policy application out of the BMC white paper, “Effortless System Management.”

Policy example: If a small file/print server is reassigned to serve the office of the company’s chief executive,
the IT staff may decide that it wants an autorecovery capability on that server. The IT staff simply sets the
new performance management policy for that server, and BMC Performance Manager makes the
appropriate changes, which may include pushing an LLP out to the server.

Another recurring topic so far is compliance efforts such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPPA, Basel II. As Sean put it, “You don’t want to see your CEO on the cover of a magazine in an orange jumpsuit.” So, if Sarbanes-Oxley or other compliance efforts are your concern, figure out how to get your policies in place. I’m hearing this over and over.

All the presentations are available with a username and password, so if you’re attending, here’s the site to download the presentations. Your packet has the username and password.

Jim Grant’s keynote address at today’s BMC Forum offered some interesting news clips

I am always on the lookout for news stories that highlight the connections between IT and business, and Jim Grant had some great news clippings in his presentation today. Here are some of the ones that caught my eye (and I was fast enough to type).

Upgrade downs 80,000 U.K government computers Nov 29, 2004

Avis blames IT for multimillion-dollar loss Oct 22, 2004

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?