Twenty four hours before my flight Tuesday evening, I received an email on my Blackberry  giving me the opportunity to check-in online, saving time at the airport do so.  While checking in, I was given the option to print my boarding pass or receive an email with the boarding card.  Since I was doing this from my Blackberry, I was not near a printer (nor am I sure I could've printed to one even if I were - unless there is some plug-in out there that does this).   So naturally I selected for them to email me the boarding pass.  When I did this, I wasn't entirely sure what I was actually doing.  I did this expecting a .PDF file to be emailed to me where I could print it - which I would do when I was in the office for meetings.

During one of my meetings that morning, I received an email on my Blackberry with the following:

Subject: "Link to mobile boarding pass for your flight to Richmond".

Body: " Please use the link below to retrieve your mobile boarding pass, which must be displayed on your mobile phone or PDA at the security checkpoint and again at the gate to board your flight.

[URL link]

As a reminder, the mobile boarding pass can only be used at IAH Terminals B, C, and E"

That sounds cool.  So at the next meeting break, I quickly opened that emal again and selected the URL link and viola! I was brought to a page that had an odd square looking bar-code and boarding card information.  I thought to myself can this actually be used?

Well upon arriving at Terminal B at Houston's IAH airport,I waited in line until my turn.  I pulled out my phone, selected the link and gave it to the security attendant checking ID's.  He said with an eagerness  "Oh Wow! This is my first one!" I responded, "Mine too."  So he grabbed his rather large handheld scanner and started waiving it over my Blackberry.  I tried five or six times.  A gentleman behind me made a comment "I was going to do that too, I'm glad I didn’t".  He wasn't mean, rather was in the tone of not-another-piece-of-too-good-to-be-true-technology-that-doesn't-work.  So I let him go ahead of me.

In the time it took for another security attendant to check his ID the security attendant helping me had taken my Blackberry and his scanner and put it in the shade of this podium and it work!  He was so happy - and I was as well.  Things were great.  He even informed me that I did not have to show my boarding pass to the attendant waiting as you walk through the metal detectors.

I made my way to the gate thinking, that was pretty cool.  When it was time to board, I pulled out my Blackberry and handed it to the gate agent.  She said almost the same thing as the security agent, "This is my first one!" proudly.  I again responded, "Mine too.".  This time they had a different machine.  It is a stationary scanner attached to their podium.  On her first try it did not work - she seemed to have scanned it to fast.  The second try, she laid the Blackberry on the podium under the scanner and slid it from of the screen to the top slowly.  "Beep!" was heard and smiles on both of our faces signaled all the world was right again.

And again I thought to myself, that was cool!  It wasn't until take-off that I started to think about why Continental Airlines would offer this.  I am thinking it most likely had some combination of customer experience and cost savings driving it.  But it hit me like a brick that I actually did something "green" and didn't even know it at the time - I did not print that boarding pass!!  While a tremendously small contribution, it was a liberating and powerful feeling that came over me.  It felt REALLY good!  The inconvenience of it not working perfectly was insignificant now - just as having to take my shoes off to pass through security.

If we all make one tremendously small contribution, collectively we will make a tremendously large contribution, a tremendously large difference.

While my family and I already recycle, this has had me consciously thinking ever since of new 'green' opportunities I can take advantage of. 

I'm hooked and hope you will be too!

Unfortunately most automation is in the form of randomly developed scripts - an administrator with the absolute best intentions - writes a script that performs some time saving function.  However most likely the script isn't well documented, may or may not tell others about it,  and does not usually meet any sort of coding standards.  The script may even have potential security risks as it hasn't gone through proper software development controls.  And this practice is probably more prevalent than you may imagine.  

OK, so these are some of the 'recreational' practices going on currently in the enterprise, but what are the implications?  It's a fact that whether businesses are trying to cut costs, take on new ventures, grow the business, address regulatory concerns, improve operations or just about any other business initiative, information technology will be used.  There are no signs of the IT proliferation slowing down  especially with the advent of virtualization which enables businesses to do so even faster and with lower cost of capital.  So the risks to the business are only going to increase with the current way automation is being conducted.  We also know that businesses are not interested in increasing IT operational costs, certainly not in-line with current ratios. 

In the recreational approach to automation its also most likely true that business continuity is not taken into consideration.  The more an organization becomes automated using these recreational practices, the less possible it becomes to be able to recover from a disaster as the automation has eliminated the manual procedures and there is no one that could even revert these operations in the case of a disaster or business impacting incident.  Automated operations require strict planning.

So the implication of not instituting structured automation development and control processes and eradicating the recreational automation practices is a significant increase in risk to business operations.  By conducting a structured program of automation, there is also higher potential of productivity improvement and cost reduction because a systematic method will be used over an ad-hoc method of convenience.

An implication of leveraging a professional approach to automation also provides the ability to reduce the dependence and risks associated with off-shoring.  You see, there is a definitive labor cost 'floor'.  Regardless of the country that actually offers the lowest labor costs, there is a bottom and the bottom will continue to rise in that country due to demand for that labor.  We've also seen where demand for this type of labor has sparked significant frenzy for 'job-hopping' in those countries.  This creates another significant problem for operating a stable operation. 

Automation when coupled with a stable (and capable) organization, on the other hand, is an ideal solution as it creates characteristics I call CASM²

• Cost
• Consistency
• Accuracy
• Availability
• Accountability
• Speed
• Scalability
• Measurability
• Manageability

Automation will increasingly become a fundamental and essential  IT management practice if for no other reason than simply because of the economic driver to do so.    With this desirable business capability, corporations must start to transition out of the current automation practices they find themselves using and to a professionally and 'planned' automation model.

To further the discussion and help the transformation from recreational IT, I'll talk about an interesting topic in my next blog entry  - "Does the Automation Team belong in the Application Team or in Operations"? 

Was talking with a service automation consultant colleague of mine this week about an engagement he was working on.  The problem being solved was pretty typical in most IT organizations today.    What was eye opening was the cost savings or cost avoidance to be had.

The IT environment has exploded in complexity.  I define IT complexity as the diversity, volume, and rate of change.  There is so much to do, and not nearly enough hands, even if you're leveraging low-cost labor strategy. 

The net result is lots and lots of tasks that should be done and need to be done, aren't getting done!

So my colleague I was talking with was working with a broadband internet provider  whose business was challenged with eliminating false positive support calls going to the Telco when a T1 line was in fact actually OK and not impaired.  BTW,  I am purposefully staying away from the technical details.

I asked my colleague if he wouldn't mind working on a mini-cost savings/cost avoidance analysis with me.  Using a very simple publicly available model (see below),  it was determined that by automating that one seemingly minor task, would yield close to $36,000/per month or $432,000/per year savings in productivity!   And this does not even account for the wasted time errant tickets that otherwise would have to be chased down and followed up on.

Interestingly, this example is an estimate because the customer was actually unable to provide the number of times this was actually performed during a day - the estimate is based off the number of events seen in the event management system.  It is worth noting that while these actions should have been taken every time, it is highly likely that they were not, due to the volume.

Because of the complexity of the IT environment and constrained staff count and labor costs, many customers are not operating their environments effectively.  Many situations like this one are just slipping through the cracks – resulting in inefficient operations and negative business impacts.

As you can see, there are savings just waiting to be had.  Service Automation platforms are now more economically viable than ever and will become the preferred method for addressing productivity in IT organizations and IT service providers.

There is a definitive floor in terms of labor costs and they will rise over time - automation can be a sustainable solution if taken seriously.  I'll address this in my next entry.

Simplistic Model:

Broad stroked characterizations can turn into oversight of very important areas.  For example, I've witnessed numerous projects where companies are 'implementing ITIL' that ITIL is 'about processes'.  Then the projects they have embarked on is really just digitizing their existing work flow with maybe some minor tweaks, and training their staff on ITIL foundations.

You may not know this, but best practices process flows exist.  Yep, you can actually buy them.  BMC for example sells a new product called BMC Service Management Process Model (SMPM)  http://www.smpm.info/.  It is a set of best practices used in nearly two hundred implementations world-wide.  It comes complete with roles and even detailed work instructions.  And it works with Remedy ITSM v7 to provide pre-defined, integrated process flows, roles, and work instructions right into the product.  And it fully leverages ITIL's best practice guidance.

What this means to you beyond taking the risk out of your process design, is the significant reduction in your process flow design time and costs, so there is significant benefits to taking this approach.  However, process operation is a change in the way management is approached, not only just a change in process flow and the enabling technology.  Implementing process without the proper process governance is a process that is bound to 'snap' back or be circumvented.  Is the process delivering what it needs to, to satisfy customers?  Is it running as efficient as it was planned too?  So just how many incidents did we think we could handle in day with our current staff?  Is the external service provider that is part of the process performing to the levels needed?  Have the people identified as 'process owners' actually equipped with the tools and training that they need to be able to govern the process?

And what about KPI's?  There are volumes filled with KPIs - but have you noticed that they never tell you what data stores they should pull the data from, what tools to use, what other KPI's they need to be coupled with, what actions should be taken when an indicator goes up/down or stays the same?

What about the organization?  Is it good enough to assign a person to a role? Might there need to be some structural changes that may be needed?  Are the right people in the roles?  And is the organization ready to change to a new process, tools, and accountability?  Who is and who isn't ready and able to change?

What about process performance?  Did we actually sit down and try to determine how many changes of a certain type that we need to be able to handle based on our business' requirements?

And I've purposefully stayed away from services - such as what services do we need to deliver to the business, what do the levels of service need to be, and how the processes need to perform to deliver those services.

And these are just things off the top, there are additional critical areas involved with 'Process'.

When embarking on your process efforts, I encourage you to think more broadly about what 'process' means.

If you understand the ITIL practices, that is essentially what it advocates.  The difference is that the ITIL takes a far broader scope to include people, process, technology, and management all working together in a well-defined, designed, and planned manner.

Does this mean we could be heading toward ‘versioning’ our organization themselves -   ABC Co. Version 2.1?  If we look far enough out, it is not unthinkable.  Comprehensive and clearly defined processes and services, well-understood and defined job roles, appropriately applied skills, and organizational performance management are some of the key components that will need to be in place and an uber controlled operation could itself be version controlled…! 

You may be saying to yourself ‘we already do those things’.  Indeed, but consider this – if you view your organization holistically (people, process, technology, management) as an operating system, what level of quality of an operating system would it be?    Note - there is a marked difference between a designed operation and an operation that has organically adapted based intuition.

“Help Wanted: Operations Architects”

Like most IT organizations, does your architecture team primarily focus on technology-related responsibility?  If so, then who has the responsibility of looking at your IT organization as an operating system and what are their skills?  Perhaps you have process owners or process managers.  While these roles are necessary, a common gap in many IT organizations is an ‘Operations Architecting’ function.  Frequently the function is fragmented across many different roles in a passive and disconnected fashion.

Operations architecting is responsible for designing/defining the processes, skills, technologies and automation, policies, agreements, measurements, etc.  This will take a new set of architecture skills than what exist in most organizations today.  While there are some of these skills in the market, they are largely rare and highly sought after and come mostly via consultants.  These offerings are some of the highest valued IT business services.  I should point out, just because someone is ITIL Service Manager certified, does not make them capable of architecting IT operations.  Many other skills are required.

Many companies have started on their IT improvement programs and have identified one or more processes to start on.  Whether you have started or not, it is worth taking time to ask the question “What would a successful operating system look like to our business?”  A good architect or more realistically, an architecture team, would be able to capture the requirements, and design the to-be operating system, and plans to get there.   When answering the question, a good architect also always keeps in mind the various interests involved – customers, employees, the business, investors, regulators, etc.

Okay, so what if during the design you determined outsourcing was a requirement in your plan?  Particularly important in multi-sourcing arrangements where there are multiple service providers, is the need for Operations Architecting.  To help answering the questions such as “Exactly how will the DBA outsourcing provider know not to respond to that alarm at 2am when it is just a scheduled change outage by the application outsourcing provider?”  As you can see, these processes will need to be designed accordingly, the people, processes, policies, etc. all need to be considered and accounted for.

I hope this view of looking at IT operations more holistically helps put a frame around your improvement program efforts and highlights some of the critical skills that you’ll want to employ. 

In the next entry, we’ll talk about the various BSM starting points and why.   We’ll discuss some real-world projects and I think you’ll find the decisions to start in one area versus another quite interesting.