Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their weaknesses irrelevant, says the Management Guru Peter Drucker. It creates harmony in working together - equilibrium in thoughts and actions, goals and achievements, plans and performance, products and markets. It resolves situations of scarcity, be they in the physical, technical or human fields, through maximum utilization with the minimum available processes to achieve the goal. Lack of management causes disorder, confusion, wastage, delay, destruction and even depression. Managing men, money and materials in the best possible way, according to circumstances and environment, is the most important and essential factor for a successful management.

On the other hand, that delay has brought about an interesting answer to the finger pointing question. Ideally, we’d want some way to tell what’s wrong in a system regardless of which tool was used. Put another way, we’d want to get the same conclusion about what’s wrong regardless of which tool is used.

To my mind, these means we need something more low-level than ITIL as a standard. A sort of commonly accepted best practices for IT diagnosing. You never get these things 100 or even 80& perfect: look at all the contention in hardware benchmarking. On the other hand, having something is better than nothing at all.

While it’s unfair to load more work on the desk of the newly formed Open Management Consortium, this topic is something that’d fit well with their goals. One of those goals, as I see/understand it, is establishing interop, including semantically, between different OSS systems management stacks (and comercial if The Big 4 want to play along).

As for Cisco, I must admit that I don’t know them, their plans, and intentions well enough to even speculate. But, climbing the value stack into the C*O office is a safe bet for most any systems management vendor, open or closed source. As with so many pieces of software, once you get a hold of all the raw data, you want to do something valuable with it beyond respond to troubling states. Doing something with that data that involves the business side of the house — like BSM — is not only more exciting than alerting when a file system is full, but worth more money.
Most vendors want to have a verticle hold on the IT in their customers shop. Who doesn’t want to be Microsoft?

Does flexibility and openness mean complexity? How much should vendors contribute out of the box versus allowing customers to implement what works for them?

I’m all for both - flexibility, openness and contributed content (from the vendor, partners and community of users). This is where I hope to make a difference.

The thing I always heard about hurting the most were the rogue groups with their own OSS tools outside the “group” who was supposed to provide systems management services. This leads to even more finger pointing with the NOC or support group when “my tool says this” and “our tool says that”. Well integrated into IT Operations and the business, OSS systems management have a place for sure and can serve as a stepping stone into other solutions as the needs of the business change.

Do you share similar thoughts on Cisco as you do for Microsoft? Do you see and OSS systems management groups climbing the stack into the process and business (BSM/BAM/BPM) areas?

Doug
BSM/ITSM Blog: http://dougmcclure.net