Cloud-yo!

BDIM workshop program

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:11:00 +0000

We lined up a nice program for the BDIM 2010 workshop, in Osaka, Japan on April 19th. It promises to be fun.

Business-driven IT management

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 07:17:00 +0000

My thesis on business-driven IT management is online at the University of Ferrara.

Here's the abstract:

Business-driven IT management (BDIM) aims at ensuring successful alignment of business and IT through thorough understanding of the impact of IT on business results, and vice versa. In this dissertation, we review the state of the art of BDIM research and we position our intended contribution within the BDIM research space along the dimensions of decision support (as opposed of automation) and its application to IT service management processes. Within these research dimensions, we advance the state of the art by 1) contributing a decision theoretical framework for BDIM and 2) presenting two novel BDIM solutions in the IT service management space. First we present a simpler BDIM solution for prioritizing incidents, which can be used as a template for creating BDIM solutions in other IT service management processes. Then, we present a more comprehensive solution for optimizing the business-related performance of an IT support organization in dealing with incidents. Our decision theoretical framework and models for BDIM bring the concepts of business impact and risk to the fore, and are able to cope with both monetizable and intangible aspects of business impact. We start from a constructive and quantitative re-definition of some terms that are widely used in IT service management but for which was never given a rigorous decision: business impact, cost, benefit, risk and urgency. On top of that, we build a coherent methodology for linking IT-level metrics with business level metrics and make progress toward solving the business-IT alignment problem. Our methodology uses a constructive and quantitative definition of alignment with business objectives, taken as the likelihood – to the best of one’s knowledge – that such objectives will be met. That is used as the basis for building an engine for business impact calculation that is in fact an alignment computation engine. We show a sample BDIM solution for incident prioritization that is built using the decision theoretical framework, the methodology and the tools developed. We show how the sample BDIM solution could be used as a blueprint to build BDIM solutions for decision support in other IT service management processes, such as change management for example. However, the full power of BDIM can be best understood by studying the second fully fledged BDIM application that we present in this thesis. While incident management is used as a scenario for this second application as well, the main contribution that it brings about is really to provide a solution for business-driven organizational redesign to optimize the performance of an IT support organization. The solution is quite rich, and features components that orchestrate together advanced techniques in visualization, simulation, data mining and operations research. We show that the techniques we use - in particular the simulation of an IT organization enacting the incident management process – bring considerable benefits both when the performance is measured in terms of traditional IT metrics (mean time to resolution of incidents), and even more so when business impact metrics are brought into the picture, thereby providing a justification for investing time and effort in creating BDIM solutions. In terms of impact, the work presented in this thesis produced about twenty conference and journal publications, and resulted so far in three patent applications. Moreover this work has greatly influenced the design and implementation of Business Impact Optimization module of HP DecisionCenter™: a leading commercial software product for IT optimization, whose core has been re-designed to work as described here.

The convergence of IT and business (from Forbes.com)

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:12:00 +0000

At a roundtable hosted by HP Wednesday, executives from Microsoft, VMware and other major technology companies agreed on the big picture--that virtualization is soon going to be ubiquitous. Read the rest of the post on Forbes. It's obviously not all about virtualization...

DSOM proceedings, Springer and Liquidpub

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:57:00 +0000

Springer asks me to put a link to the DSOM proceedings on my web page (which I had already done), but here is a nice picture of it.

This all made me think of Liquidpub. Liquidpub is a collaborative project sponsored by the European Commission and coordinated by the University of Trento. Liquidpub aims at changing the whole academic publishing industry, and quite cleverly Springer is a partner to it (if you can't beat them, eat them). I'm involved in Liquidpub through my connection with Fabio Casati's group at Trento, and quite excited to be part of it. One of the use cases we're working on is that of liquid journals, that will allow anyone to publish first, and gain acceptance later; embed and value liquid contributions, including contributions other than standard academic papers (blog entries, etc...). Quite promising and a lot of fun.

It's BDIM time again

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:36:00 +0000

The fifth edition of BDIM - the IEEE/IFIP Business-driven IT Management workshop will be held in Osaka, Japan on April 19, 2010 - co-located with NOMS 2010.

And this year we'll be on twitter too.

DSOM '09 proceedings

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 18:19:00 +0000

The proceedings of DSOM '09 are now available, published by Springer in LNCS. At some point I'll post about the workshop too, which was quite good, definitely better than the last few previous editions.

Splunk

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:33:00 +0000

Splunk is the subject of one of the invited talks at CHIMIT '09. Splunks is an IT search company. Their solution indexes various sources of data in IT, associates rules to them and provides analytics and dashboarding on top of them. There was no demo, so I'm trying to find out what I can from the website, but seems to me that Splunk is to IT what Autonomy is to the enterprise.

Curiously, all the questions that the keynote got were about privacy concerns - maybe not surprising, given that the audience is mostly made up of SysAdmins.

CHIMIT '09 in Baltimore

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:24:00 +0000

I'm attending CHIMIT '09, (almost) co-located with LISA '09 in Baltimore. Interesting agenda at the intersection between HCI and system administration. HCI is definitely not in my background, though it's an interest of mine, because systems should be designed from the user interface in. This is the third edition of CHIMIT, and it started a few years ago when researchers started to get together who had carried out field studies to look in depth at how system administrators do their job.

Web page update

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:15:00 +0000

I finally also got to update my web (1.0) page at HP Labs.

What's left to do now?

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 04:47:00 +0000

Wave is to the Cloud what email has been to the Internet.

Watch the video. Long but worth it.

Cloud-yo!

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:59:00 +0000

Ah, yes, and I'm now jumping on the Cloud bandwagon too. Impact of Cloud on ITSM that is. Hence the revamping of this blog site, from its title down

DSOM 09 in Venice, Italy

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:39:00 +0000

I managed to let one year pass without a post, which is quite an achievement.

Luciano Paschoal Gaspary and I are organizing the twentieth IEEE Symposium on Distributed Systems Operations and Management (DSOM 09), in the context of Manweek 09 on October 26-28 in Venice, Italy.

This year's theme is "Integrated Management of Systems, Services, Processes and People in IT", continuing on our push to raise the level the research on management from infrastructure to service, processes and people.

We'll have keynotes from Nikos Anerousis from IBM Research TJ Watson, and George Pavlou from University College London. (I know, that's a spoiler, because the program hasn't been updated yet.)

Business-driven IT management workshop at LISA 08, San Diego, November 9th, 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:55:00 +0000

Mark Burgess from University College Oslo, Norway and I are organizing a half-day workshop on business-driven IT management, co-located with LISA 08 - the 22nd USENIX large installation system administration conference.

The workshop will be held on November 9th. If you are traveling to San Diego to attend LISA 08 or any of the related workshops, please consider attending the business-driven IT managent workshop.

This blog is too boring

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 20:59:00 +0000

I'm experimenting with ideas. Reading back, all I wrote so far is a little (very much actually) on the boring side. I guess I'll mix things up a little, just for fun. The title stays the same, for the moment.

Danny Raz visits HPL

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:21:00 +0000

We hosted Danny Raz from Technion (on sabbatical at Google) today. He gave a very entertaining talk on cost aware service optimization,
based on joint papers with David Breitgand, Rami Cohen, and Amir Nahir.
The main message of his talk was that when one takes the cost of management into the equation, there are non trivial tradeoffs to be made. In particular, he presented alternative approaches to load balancing and how the optimal amount of monitoring overhead depends on variables such as load, arrival rate, and relative cost of transferring information between dispatcher and servers.

Tutorial al BPM 2008 in Milan

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 05:42:00 +0000

Vladimir Tosic, Patrick Hung and I (well, Vladimir mostly...) will present a tutorial on "Management of Service-Oriented Implementations of Business Processes: From Quality of Service to Business Value" at the Business Process Management (BPM 2008) conference in Milan on Sep 3rd.

Abstract follows:

Management (monitoring and control) of business processes is needed to ensure regular operation, attain or surpass the guaranteed quality of service (QoS), accommodate change, keep track of the consumed resources, and perform billing. Monitoring is used to measure QoS and/or business value attributes, while control is used to reactively/proactively ensure that the measured quantities are within desired (guaranteed) boundaries. To successfully perform management activities, a comprehensive specification of management goals is necessary. Management of business processes can be viewed from several aspects and at several layers of granularity. In this tutorial, we will discuss monitoring and control of service-oriented implementations of business processes, with particular emphasis on QoS management and maximization of business value. That is, we will assume that services implementing business process activities are using Web service technologies such as SOAP and the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and that they are composed using technologies such as the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL). By QoS we will mean technical metrics such as response time, throughput, and availability, while by business value we will mean both financial metrics such as prices, profit, and return on investment (ROI) and non-financial business metrics such as number of customers, market share, and customer satisfaction. The tutorial will first clarify the importance of these topics and why the widely used basic Web service technologies are not enough. Then, it will explain theoretical principles for specification, monitoring, and control of QoS and business value attributes. Examples of these principles are contracts (including service level agreements - SLAs), policies, intermediaries, probes, and multiple request queues. Next, it will provide a critical analysis of several important specification languages, research infrastructures, industrial products, and standardization efforts in this area. Currently there are many more results on management maximizing QoS than on management maximizing business value, but the latter promises better alignment between business and information technology (IT). Therefore, this tutorial will also present a brief introduction into business-driven IT management (BDIM) and will discuss possible approaches to extend QoS driven management solutions into business value driven management solutions. At the end, a number of open topics and resources for further study will be identified. After attending this tutorial, participants will have general knowledge and understanding of the challenges and fundamental concepts related to the specification, monitoring, and control of QoS and business value attributes of Web services and business processes implemented with Web services, the state of the art in the area, and open research issues. This knowledge can help them in making decisions about using some of the existing technologies and/or in conducting further research and development in the area.

BDIM lives on!

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 03:04:00 +0000

So business-driven IT management lives on through. Jacques Sauve, Kamal Bhattacharya and I are submitting a workshop proposal to IM 2009, fingers crossed. We will also be having a BDIM session at the USENIX Lisa 2008 event in San Diego, on Nov 9th (Sunday!), hosted by Mark Burgess and myself.

If you are interested in helping out with the organization of BDIM-related event please get in touch with any of us. (Do insist if you don't get a response the first time, as you probably know by now I'm lousy at emails).

Friend of a friend

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 21:12:00 +0000

I have created my foaf.rdf file. Now let's see what happens. The foaf project predicts that I'll have many friends soon...

Tutorial on IT Service Management and Business-Driven IT Management at NOMS 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 03:31:00 +0000

Next Friday, April 11th, On the last day of NOMS 2008 in Salvador, Brazil, Jacques Sauve and I will give a tutorial on IT Service Management and Business-Driven IT Management (look it up at the conference website under program -> tutorials).

Here's a description of the tutorial. Join in, it should be fun. If successful, we could make a roadshow of it :)

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The importance and difficulty of managing IT resources and services is driving IT organizations to adopt best practices developed over the last few years. The paradigm being used to project IT to the enterprise and its clients, partners and suppliers is the "IT Service". The tutorial examines IT Service Management (ITSM) in its various aspects. The complete lifecycle of a service is covered, including service strategy, service design, service transition, service operation and continual service improvement. Best practices for service management are examined with the help of the very popular IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework in its latest version (v3).
Service providers are increasingly focusing on aligning IT services with business goals and, to that end, Business-Driven IT Management (BDIM) is currently in the initial stages of formalization and product offerings. The second part of the tutorial maps the state-of-the-art in this rapidly emerging field. The tutorial will cover definitions of BDIM, challenges posed by IT-business alignment and will provide concrete application examples as well as a description of current BDIM tools available.
The tutorial provides a mix of practical aspects, recent research results and descriptions of real tools concerning ITSM and BDIM.The attendee will understand and appreciate the terms ITSM, ITIL, IT governance, COBIT, and will gain familiarity with important IT processes dealing with service design, service transition and service operation.

IT professionals - yes we can

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 03:35:00 +0000

From a CompTIA survey (see Infoworld article) I found out that: 1) US IT professionals mostly classify themselves as conservatives (at least more conservative than the general US population), and that 2) they'd split their vote equally between Obama and McCain with Clinton distant third. 1) seems surprising. Wonder if that goes for Europe too. This polls was taken at the beginning of March, things might have changed since then.

Vladimir Tosic's book

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:10:00 +0000

Vladimir Tosic of NICTA, Australia is editing a book on "Information Technology Aligned with Business Objectives and Values: Integrating Software Engineering, System Management, and Governance". The book will be be published by IGI in 2009. Find a call for chapter at http://www.nicta.com.au/people/tosicv/igi_book. Deadline for chapter submission is March 31st, 2008.

BDIM 2008 program online

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 03:05:00 +0000

The program of the Third IEEE Workshop on Business-driven IT Management (BDIM '08) is online at http://www.businessdrivenitmanagement.org/bdim2008/program. We will have a keynote address by Prof. Mark Burgess of University College of Oslo, Norway title "Business promises", applying promise theory to IT management.
The rest of the program is divided in four sections on Service Design, Risk, trust, security and economic aspects of BDIM, Service Operations and Continual Service Improvement.
Workshop registration is open at http://www2.dcc.ufmg.br/eventos/noms2008/.

Many eyes

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 08:15:00 +0000

Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg at IBM research have created ManyEyes, a social experiment allowing people to visualize datasets and share their comments with people either on the ManyEyes site or on other forums. Pretty cool.

Questions I'm pondering right now

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 07:24:00 +0000

What are the most pressing problems to do with information management in the ITSM domain?
Why the wikipedia ITSM page describe ITSM as "an enabler of IT Governance (or information management) objectives". This is interesting, and it's totally opposite the way I'm thinking about it right now: information management as an enabler of ITSM.
Can't trace back who might have edited the ITSM page to that effect let alone what they meant. I asked a clarification in the talk page

Manweek 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 23:45:00 +0000

I attended a few sessions of Manweek 2007 in San Jose week before last. Mostly was in for DSOM, where the Bottom Line team's (Jacques Sauve et al.) paper on risk consideration in IT change management got the best paper award (congratulations to them!).

Besides that I have to say that I was not overall very impressed with the quality of the workshop. I found some of the sessions at MACE fresher and more interesting, though the presentations tended to be more about work-in-progress.

The workshop was anyway very well organized, with social dinner at the Tech in San Jose, during which we felt - very close - a 5.6 earthquake that made the whole structure swing. That was quite cool, being at the Tech it felt like a demo of what it is like being on the San Andreas fault.