ITSM-fu, beware the acquisitions!

IT service management is all about ensuring the warranty and utility of IT assets and services. Simply put, the IT has to support the company's main process well. Incident management, change management and so on are fairly standardized processes that help companies manage their IT environment.
Some changes to the environment are wholly out of scope of these regular, 'busines-as-usual' processes, because they do not originate from within the processes themselves. IT Service Management is a bit introspective.

A favorite activity of growing companies is acquisition: gobbling up big competitors, promising start-ups and maybe something more outré for diversification. These companies are bought for their valuable people and assets, and nowadays a lot of the value of a company is its data. IP, content, patents, customer data, research databases, what have you.

A lot of this virtual gold is in formats and systems which are different from, sometimes fundamentally incompatible with, the buyers own data and systems.

The positive impact of new purchases is therefore determined in part by the ability to absorb new data, and bring it in line with ones own databases, systems and procedures for access.

IT Service Management frameworks need to expand their focus beyond running business-as-usual IT services. Robust procedures and best practices for integrating new IT systems and large, diverse data sets need to be developed as part and parcel of IT service management in general. Running a series of technical projects every time an acquisition is made is less effective for bypassing the regular IT service management organization, because that is where, ultimately, all new systems and data end up being managed anyway.

Currently, a lot of knowledge resides within large companies. Some of them have very strict policies for this sort of thing, and have absorbed a new buy in six months. Others take forever as ponderous projects with lots of external expertise are sent up to digest acquired data. The technical know-how can always be found, however, all the management and governance level experience is currently not distilled into frameworks and best practices, and companies are poorer for it.

As long as an integration process is not properly managed from the perspective of the regular IT-organization, it will have a large and detrimental impact on regular ITSM processes because they are calibrated towards preserving the business-as-usual IT organization, not towards merging IT organizations while preserving the current warranty and utility of IT services. This is a hard thing to do.

The next iteration of frameworks like ITIL need to address the needs of large companies when it comes to adopting acquisitions to maintain their status as comprehensive IT Service Management frameworks.

The current set of processes needs to be expanded. Currently, change management and release management are originators of change in the environment, presuming that IT service management instigates change, rather than reacts to it. New processes have to be defined and integrated with the rest, which deal with imposed change and seek to absorb and integrate new data and systems. The knowledge is definitely out there, and it is up to platforms like the IT Service Management Forum to distill it into the current frameworks. I mentioned ITIL a lot, but certainly BiSL and ASL are up for the same improvement.

The bottom line is that the biggest changes in an IT environment often come from the outside, and the success of the company can hinge on how well these changes are dealt with. IT service management frameworks need to adjust from introspection to adaptivity: ITSM-fu.

Steve's Job

When I started studying computer science it was my avowed purpose to one day have Steve's Job: to be Chief Executive Officer of my very own technology company. Now Steve is no longer CEO of Apple and it feels very strange. I feel a bit like Bill Turner would feel if one day Jack Sparrow gave up on being captain of the Black Pearl. The goal is still there, but it's daunting to see that a brilliant and driven man has worked himself into what seems to be an early grave. I hope for his recovery, and I hope he will be chairman of the board for a long time to come. Meanwhile I'll soldier on, collecting experience that I hope to put to good use some day. Who knows? Steve certainly put a ding in our (digital) universe.

The deep end

DPI, or deep packet inspection, is a hot topic right now. Here in the Netherlands there's a raging debate about everything from net neutrality to privacy issues.

It started with Dutch mobile service providers publicly admitting that they are, and have been for a while, doing deep packet inspection on their customers' traffic¹.

DPI is a technology for looking inside internet protocol packets to find out what kind of data is actually being transmitted. DPI can tell the difference between an e-mail and a tweet and a WhatsApp message, for example.

The mobile providers do this to find out if us sneaky mobile internet users are using services like voice-over-IP and online texting instead of paid-for regular phone calls and text messages.

As I've written before, I'm fairly square when it comes to property rights and fairly pessimistic where it concerns privacy. Deep packet inspection, and post-paying for bandwidth used on skype and WhatsApp troubles me deeply. I buy bandwidth for market prices do use as I see fit, and that's how the provider used to sell it.

The service providers are scared of loosing revenue and would rather conservatively repress free use of the bandwidth they are selling than go with the times and re-focus their business on what the consumer is asking for: freely useable bandwidth. History, it seems, has not elucidated obsoleteness enough, but the providers are generous in giving it ample opportunity time and again.

Now politicians have smelled controversy and votes, and several have taken side with the users to guarantee free use of bandwidth. Count on Dutch politicians to side with the little guy :).

Concurrently, four hours drive south of The Hague the G8 summit has been, by and large, advocating the direct opposite: monitor, inspect, regulate, police internet users and bill the bleep out of those nasty little consumers². If they need privacy they are up to no good. If they share content they are stealing. If they use cheaper service is is a dangerous abuse of market self-regulation and everything should be done to protect obsolete revenue models. Guess how this is to be achieved? Right, DPI again.

So the guardians of intellectual property and the guardians of obsolete revenue models are united in a common goal: to inspect, log, and give consequence to the content of each internet protocol package going in and out of your computer, laptop and mobile, ever.

Interesting.

According to Cisco³, last year an average 237 petabytes was transmitted by mobile users per month. Good luck monitoring all that. That's a lot of packets to inspect. Will consumers be asked to field the price tag of their own repression? Higher prices, less functionality. Great business model.

Meanwhile Dutch minister Verhagen is industriously campaigning against the (ab)use of deep packet inspection by Dutch providers, citing privacy concerns. In his scenario regulation would be used for, rather than against the consumer's interests. Although I agree with his motivation (more votes privacy), I dislike the idea that the providers should be slapped with yet another regulation. My wallet can vote much louder than my ballot.

I'd like to think a daring provider will do the same thing to mobile bandwidth that Apple did to digital music: put a fair price on extensive usage rights, and re-invent the market. I'm not holding my breath though. Who'd dare go down the deep end?


1: http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/12/dutch-telco-kpn-using-deep-packet-inspection-to-monitor-mobile-c/

2: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13553943

3: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/
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