Business-driven IT management

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.

Italy beats Team USA 6-2 at the baseball world cup in Taiwan

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 07:38:00 +0000

Slightly off-topic, but I needed to write about, because it's amazing. Read on. I'm behind with a couple of posts on BDIM 2.5 and another visit from Luciano Gaspary and Lisandro Granville, will post about it in the weekend.

Third IEEE workshop on Business-driven IT Management (BDIM 2008)

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 20:51:00 +0000

BDIM 2008 is on.

On April 7th at Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, co-located with NOMS 2008.

Working on the CFP now, submission deadline will most probably be in January 2008.

Back from RuleML 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 06:00:00 +0000

I attended the RuleML 2007 symposium at Orlando, Florida, which was co-located with the Business Rules Forum.

My main motivation for attending was to build bridges between the BDIM community and the business rules research community, and I was quite happy with the outcome in the end. The symposium was really well organized (Adrian Paschke of Technical University Munich and Yevgen Biletskiy of the University of New Brunswick did a really good job). It definitely helped that it was co-located with the Business Rules Forum, so that they were able to put together a very strong program with four invited addresses and a very interesting panel discussion. They also ran a "challenge session" that was actually more of a demo session than something along the lines of the trading agent competition. However, it got the audience engaged and made the whole experience more interesting.

The most promising connection at this point for BDIM seems to be with the editors of the OMG's Business Motivation Model (John Hall et. al.). The business motivation model could be the basis of the framework to express business objectives and map IT metrics to them.

BDIM workshop 2.5 at HP Labs on November 1st

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 21:55:00 +0000

Taking advantage of Manweek 2007 in San Jose, CA, we are organizing a working session on business-driven IT management at HP Labs Palo Alto on November 1st, 2007. We decided to call this BDIM workshop 2.5 since it's happening between the second edition of the IEEE BDIM workshop held last year in Munich, and the next edition that we are planning to hold next April in Salvador, Brazil, co-located with NOMS 2008.

The format will be different from the usual IEEE-style workshops. We really want this to be a working session, aimed at defining a BDIM research agenda and foster the growing research community around the BDIM themes. I'll post more on BDIM 2.5 as we finalize the program.

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 21:28:00 +0000

Added my Technorati Profile.

BDIM and value-based software engineering

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 20:54:00 +0000

I hosted Vladimir Tosic from NICTA, Australia at HP labs last week. He gave a talk introducting NICTA, the Australian center of excellence for ICT and presenting his current research directions. Vladimir is a very prolific researcher. Among the various things he's looking at, his attempt to bring together BDIM and value-based software engineering got my attention. Value-based software engineering's goal, according to Stefan Biffl and his co-authors is "to develop models and measures of value which are of use for managers, developers and users as they make tradeoff decisions between, for example, quality and cost or functionality and schedule – such decisions must be economically feasible and comprehensible to the stakeholders with differing value perspectives. [...] VBSE extends the merely technical ISO software engineering definition with elements not only from economics, but also from cognitive science, finance, management science, behavioural sciences, and decision sciences, giving rise to a truly multi-disciplinary framework." This link definitely deserves some investigation. On my part, I'm going to start by looking at business-driven software testing, that is driving the design of test suites not from the point of view of coverage, but from the point of view of the value to the business expressed through successive refinement of requirements.

Welcome to my blog on Business-driven IT management (BDIM)

noreply@blogger.com (Claudio Bartolini) — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 04:41:00 +0000

Welcome to my blog on Business-driven IT management (BDIM).

The goal of BDIM is to to enable an enterprise to manage its IT services in accordance with its business objectives. BDIM focuses on the impact of IT on business processes and business results and vice versa; besides the conventional IT metrics such as availability and response time, it looks at key performance indicators (KPIs), that is metrics that have significance from the point of view of the business supported by the IT. The BDIM approach aims at rethinking IT management from a business perspective, whether this be in an operational, tactical or strategic context.