Chris Boos on Automation

This week we are attending the Cloud Computing World Forum in London, a great event where the who is who of Cloud Computing meets. The three day conference will bring a number of sessions and workshop and a huge exhibition with about 45 stands to the Olympia Conference Centre. To bring the most ROI, the three conference days are packed with a special events like the Cloud Computing World Series Awards, where the best Cloud Solutions will be awarded and the co-located Cloudcamp London, a well-known unconference-series, where the Cloud  Community gathers for the 10th time in London.

The Cloud Computing World Forum conference topics for the three day will be

• Business Models and the Current Marketplace
• Deployment and integration strategies
• The future of business computing

Find more information in the Online-Show Guide <here>.

Please feel free to contact us for a meetup via DM on twitter: @rjudas and @boosc

Last week I attended Pulse Comes To You 2010 in Frankfurt. This great one-day event series tries to capture the Pulse spirit and bring it to a number of major cities around the globe. The german issue, which attracted round about 180 people, was hosted by Tivoli’s General Manager Al Zollar in Frankfurt.

The agenda was split into a generall session in the morning and workshop sessions in the afternoon. After German Tivoli Business Unit Executive Oliver Grell’s welcome note, Al Zollar took the stage and presented IBMs vision on Integrated Service Management, which is the foundation for their Smarter Planet vision. He showed how Tivoli tools like Maximo Asset Management will help us to manage growing complexity of IT systems and plenty of other devices beeing around in todays technical infrastructure. After presenting a couple of case studies from various customers and annouced partnerships with Ricoh, Johnson Controls and Juniper Networks.

 A second keynote was held by Forrester Research Director Thomas Mendel, Ph. D. who presentend Forresters view on IT Management 2.0. He made some interesting comments on the importance of infrastructure & operation for 2010 spendings and said the that the biggest concern for IT managers is, that they fear to be unable to support business growth in these troubled times. A new approach for IT Management 2.0 that Forrester promotes is  “Do less. But do those things superbly!“, which is quite a step-up from the much overstressed “Do more with less” meme. More interesting comments from Forrester were, that ‘Service Catalogues’ are currently the second most requested topic at Forrester and the  recommendation to build a “Just enough CMDB“, which from my point of view should be common sense, not to mention the usual call to “Break down the silos” and “know your Business” for Operations. Mendel concluded that Tivoli should grow into an abstraction layer between infrastrure/applications and the business processes.

Following the Forrester keynote was an fresh talk from geman author, management trainer and lateral thinker Anja Foerster, who tried to motivate the audience to expand their horizons and go for unconventinal solutions. After an excursion into examples of cross-industry innovations, she described homogeneity as the true killer of innovation and asked the audience to forster diversity amongst their subordinates and coworkers. Contradiction lays ground for creativity.

After the lunch break PCTY2010 contiued in 4 parallel workshop tracks, headlined

• Late-breaking Service Management
• Service Management for IT
• Service Management for Development and Deployment
• Technical News

where IBMers, partners and german customers presented a number of  Tivoli and Service Management related sessions (see Agenda). The day closed with a Get-Together and Dinner, where all attendees had the chance to get hold of the specialists and to continue the discussion.

All in all I had a great day, talking to many people and listening to interesting talks and sessions, but I’m confident that next year I will have the chance to go for the “real thing” in Las Vegas again.

What was really a pity that there was no Social Media coverage at all: There have be a handfull of Tweets – about 90 percent of them were sent be me (@rjudas) and some by IBMer Ingo Averdunk (@ingoa). I haven’t found any picures on Flickr, nor any blog article, yet, so:

Come on IBM, you can do better.

As far as change agents go in terms of technology, cloud computing has done its fair bit. Most large IT companies are investing heavily and those who do not have any cloud programs yet are starting to get involved by buying companies already active in the cloud.

To me, this is just the start of a whole new era. I am very happy with that as I believe that automating IT operations will be the market maker for the massive change initiated by the cloud. As you will read in an upcoming blog post (How to keep Cloud Computing from becoming an epic fail), most IT is still in legacy systems and as long as the cloud is not unlocked for these applications, the idea of cloud computing is big, but its application is severely limited to those users who are willing to rely on standard software and services and those who have the resources or need to re-implement whatever they are using. Automation in IT operations will be the ground-breaking change that unlocks the cloud to all the rest – but as I said, that will be part of another article.

Today, I want to take a little glance at the future and show why I believe that new technologies (especially 4G) will be the biggest drivers towards cloud computing and IT in general yet.

To make any kind of prognosis on future development, it is quite useful to look at the past and at the status quo of IT. Right now, most IT is used either in the B2B area or at predictable times at home. That makes the IT usage very easily manageable and it actually means that we can see what kinds of applications will be used at what time. Imagine the usage of IT to look somewhat like the power usage curve that has a clear pattern over the day (everyone uses power in the morning to make coffee, only little power on the way to work, etc.). This holds true, even if we divide this into different application areas and even if we admit that there are a lot of people out there sitting at their desks and using Facebook and other nice things privately instead of doing whatever they are actually paid to do. The current application and IT usage curves are very distinct and distinctly separable.
This is what makes the idea of cloud computing attractive in the first place. As you can see from graph 1 there is a trend line that shows overall IT usage. So, if we can have an IT platform that everyone shares and only pay for what they use, the overall spend on hardware, energy and premises will be reduced massively. Actually, that is what the current cloud hype is all about.

Graph 1

When we look at all the IT resources available today, we could close down 80% of all data centres and give the toxic waste recycling industry a big boost to get rid of all the servers we won´t need anymore. But that would be ever so short-sighted. And that is actually why most of the IT biggies are out there building or buying new data centres (which we would not need if we just converted everything we have today into the cloud).
So where will all this additional demand for computing power come from??? If we are no longer looking at individual IT usage curves, the average usage will exceed even the IT resources available today. Implementing 4G on a global scale will have exactly that effect.

Why? Well, even at the 1992 web conference the term “Web Tone” was invented, and it meant to give everybody access to information from any device, at any time, anywhere. Now we have gone from information to application and with Web 3.0 on the horizon, we will go from applications to knowledge and knowledge applications which will not only be available to anyone (in the industrialised world) from anywhere anytime, but which will be used by everyone all of the time from everywhere. In order to make this vision reality, the pre-condition that is yet unmet is the availability of cheap broadband mobile network access and that is what 4G will do for us.

A data-sphere with intuitive (not just multi-touch) interfaces – and we can see some of them already evolving with the 6th sense or the Xbox natal – will become a reality in the industrialised world that is moving from production to knowledge society at a slow but steady place. This will mean everybody will use IT all of the time, since it is available all of the time through 4G and creates intuitive value though semantics (Web 3.0) as well as being usable (modern interfaces). And that again means that the currently available computing resources will not be enough and have to be scaled up. Since no single application or application group would be able to finance possible peak usage requirements in own IT resources, the combination of 4G driving the IT usage and the cloud making that IT available at reasonable cost – while using available technologies in semantics and human-machine-interfaces (HMI) – will make this game changing development that is so much desired by all users – business and consumer alike – possible.

To me it seems that the combination of 4G, Cloud Computing, Web 3.0 as well as new HMIs all becoming available at the same time, is the key to the next generation of IT applications as well as the key to finally unlock the door to a knowledge-driven and fully interconnected society.

Links:

HTC Evo 4G: New Android Champ – The Cloud Computing Future

Cloud Computing, Mobility Gain Focus for 2010

Is a Mobile Video Chat Revolution imminent?

Well, sometimes I am ahead in technology and sometimes I am just a little behind. So finally I have decided to extend the blog (thank you for all the e-mails and encouragement by the way) with a channel at BrightTalk.

The Channel “Chris Boos on Automation” was created yesterday and I have scheduled the first WebCast on this Channel to take place Tuesday 11th May 2010 14h CET. The Topic of the first WebCast will be: “No Cloud without Automation” or “No Cloud without Automation – Because Cloud Computing Will Be an Epic Fail Without Automation”.

I will be talking about the administrative overhead clouds create and how this overhead can eat up all the advantages of a cloud when migrating business critical applications to the cloud. And (you know I am not a doomsday person) I will be speaking about a solution to this particular challenge.

If you are interested, please register at BrightTalk (just click on the channel and register there).
I am looking forward to speaking to you and answering all upcoming questions at this little presentation.

Chris

What was the date today? It is May already and I am not finished with catching up on the PULSE writing I wanted to do. So it is about time to finish the aftermath and get on with it. Basically I want to structure this short post into three sections:

1. Why automation as I understand it was totally under represented at PULSE
2. Why I will go to visit PULSE 2011
3. Why there is so little coverage on the biggest global ITSM event and what should change about that

So let’s start in talking about my favorite topic: Automating IT operation or putting an autopilot into the driver´s seat of every day “run the business” tasks. First of all I have to say that PULSE had its own automation track and that shows you how much pressure there is to change something about putting large parts of the IT budget just into keeping things as they are. But IBM Tivoli – being a big company and thus making lots of money by selling tools to IT operators (normally with some kind of seat license) – is afraid of cannibalizing their own business model. So the automation that was seen in the PULSE exhibits mainly ranked around the ideas of automating deployment, configuration management and even service management. The actual operational work is very much untouched by that approach but the tools presented were good tools.

I would recommend the reading of “The Innovator´s Dilemma” by Clayton M. Christensen to some strategists and maybe you find that you already have the next generation knowledge in your labs to go a step further and actually come out with at least autonomous systems (yes, there still is some bad taste to those words, but the times have changed and the marked it ready for a machine actually managing itself). I have been at most large ITSM events and I always see that dilemma between selling current technology and the need to move ahead – PULSE just confirmed that view from IBM Tivoli – the one entity with the largest market share in ITSM. Automation still means getting a new tool that will multiply the keystrokes of an expert, but it should mean putting a machine into control and having it contact the experts, when it cannot resolve a problem. That is what we have been working on and as you can see from the podcasts recorded at IBM PULSE it is something of interest to most people dealing with keeping IT alive.

I sincerely hope our industry will leave its daemons behind and finally start reinventing itself. We have been running an autopilot approach for IT operation for more than 12 years now – with astonishing results. But current business models nail the major part of the IT industry to the ground – just because selling licenses to a user still works. I am much looking forward to next year´s PULSE – maybe with less tools and more automated decision making.

This takes me straight to the next point on my agenda, I believe that IBM PULSE is still the must-go-to-service-management-event in the industry. Even if you are not heavily involved with IBM tools it is a place where experts share knowledge and where trends (like automation) become visible very clearly. I have been to many other conferences and only at PULSE is the “in your face marketing” part cut down to a minimum (and that mostly in the exhibition). A vendor who has the courage to put a customer on stage talking about the problems they had on completing their projects successfully not only has grandeur but has also understood that it is about putting solutions into place and not about making it all shine (come on, we all know that ITSM is not so simple, otherwise we´d all be doing it between the hours of 11 and 12am and take the rest of the day off). I have only seen things like that happen at PULSE and that is what makes me consider PULSE the service management event Numero Uno. I will definitely return next year and I hope to meet many of the real IT experts I have come to trust over the last years and get to know many more. Maybe I even hand in a presentation again and see if speaking about next generation technology is possible in front of a larger audience instead of some side track.

Unfortunately IBM PULSE is not well covered on the net (yet). At least if you compare it to other events of lesser size and professional influence. John Willis (www.johnmwillis.com @botchagalupe)and I are not the only none IBM bloggers actually writing about the conference, but there are more blog entries on how to book a cheap hotel room in Vegas than there are on the actual content of the conference.

As I mentioned before the content presented is top brass (even if the program committee is still struggling with the next generation approaches, but as mentioned above that is a business model or strategic question). So why is there so little coverage? Well there are parts of IBM that embrace web 2.0 much more than others (As a whole IBM was voted the most tweeting company by Mashable). In the Tivoli area however I have seen more effort put into creating a great press kit than into attracting bloggers, tweeters and so on. The Facebook community is quite alive, but is not really working on the content IBM has and wants to transport. Well, PULSE has made a first step by making Tiffany Winman (LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook, Twitter, Slideshare, Blog)their social media guru. Also other individual IBMmers like Suzan Aydin (@ibmtivoli_DE), Ingo Averdunk (@ingoa) and Doug Mc Clure (@dmcclure, www.dougmcclure.net) obviously have realized the potential of the web where relevance beats reach by large and tweet or comment an all the cool thing IBM Tivoli is doing. Even customers like T-Systems are speaking up on the web on behalf of IBM Tivoli.Also I have seen Tiffany being promoted from a local social media program to take on a group function and I am sure she is doing an excellent job (I am following her on twitter, reading her blog posts and some of the posts she promotes). But I also believe that a lot of time is spent on convincing the IBM internal brass not to regard that strange blog and twitter thing as a medial flicker (good luck on that).

So here´s to the IBM guys responsible who are not taking social media seriously yet: You have excellent content, you have a message, your message is great, you have good customers, you have a good attitude towards not just talking marketing speak, so please stop being afraid of blogs and twitter or stop thinking these are phenomenon that will disappear soon. If you really want your message and content to be transported in a better (likely cheaper) and much faster way, why not:

1.  Encourage bloggers to attend your conferences and actually blog about them – No that does definitely not mean paying for content!!!, it means:

a.  Supplying chairs and tables at a conference where bloggers can sit down and write up a post
b.  Create a networking platform for bloggers (we all like to meet, since most of us think we have something to say) – EMC had a bloggers lounge (even sponsored by ZDnet) at 2009 EMC World, that is how to do it.
c.  Encourage the bloggers to share content – that means making the content easy to find (even after a day has passed).
d. Maybe even invite some bloggers (not everyone can afford the ticket) proactively and not have them beg on twitter

2. Get twitter up on center stage. Yes, that means you will have to be more spontaneous up there, but everyone stepping on that stage in front of 5.000 people is a well trained speaker and will be up for the task – this will give you instant customer feedback cutting out all the politics and self interests on the way and it will make the giant IBM much less frightening to bright people and smaller companies.

3. Make management available to the online crowd, you will get the best feedback ever and everyone will write, and tweet and fb about that kind of an experience.

4. And if you are really into the web 2.0 idea, get your customers to talk to the online crowd without you sitting there. If that works only half as well as it does in the PULSE presentations any heart-felt testimonial from a customer will be multiplied in power and reach without any cost to you.

Reading the last part I really ask myself why I write it. Since I am not an IBMmer and have nothing to gain from a better representation of PULSE on the social web. Well it is because I enjoy PULSE so much and I believe the content is really what the ITSM community needs that it just grieves me not to see it spread ALL OVER THE PLACE. And by the way, one person cannot do that job – just in case you wanted to tell Tiffany she is not performing – this is why we call it crowd sourcing and this is why everyone (especially management) should get involved and everyone else should be encouraged – in fact Tiffany is doing a great job, but she and all the other cool IBMmers, user group members and customers could be so much more effective with the proper (and completely inexpensive) support. I myself would have written two articles per day, if I had had a chair and desk (not at lunch, because that is when I had a lot of meetings) to do so. By the enthusiasm I have put up, there would have been 6 more articles read by the roughly 300 executives and high end engineers following my blog. And I know that someone like John Willis, with a much larger reach in the more technical community would have produced more coverage just as well. Sounds like a no-brainer to me

Everybody is talking about process optimisation these days, especially within the area of IT services, consultants and so called strategists often claim new methods, usually wrapped in lots of buzzwords and three-letter-acronyms: Their goal is of course not only optimising processes, but at the same time – using appropriate software tools – to increase the quality and lower the costs. Unfortunately this usually doesn’t work that way for the customers. Instead the tool-vendors and their Consulting- and Training-Branches are making money. If expectations are not met, it’s basically customers’ or users’ fault, who didn’t order enough training or consulting services. Then usually someone starts the discussion about ‘Business-IT-Alignment‘, pointing the finger at the business user: Anything would be great if ‘they’ just had correctly defined their requirements.

The dairy farming industry proves that smart and intelligent tools can help to completely automate the truly manual process of milking cows. The milking robot Lely Astronaut A3 Next is able to autonomically milk cows. Not only that manual tasks are omitted, but also – through improved working conditions for the cows – the output is increased. They can decide on their own when to go inside the Astronaut for beeing milked. Using RFID tags the Astronaut is able to see if milking is necessary. If it is, their turn, the high tech robotic arm moves below the udder, detects the teads with a 3D-laser scanning system (Tead Detection System), cleans them and attaches the milking cups with a high accuracy and minimal stress for the cows.

The over-all result is, that after a short period of acclimatisation the herd has a greater yield. To ensure that only highest quality pure milk reaches the end customer, the Lely Astronaut has an integrated monitoring system, the so called MQC (Milk Quality Control) system, which controls the milk before it is pumped to the main tank. The whole process can be monitored by the farmer sitting in his rocking chair via an PDA or in front of his herd management workstation, utilizing the Lely T4C - (Time for cows) management software, which not only provides a dashboard with a number of KPIs but also allows benchmarking against other farmers in the world.

Not only the technology is interesting, but also the service lifecycle draws a good picture of this truly smart solution: The Ethernet-equipped Lely Astronaut A3 Next only requires 4 service assignments per year and is delivered as a fully integrated Plug-and-Play (milking from the first day) solution. To be able to afford the investments, and to minimize the capital expenditures the product can be purchased as a pay-per-milking offering.

Doesn’t this story sound like being from another galaxy?

For us IT people it will, but the Lely Astronaut A3 Next exists. Here you can see it action:

Here are some images:

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If you’d like to read more about the milking robot, a product brochure is available here <LINK>. It includes some really nice pictures of the product and also more pictures of happy cows.

By the way: The dutch manufacturer Lely has invented milking robots 20 years ago and improved their products since then year by year.

Coming to PULSE 2010 almost felt like coming to a friend I had not seen for a long time. The setup is very similar to last year´s with some little improvements. Obviously the conference committee was actually reading many of the suggestions given. For example the temperature in the conference center is no longer below freezing… Well PULSE started off as usual with Al Zoller coming on stage and getting all of us on track. “All of us” means more than 5.500 IT professionals who have come to Las Vegas despite tight budgets and economic crises. Al Zoller announced that this year IT service management at Tivoli is all about integration. After the idea of breaking down silos of competence integration – between the remaining silos (?) and especially between all the tools and processes we find in IT service management today is a great idea and actually long overdue. The scenarios and examples presented in Al Zoller´s and other first day keynotes are still very much in the shadow of economic downturn. Even though every manager is emphasizing that we are in a recovery phase their choice of case studies in the keynotes either shows that they are still skeptical (like most top managers) about the sustainability of the recovery or that in 2009 Tivoli did only do successful projects in more or less crises resistant sectors like energy, government or PPP. Since I do not believe the latter (Tivoli is just too big for that) I would say Tivoli top management is on the same page as many other executives, who make a great public appearance telling everyone that the crises is over but do not quite believe so internally – at least not yet. Following Al Zoller´s keynote address we had the chance to look at an example of integrated service management or rather an example of the applied theory of smarter planets. The demo was about Las Vegas and the Venetian as a smarter city or building respectively. The demo was quite staged and the Tivoli executives on stage had to struggle with their acting skills. Personally I do not believe in the usefulness of the kinds of dashboards shown in the presentations, but it seems this is what customers are looking for at the moment, so IBM was right on spot showing what could be done and how these dashboards interacted with all the data sources and process management systems. Speaking of data sources, I think if we are really going into the direction of a smarter planet and the internet of things, the term information overload will gather new meaning over the next couple of years.

The guest keynote given by former vice president Al Gore was the best guest keynote at any PULSE so far. I had heard that Al Zoller was criticized harshly for inviting Al Gore as an environmentalist, because IBM has such a strong customer base in the energy and traditional industry sector. Well guys, get real – oil will only be there for about 50 years (if that long) and Exxon et al are also looking into other concepts. Personally I would prefer if everyone was doing research about nuclear fusion as the energy source of the future, but taking nature as an example is maybe too far out for parts of the environmental movement. Al Gore was absolutely authentic, convincing and just fun. And he got everybody to think about their behavior, especially giving a speech on energy efficiency in a city like Las Vegas. As Al Gore said, the next generation will ask us either the question “How did you do it” or “Didn´t you see it coming”. So congratulations for Al Zoller for taking the initial heat when inviting Al Gore. More than 5.500 attendees at the opening session of PULSE 2010 were enthusiastic about the speakers and the integration message of IBM as well as the sustainability message of Mr. Gore on behalf of mankind.

Looking at PULSE I have seen many more client presentations and case studies than last year. And – coming back to a point I made before – these presentations are mainly not about state funded endeavors, but about companies dealing with the economic down turn successfully in one way or the other. Tivoli has also introduced the opportunity to meet reference customers in one-on-one talks and start an exchange on their experience with Tivoli products, which I think is a great idea – especially after seeing the customer panel discussion as part of the second day´s general session and the positive audience feedback to the panel. Even though the CIOs of several major international companies were not really sharing any news when talking about their efforts to deal with integration issues and reengineering their IT business alignment, getting these guys up on the main stage to openly declare that IBM was helping them to achieve their goals made everybody else walk out with a secure feeling. Not just great marketing, but obviously also a job well done on the part of the IBM Tivoli engineers, project teams and account managers.

Some of the session presentations were of a little less quality than the ones I had seen in previous years. Maybe that is because everybody was very busy fighting IT budget cuts and the economic crises itself, but the content of most presentations was as good as I have gotten used to over the last three years. The only thing I am a little disappointed about so far is the track on Cloud Computing. This track is still very much about why clouds make sense and other theories that have long since been proven by reality. But some of the customer presentations (e.g. CSC or ITricity) had really good cloud examples. Maybe IBM feels that they still have to pick up the cloud skeptics by introducing them from the beginning, but I think the PULSE attendees are more cloud worthy than that. I have had no time to take a look at the new track on medium sized business, because the first two days are so packed with must see presentations that I simply could not spare the hour. But I am sure I will get around to the topic tonight.

The second day´s keynotes were dominated by Harriet Person – or as I said Ms. Security. Her presentation on regarding the integration of security into embracing change as an opportunity rather than being paranoid about all the things that could happen was authentic, fun and well received by the audience. The presentation also made the best points so far on the integration topic and its actual business effects (apart from all the effects of technical integration that I will not mention here, because those should have been addressed a while back). I already mentioned the customer panel which was a great idea of the conference designers. Some of the other talks in the 2nd day´s general sessions were a little dull to me.

I must give a little note on the usage of social media at this year´s IBM PULSE. Twitter screens all over the place, blogger meetings and lots of coverage on all kinds of channels have made it clear that IBM is serious about the social media community. Not integrating twitter into the main sessions however also shows that there is still skepticism about the uncontrollability or the enormous demands of interaction required by social media. I am sure the very positive coverage PULSE has gotten so far on twitter and blogs will give Tivoli´s senior management a hint as to the topic of being skeptics.

Yesterday night I attended the 2nd CloudStorm in London <LINK> togther with more than 100 other people interested in Cloud Computing solutions.
The organizers (namely Arvid Fossen from A-Server) have choosen a fantastic location at Allen & Overys offices in the 10th floor, which offered a great view over London, as you can see from the images. The venue was very decent and everything was perfectly arranged.

After a great keynote from Joe Baguley (@JoeBaguley) of Quest Software, serveral 5 to 6 minute talks presented Cloud Computing solutions and described some interesting real world customer scenarios. Following the talks there was a 40 minutes panels, where the audience posed a number of questions to the speaker: Most interest appeared to be the topic of security and how organisations and SME’s could benefit from Cloud offerings. There were a number of questions proving that Cloud Computing is a hot topic and people are starting to discuss benefits and tradeoff with their customers.

Following the panel there was a intesive networking party, including great finger foods and drinks, which offered a perfect framing for interesting discussions between the audience and the speakers, which countinued until around 22:00.

Overall it was great event, and we will continue to attend and contribute to the Cloudstorm events series. Find mor information at the Cloudstorm Homepage www.cloudstorm.org. There you soon will find all the slides from the event.

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The term IT Automation has become a real buzzword over the last couple of years. With the economic meltdown still hanging over our heads, previously used potentials such as outsourcing and off shoring being a disillusionment , many IT managers have come to the conclusion that it is about time to deal with improving the “Run the Business” part of their IT themselves if sustainable results are to be expected. This little article will take you through the usage of the new “Automation buzzword” and will eventually show a solution on how to really automate IT operations.

The more IT turns away from being voodoo to being a business the more IT follows the idol of “the old economy´s producing industries” and this brings the term automation into focus. Normally this means giving a good tool to the IT operators (administrators) to make their job easier or to control their work. In other words the IT guys are buying a great shiny new hammer that will drive a nail into wood with two blows as compared to the ten the old hammer required. Or they install an assembly line that take an IT issue from one expert to the next until all of them have contributed their 10 cents to the final result. Of course IT cannot use such old style terms and this is why terms like Data Center Automation or Automated Provisioning describe nothing more than the shiny new tool and terms like IT Process Management or Operation Orchestration represent the optimized factory processes or assembly line approach.

But is this really IT automation?

Well if IT was the delivery of completely standardized products (service catalogue) and their different varieties this claim would be true. But most of the effort in IT operations today is consumed by dealing with non standard issues. This is because a long time before the shiny new tools were available, smart administrators were automating repetitive jobs in scripts, jobs and by using other neat methods – much less transparent, rarely reusable, but still automated. The unpredictable part of the administrative workload is generated when a “working system” (a fully functional productive IT environment) is changed following a client’s instructions or when a previously unknown challenge pops out of the blue and has to be dissected by several experts before it can be resolved. If we shift our focus from the workload created from such unpredictable tasks to the impact their time consuming resolution has on business, we can see that exactly these unpredictable tasks are the major causes for quality problems and can sustainably influence availability and performance over time.

These unpredictable efforts and the impact they have on business performance are not addressed by implementing standard IT automation approaches (installing a new tool or improving process controls). These tools are certainly worth their while and are responsible for ensuring today’s administrators and their managers can just about handle the massive growth of issues they have to deal with each year, but they do not address the basic problem of applying expert knowledge to unpredictable issues.

Looking at the IT industry in general and IT operations in particular, one must be reminded of the gold rush. Not only is the number of IT workers constantly increasing – despite ongoing crisises – the suppliers for this industry and their organic growth are in full swing. And this is why the established suppliers like to sell new shovels to the IT gold diggers – so long as this is possible. Only when the administrators realize that it is impossible to deal with their workload – not to speak of their personal ambition of doing something interesting and creative in IT – will big suppliers wake up and try to change their products. So why is the basic problem not being resolved? Well, quite simply because selling shovels (new tools for IT operation) is still big business and actual change is a big challenge.

Comparing IT automation with industrial automation is for the main part invalid. One should look at automation of IT operations from a different angle. Industrialization in the IT sector is moving forward every day, but since the major part of work delivered in this sector is virtual or at least intellectual, this new angle of looking at IT operations will have to focus on mental abilities like knowledge. Each and every one of us knows a machine that was built do deal with exactly such a challenge. This would be the autopilot in an airplane or other vehicles. This device (by the way first designed in 1914) has to create a result (keep a specific heading, etc.) even when unpredictable and unknown events and issues occur. It is the goal of this machine to keep the result intact as long as possible and react to change in its environment dynamically. Every one of us trusts these machines and these machines do nothing but take and execute decisions that would normally be taken and executed by a human. Only when the autopilot no longer knows what to do or is facing a problem that can only be resolved by innovation, creativity or even emotion, the real (well educated and experienced) creative human expert is contacted.

And this is exactly what IT operations should be like!

We have been working on and with such a machine for more than ten years now to solve workload overflow in our IT service delivery. With an 80% level of automation when dealing with standard environments (OS, network, etc.) and a 30% level of automation when dealing with individual applications, this approach has reached a satisfactory level of maturity. On top of actually eliminating manual intervention and giving our experts the time to focus their knowledge and creativity on interesting and completely new challenges, the faster reaction time of an IT autopilot are noteworthy because they reduce the business impact of upcoming issues. This results in a win-win-win situation for our customers, our staff and our company. Our customers get a better service at a better price, our employees have more interesting tasks to deal with and our company has a better margin.

By looking at the autopilot concept for IT operations it becomes obvious that a new angle of looking at a problem brings new and innovative solutions. Because in an overcrowded gold digging area you can have the best shovels on earth and still have no competitive advantage. An advantage would only be created by finding a new area to dig in or by creating a completely new method to mine the gold. This kind of a new approach is exactly what IT Autopilot for operations is. Looking at other industries and experiences from other sectors has created the difference between IT automation and autopilot for IT operations.

• Matthew – http://www.flickr.com/photos/bb_matt/
• Tony Oliver – http://www.flickr.com/photos/tooliver/
• Nicki Dugan – http://www.flickr.com/photos/thenickster/
• Andres Rueda - http://www.flickr.com/photos/andresrueda/

for providing their images under Creative Commons license.

Blog postings on a conference before the conference is actually taking place are normally very vendor driven. Since I have attended Pulse 2008, 2009 and will now attend 2010 I feel it is time to give some feedback on why I think it is worth a week of my time (and of course what could be improved).

First let me say that I am not part of IBM and that I am normally on a very tight schedule, so going to a conference created by ONE vendor is a rare thing for me. For me PULSE is quite different. So here are my top reasons for going

1.    Get a good feeling for trends in ITSM
The name PULSE is well chosen. There are many conferences on specific IT operational topics, but PULSE is the only one that exclusively deals with ALL topics surrounding the “Run the Business” area. The general setup of PULSE already tells me whether it will be a year for strategic thinking or work on technical details. Besides the “chit-chat” strategy IBM pulls out around the Smarter Planet initiative, the topics at PULSE actually focus on real life challenges and to someone like me who´s head in constantly engaged with tomorrow´s IT operational ideas seeing what is “cool” and “necessary” and “challenging” in everyday life is just great.

2.   Consistent content and people focus
Contrary to other vendor conferences (well as I said I rarely go), PULSE – at least for the last two years and this year´s agenda looks good too – has managed to deal with today, with the past (talking about organically grown IT environments and the challenges they present) and the future. It is a very consistent evolvement. If you take the example of cloud computing. Last year it was all talk from the labs and theory and pioneers like John Willis (Opscode) were tweeting “will I get a press invite”. This year clouds are a reality and even if you do not quite agree with IBM´s interpretation of the cloud the sessions presented at PULSE summarize the current state of IT-nation. And John is back accordingly – now out of the underground with a representative role and with his own presentation.

3.    Qualified attendees
a lot of time conferences are about people looking for jobs, sales opportunities and everything else that is not really the focus of the conference. I have found PULSE attendees to be actually interested in the topic, experienced and competent. And then you get the these open minded people on all levels. For someone like me – who is equally at home in the details technology discussion and the major strategy – this is definitely a key reason to come. You actually get to talk to people – apart from the networking – who know what they are doing, who have an opinion and will discuss it with you. And I am talking about all the IBMers AND everybody else. In combination with the straight forward American debate culture, this gets things right to the point and I love it, if the marketing get cut out a little.

4.    Great networking
Well, this had to be a point. When you get between 4000 and 5000 experts in their fields around ITSM together, there is not just room for business and technical discussions and exchange it is also about building your personal network. It is easy to find people you are interested and even the big shots talk to everybody.

5.    Hands-on experience
The last point of importance to me is the chance to go to a room and actually try something out you have just heard about. You can kick the car before you start ranting and raving about it and you have competent people at hand to answer your intelligent (more or less) questions, and you get all the background information. This opportunity has saved me so much reading red- white- and blue-books just by being able to give an idea a quick try and then being pointed at exactly the right material.

Reading this I am singing too much of a praise, ain´t I? Well I do believe what I said and I do act on it. Still there are some points to improve (let´s see what is done this year). So to any PULSE organizers reading this – please bring back the Guru Galaxy. I never had the chance to talk to 100+ IBM Gurus like Doug McClure and others in one room before and it was one of the most productive hours in my professional life. And while I am at it, why not make it easier for common place people to meet with Tivoli management. Sure they are booked out to wind and dine customers, but the feedback and ideas they could collect right from the base. I know that – if you know the right people – you can get a quick appointment and I have enjoyed so very much. But why not make that an actual part of the conference, a part accessible to anyone who takes the time to get his message or feedback down to a few minutes. Well I have to say Tivoli management itself seemed to be interested. Last year Al Zollar himself appeared at the bar talking to anyone interested in a conversation one evening.

Ok, I am done now. I hope this will give some inside or hint why it might be worth to spend time at PULSE. Of course I follow my own goals, because I would like to meet as many people as possible who are interested in IT automation (that being my own topic of the heart) and thus I am trying to get you there –smile-.