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Podcast production at talk.bmc.com
It went all too quickly, but for the past few months I’ve been working with Tom Parish on podcast production at talk.bmc.com. I’ve since decided I can’t juggle quite that many balls in the air, but I’m pleased with how these podcasts turned out. I learned a lot about the behind-the-scenes work of recruiting interviewees, finding topics, and producing the shows. With an assertive goal of four shows a month, you have to be constantly looking for the next person to talk with, setting a schedule, and researching the topic well enough to come up with a set of 5-7 questions to fill a 15-30 minute recording.
Our goal with talk.bmc.com/podcasts is to produce educational shows about Information Technology, ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), which is a set of standards published to help you tighten up your IT department and align it with the whole company, and Business Service Management which is a revolution for how IT departments can run in order to tie technology into business goals.
William Hurley - Seeing Transparency through Open Source and Enterprise Software
Mary Nugent - Preparing your Business Services for the Future
Dennis Drogseth - Value Proof for CMDB Deployments
Tom Bishop and Dan Turchin - The Mobile IT Worker – They Walk, Talk, and Keep Businesses Running
Mainframe Trends in Enterprise IT for 2008 with John Albee and Mike Moser
Peter Armstrong on Guiding Principles to Changing Behavior and Speeding the Adoption of BSM and ITIL
Doug Mueller - Taking the Service Desk to the Next Level
The links above go to the show notes for each show, which is basically a blog entry to entice people to listen to the show. My favorite is probably William Hurley with Mary Nugent a close second. And the Mobile IT Worker has some fun stories in it.
The neat thing about podcasting is that it lets people tell their stories. Stories are very difficult to convey any other way, although the Google Chrome comic does tell individuals stories in a unique way.
I’ve been on the interviewee side of podcasts a few times, and I’m planning another one this week with Scott Nesbitt and Aaron Davis of DMN Communications. But it was neat to be an assistant to podcast production even if only for a few months.
Transforming coins into donations using technology
I’m in the Sunnyvale BMC office this week, and I’m learning a lot about Configuration Management and how IT departments can manage desktops and servers, automatically sending patches and updates. I’m trying to put myself in the role of an IT system administrator and figure out the best applications of information technology for business purposes.
One innovative application of IT that I noticed recently was that you can turn your loose change into about anything you want using automated kiosks. Coinstar machines are used in the U.S. as a convenient way to donate for charity. While their corporate headquarters are in Bellevue, Washington, Coinstar kiosks were first installed in the San Francisco Bay area, according to their Frequently Asked Questions page. Automated coin counting and tallying technology is applied to turn coins into other things like donations or Amazon gift cards. They have grown from processing $200,000 per year in 1997 to more than $3 million in 2004 and reached $20 million in 2006.
To me, this is a great application of already existing technology to raise money where it’s needed. It also gets money circulating again that might have stayed in a coffee can in your house for a long time. Coinstar estimates that American households contain about $10.5 billion in uncounted change. I doubt my house contains even $50 worth of loose change, but then again, I haven’t overturned the couch cushions in a while. But there are certainly people who like to collect their loose change in one location and then find it’s quite unweilding to use to spend on something.
Now, I know there is a basic concept of money for services or products. But coins are getting turned in gift certificates, charitable donations, and even pre-paid wireless minutes. That transformation is really cool to me.
Coinstar has even applied more technology on top of their patented technology by using Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to help them figure out where to place kiosks to collect the most change so they can predict performance based on placement. I have no idea how their maps know who is most likely to bring in a bucket of change, but there you go. Using information technology to help others while decluttering at the same time. That’s a neat system to me, and a great application of technology.
Learning a lot by reading through the ITIL glossary
In working on a glossary of terms for Business Service Management, I’ve discovered the ITIL glossary, version 3.0, and I’m reading it with interest. It’s a writing task taken very seriously with wonderful cross referencing and consistency of terms and usage. I haven’t yet found a contradiction or hole in logic so hats off to the writers who put it together. The only additional feature I’d like is clickable cross-references to the other terms used within a definition.
With the terms of use, you can reference the definitions as long as you’re not using the glossary specifically to sell your own products or services, and you must use the term accurately. So it’s a wonderful resource and source of content.
One item I found very interesting while studying the glossary: IT Service seems interchangeable with any Service. However, that interchangeability is not specifically spelled out in the IT Service definition. In the Service definition they call Service synonymous with IT Service. But, there’s also the Business Service definition which has an example such as financial services. So the generic term “Service” is never related to say, banking services or financial services, but “Service” is always related to IT Services.
Confused yet? I confess I am a little confused as well, especially if I want to use Business Service Management principles to interrelate banking services and IT services such as ATM software (firmware?) that runs on Linux. At that point, I guess it’s all about Service, no matter what type you’re talking about. I’ll have to ask Peter Armstrong where he draws the line for his definitions of service management.
What criteria do you use for your definitions of IT Service in contrast to Business Service?
SplunkBase - tag your IT
Cote passed along SplunkBase to me a while back as an example of a wiki that houses technical information, and it looks like Slashdot got a hold of SplunkBase early in April with SplunkBase Brings IT Troubleshooting Wiki to the Masses.
I had challenged everyone on my internal BMC blog to send me good examples of wikis for technical documentation. So far SplunkBase is the most interesting and discussed example I’ve found so far.
SplunkBase is not Splunk
The name (which took some flack from slashdotters) does derive from the term spelunking, or exploring caves for fun.
To be clear, the freely available SplunkBase is not the same as the fee-based product Splunk, which indexes your log files and has a nice review and better explanation from a user here. His company has a Gig of log files generated a day, and he posted a sample log file to SplunkBase for an Input/output error from courier impad when there are FAM problems. His description also offers a fix (either install or restart portmap and fam). To me, this is a great example of users helping users through collaborative content generation.
Industry analyst Dana Gardner has a good discussion of it in a recent podcast with Chief Executive Splunker Michael Baum and Chief Community Splunker Pat McGovern (of SourceForge fame).
Livin’ in your logs
Those two talk about how sys admins live in the log files, constantly troubleshooting and walking through this highly unstructured data trapped in a log file. Lots of people have compared Splunk Base to grep and awk with a more Google-search-like interface. Search and navigation are the biggest two productivity boosts when it comes to searching through unstructured data. Couple those boosts with the power of a large user community contributing content and I think they’ve got something there. Imagine Wikipedia but for discoveries in your log files rather than a encyclopedia.
Are you kidding? Share my log content with others who might be hackers?
An immediate concern about sharing content such as the contents of your log files is keeping data scrambled and anonymous. In other words, how do you ensure that you aren’t giving away your IT infrastructure when you upload your log files as examples or broadcast to the world via a wiki page what you learned while troubleshooting your company’s IT environment. In the podcast, about halfway through they talk about how they’ve built in an event anonymizer before it’s shared with others. Most IT data is timestamps, usernames, machine names, IP addresses, that occur repeatedly, but this anonymization process scrambles that type of common data repeats in a way that you still recognize the repeated event or IP address, but you can’t reverse engineer that company’s infrastructure (except for what version of SendMail or Microsoft Exchange is used.)
In the podcast, they do congratulate Cisco on doing a nice job documenting log files, but most vendors aren’t really focusing on that information. A wiki just might be the right way to document log files. What do you look for in good log documentation?
In closing, I’ll challenge all of you as well — where are you seeing good examples of wikis or other collaborative authoring environments for technical information?
IT-related resolutions for the new year
The new year is ever nearer, and here are some new year’s resolutions for both information technology experts and technologists in general.
Pick up a copy of Time Management for System Administrators for productivity tips that speak to the sys admin life. I just read the first page of Chapter 4 and the best quote is “I’m a system administrator! I manage chaos for a living!” True, true. I’ve seen this in person.
Shadow or interview one of your typical users this year. Take someone who uses your applications to lunch.
Invite a co-worker in another area of business to coffee to gain some insight and perspective outside of your corner of the world (and perhaps outside of your influence).
Find a way to automate one of your daily or weekly tasks. I’m personally working on automating my digital photo backups at home.
Clear out your help desk inbox. We all have those tickets we just haven’t wanted to deal with. Start 2006 with a clean inbox.
Pick your favorite lifehack and put it into action, such as search shortcuts.
Find ways to examine your business’ needs and see how IT or any technology can help. You can choose just one BSM Route To Value as a starting point if you get stuck.
IT managers wish lists for 2006
A summary description of an article featuring many IT managers and their wishes for 2006
This article called ” What matters most” in the Australia-based The Age newspaper gets to the heart of what IT Managers wish for most in 2006. At the top of many of the manager’s list is an even closer alignment of business and IT. Many have already seen the value of business services managed with IT service, and want to expand on that idea in 2006.
Managers also talk about the hiring landscape and wonder if the talent they need will be available in the coming year. Many saw a shortage in skill sets they needed in the market. Others note that finding the right people takes a lot of time and effort and wish for recruiting efficiency.
A manager in the banking business said that compliance work was a real pain point for 2005, and wishes for 2006 to have smooth compliance efforts while learning to live with regulators across the world.
BMC’s own Tom Bishop says that “His management wish list has already come to pass - “the recognition that in order to really deliver on the vision on IT service management, you need a good library of best practices [ITIL] that represent the collective wisdom of a set of IT”.” IT governance definitely fulfills the wishes of many IT managers. And on a personal note, congratulations Tom on an adopted daughter on the way December 27th! Now that’s a great wish to come true.
I also would note that it seems like more than half of these IT managers wish to improve their golf score. I read recently that statistically speaking, you can get a hole in one at least 1 in 5,000 tries. So by going golfing three times a week for fifty years, you should be able to get a hole in one. That ought to improve your game!
How about you? Any personal or professional wishes for the new year?
