Chris Boos on Automation

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

Talking and thinking about automation so much can be like sitting in a forest and not seeing the wood from the trees. Only recently I have discovered that some of the ideas we are already applying at arago are a step beyond what is generally called IT automation. Therefore I want to give a clear picture of what is possible compared to what is widely known to be top of the pops automation technology.

Automation Tools for Stressed out Admins

As you have seen in previous posts, there are many buzzwords describing automation technology and they are all more or less cool and more or less useful approaches towards making the process of maintaining ever more dynamic IT and application landscapes. But this is not where it stops. All of these tools just take a part of the work process, wrap it into a nice user interface and hopefully standardized configuration. None of these tools actually does the maintenance work, takes the necessary decisions or finds solutions to upcoming problems or adequate answers to imminent questions. But that is what we want, isn´t it? So what we want is something to automatically use all these automation tools to “just do the job”, something to automate the automation.
The best way to explain these different automation tools and their application in IT is comparing IT maintenance to flying an aircraft. In order to keep the plane up and running there are many different tools and technologies that automate the actual flying process. There are also many systems that automate the task of executing all the commands that originate from the flight support systems. These commands are transported to the actual aircraft mechanics where changes in the wing positions, thrust, flaps etc are executed.  All these systems themselves automate manual tasks. A pilot flying a modern aircraft no longer has to manually move parts but uses automation tools to do the job for him. Still he is flying the plane. For tedious standard situations our pilot has another tool, called the autopilot. This system does the job of the pilot in such standard situations. The autopilot uses all the other automation tools aboard the aircraft to perform the task of keeping the plane up in the skies. Theoretically the autopilot would only call for assistance when it cannot cope with the situation at hand and that is when the pilot has to step in.

Autopilot Approach to IT Maintenance

It is exactly the same in IT. With all the automation tools around, you should use an auto pilot that can handle all kinds of standard situations when managing incidents, problems, changes, IT capacity and overall availability. At the core of this auto pilot for IT operations is an autopilot engine. A large set of possible actions is stored within this engine. The job of the engine is to combine and recombine these possible actions to resolve any upcoming issues automatically. Only when it encounters a situation it cannot resolve after applying possible actions should it contact the IT experts and ask for their assistance.
This approach changes an IT expert from someone who has all kinds of good automation tools at his fingertips but is constantly battered and chased by important and urgent issues to an expert who is contacted only when his expertise is required.

003366;">This auto pilot approach minimizes the probability of human error (which is constantly high in IT operations, as there is always more than one task that needs attention in a normal environment), guarantees short reaction time, relieves the IT experts of tedious standard tasks and give them time to concentrate on important and interesting issues. An autopilot in IT operations pushes the job of an IT expert up the value chain and improves service quality at the same time.

Cloud Computing was a big topic at this year´s EMC World in Orlando. I think it is a given that virtualization is a pre requirement for any kind of Cloud concept that can be implemented today and thus EMC is playing a vital role in the Cloud space with VMware. Following the “keynote” on Cloud Computing and virtualization on Tuesday showed quite well what EMC expects. First of all I want to mention, that I thought it a pretty neat idea to turn a keynote into a panel discussion, because that demonstrates the impact Cloud Computing has on IT – it touches every part of IT and thus every part of a major vendor like EMC gets involved.

EMC World - Cloud Keynote Discussion

The discussion clearly showed that EMC is thinking of what can be done with the Cloud today rather than proposing the overall concept and waiting for it to be technically possible. For EMC Clouds have to tackle the space of legacy applications rather than requiring the users to rewrite all their software. In my opinion this is the absolutely logical step and therefore I liked the content showing how different concepts at EMC support making today´s applications “Cloud ready”. The biggest step into this direction is VMware´s latest release of vSphere that enables outtasking of compute resources on demand while turning the hardware available internally into a resource pool that can be allocated flexibly and automatically. This is supported by resource and system management software as well as storage. It is all done by adding management capacities and predefined behavior to the virtualization capabilities already available and by bringing other components closer to the virtual world by adding direct control over hardware though interfaces to the management program driving and allocating the virtual resources. This concept creates a resource pool out of all involved components (storage, network, compute) that can be allocated dynamically. The feature that tops up the concept is the ability to externalize such services if peak loads require additional resources.

By simulating the environments we are using today and bringing this simulation into such an dynamic space a pre Cloud becomes reality very quickly. This is what can realistically be done today and this is what makes Cloud concepts available to legacy application, short term project requirements as well as test and integration environments.

For my taste the fact that the Cloud concept would require the reprogramming of all software was a little overdone. Yes, I too believe that there is no way dynamic parallelization of computation cannot be reached unless you write programs for such a kind of super dynamic scheduler (like Google does).But this is where computing is headed in the long run. To try and reimplement everything on the spot is absolutely unrealistic and therefore the concepts of bringing at least some of the benefits of Cloud concepts to today´s applications and architects is great. But to say that reimplementation can be avoided in a very long term perspective is just incorrect. I think we should have learned something from the immense cost generated by maintaining the big monolithic legacy apps we do rely on today (If you want something, you make something new because changing the old think to look new will create more cost through maintenance in the long run).

Last but not least the EMC team emphasized many times, that the VMware approach created much less dependencies for customers than giving their applications into the proprietary domains of Google App Engine (where your program only runs with the Google API) or Amazon EC2 (where the virtual machine itself is hard to retrieve once deployed). This is a valid point. And despite the hype created around Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine this addresses the fear of many business users. On the other hand one should state too that EMC as well is building features into their “Cloud OS” that make a customer “want” to use EMC hardware and other EMC preferred services. All in all EMC is doing a good job of opening up the specs and standards for these kind of dependencies enabling other providers to step into the world of VMware and be just as well integrated.

In the long run I am sure standards for Cloud machine images, templates and Cloud programming interfaces will evolve. I think this will be an evolutionary process rather than the job of a standardization committee, because the Cloud idea spreads so quickly and many many different concepts are being tried out every day. Survival of the fittest is not the worst thing to happen here.

As one should save the best for last I can say now that EMC management and engineers obviously understand the need for more effective automation technologies. The discussion returned to the point that such very dynamic infrastructures and environments simply can no longer be managed manually and that the current toolsets available in system and resource management will have to take major steps towards actually automating the maintenance process fully. So in the eyes of EMC and VMWare management and engineering the operational auto pilot discussed in this blog many times and actually implemented in the aAE (arago Automation Engine) is not just a good way for cost cutting or freeing up resources for innovation and change, but becomes an absolute necessity in a dynamic environment where the speed of change is too high to be reflected in human experience. Thus I conclude that the idea of preserving these experiences within an automation engine as described before is the best way to protect investment into these experiences.

You will definitely find more information on Chuck´s Blog and for a more day to day recap you can look at Len´s Blog

I am sitting in the blogger´s lounge at EMCWorld 2009 – a really cool idea from ZDNet. After half a day of the conference I must say I am really impressed. In his keynote Joe Tucci (CEO EMC) talked about the challenges presented by the current economic downturn and EMC´s reaction to them. Technologically they concentrate on the areas of:

1. 000080;">Storage
   storage virtualization and the trend towards SSD
2. 000080;">information management
   where they are moving from a content management platform or system towards an information management framework with multiple repositories
3. 000080;">security
   though virtualization and HA solutions on the one side and a group of solutions around identity management and security on the other side
4. 000080;">clouds
   strategy for bringing the dynamic and flexible aspects of a cloud infrastructure to legacy applications while keeping security, reliability and control at the level they are today and promoting automation as a key point in making dynamic infrastructures possible on a large scale

Paul Maritz (CEO vmware) elaborated on the latter point by giving an actual demonstration of vSphere – vmware´s brand new “cloud operating system”. Even thou I think the term cloud OS is used a little prematurely, the concepts of delivering a dynamic management solution with the virtualization solution is obviously well designed and a great next step. This “cloud OS” will automatically manage resources from a service perspective – including automated provisioning and SLA tracking. This resource management does not only include computing power as before, but now also extends towards storage (dynamically moving storage, WOW) as well as automated HA, user based environment templates and the possibility to externalize resources on demand. To me this approach and the actual availability of the solution shows how a technology driven company can harvest the fruits of a clean and diligent design process even in turbulent times while at the same time making a big contribution to its customers cost reduction scenarios. 

Joe Tucci also made a very strong commitment towards EMC remaining a technology company and their strategy within the economic downturn. To him this means

• getting closer to the customers,
• securing talent,
•  no cuts in R&D budgets,
• increase in cash reserves,
• opportunistic  M & A as was as
• strategic investment.

To me this sounds like a viable strategy of a well positioned company.
Client virtualization and automated operating were put out as the next “hot things” they will be dealing with.

And I can tell you that I found some people to talk to about operating auto pilots and automation beyond dynamic provisioning really quickly. I will be going to an engineering round table this afternoon and I will surely keep you posted.

EMC World 2009

At this year´s JAVA development conference (JAX 09) I had the honor and pleasure of giving the keynote presentation for the track on IT in the financial industry. As this touches many of the concepts we deal with in this blog, I want to share this presentation with you and maybe have a good discussion about:

1. Why clouds are cool, but average administrators hate them.
2. Why SOA can be a heaven or hell.
3. Why no one should think that writing code is a creative process.

Enjoy the presentation.

  Chris

Chris Boos is attenting the IT Automation Summit on BrightTALK.com on 7th of April 14:00 CET. All webcasts will be recorded and are available for download afterwards.

The history of delivering IT Services is certainly an evolutionary process. This is not even considering the huge evolution that has taken place in the technology available to deliver such services. The evolution in IT delivery or IT operation is more or less an evolution of tools. It began with the host operating systems where much of the software that came with the computer was only used to manage the machine itself. Skipping many steps, these tools went through the various stages of network and system management to business service management or business transaction management tools. The latter’s claim to fame is actually achieving what business service management set out to do – making IT manageable from a business point of view.

Automation Auto Pilot

Speaking abstractly all these tools are automation tools. They automate several steps of work that an IT operator, administrator or delivery manager previously had to perform manually. But they are still just tools. They make life easier for the one who is doing the job, but would you call an industrial hammer an automation tool? Therefore I think it is time to take a look into the fish tank of (IT-)tools and approaches available today and show how evolution points towards engines (not so much the tools) that actually decide what to do and then take the action autonomously – only asking for permission, reassurance or assistance if required by process or if no solution is available to them. Such an engine could be called an automation auto pilot and is sitting on top of all the tools available to IT experts today.

We have been developing and using such an engine for more than ten years now and have achieved very good results in quality improvement, availability of documentation as part of compliance and cost cutting. But why do I most strongly believe that this is not an exotic idea, but the logical next step?

If we focus on the two dimensions IT management tool that can takes actions automatically or facilitate taking complex actions on a complex IT and application landscape, we end up with a trigger axis and an approach axis. The trigger axis describes under what conditions an action or tool invocation is triggered. The approach axis describes what kind of action will be taken and how flexible these actions can be taking the trigger conditions into account.

At the left of the trigger axis (x) we place “scheduled”, in the middle “event triggered” and at the right automated. This means that a tool positioned to the far left of the trigger axis will take action at a predefined time. Tools placed in the middle will take action if certain events occur and tools to the far right will take action as they become necessary. On the approach axis we placed “standardized” at the bottom, “rationalized” in the middle and “dynamic” at the top. This means that tools that perform predefined actions without reacting to any information gathered while executing (e.g. cron scripts), would be placed on the bottom, tools following a predefined process but building branches into the process that take current conditions into account would be placed in the middle and tools that combine the best process to be taken for the given situation out of a pool of possible actions are placed on top.

Tool Classification Dimensions

Placing the tools and concepts currently on the market onto these axes will show a clear evolutionary development from a scheduled standardized batch process to an engine that combines possible actions to a solution as the situation requires. The auto pilot function that I was talking about earlier is such a tool that would be placed up and to the right on our chart of automation evolution.

In the chart presented below, the placement of “hot” topics such as data center automation, work load automation and even run book automation are much more “old school” in their approaches and are therefore placed accordingly. Our auto pilot engine clearly takes up the “new approach” position – with a very notable difference – we have been running a successful business on this model for a long time. Thus this is not a fancy idea, but a valid approach and current trends in management software are pointing to exactly this approach.

Automation Auto Pilot as Trend

Maybe this “sorting of the tools” article has helped a little to place other thoughts on automation published here. It will certainly be necessary when we look at why dynamic automation becomes more and more unavoidable as complexity and change rate increase. E.g. following the current discussions on cloud computing from the Atlanta cloud camp organized by John Willis or even the dynamically evolving enterprise clouds as described by Mark Masterson, an automation auto pilot is the only way to keep track of an IT landscape that is fully distributed and dynamic. Just solving the problem of distributed computing and dynamic resources from an OS point of view by creating good cloud managers or VMs does not solve the problem of keeping business applications alive and available with proper execution quality and correct business results. If any of you have ever configured e.g. the Tivoli Correlation Engine in an Enterprise console successfully you know how much work that is. Putting your environment in a cloud would essentially mean you would have to review all correlation rues every time the cloud manager changes your environment. Not possible you say – well that was only the correlation engine. No other system management, IT service management or business service management tool or visualization was even touched. So you see, something will have to be done in order to keep the actual delivery of business services up and running when moving to a fully dynamic environment – this something is an autonomous automation engine or an automation auto pilot.

The terms “tool” and “automation” do not go well together. Taking a look at other more mature sectors a tool is an item used by either a human or a machine and automation in this context it means that work is done by a machine rather than by a human.

Still the IT industry is lively talking about automation tools and a great many to start with. For a long time I could not get a grip on what all these tools were good for and why so many categories are around. This is why you find a map of the classes of tools around. I chose two dimensions to lay out the map of tools. Since we are talking about a map of tools naturally the users of these tools are the first dimension. The second dimension is the part of IT the tool in question is focused upon.

The user dimension starts at actual IT administrator, continues with business users and ends at managers. The IT dimension starts at the facility level going on to infrastructure, network, systems, services, applications and ending in business processes. You will find this map in the figure included below.

Automation Tool Map

Looking at this map, I have come to the following conclusions:

1. NSM covers the smallest piece of the map while being the oldest toolset around. When NSM tools came out they were supposed to be used by everyone and save the world. Becoming a mature setup of tools they have clearly found their niche and will definitely stay and important piece in the big IT puzzle. Not much revolution is to be expected here, but some continuous refinement can still bring big steps in effectiveness of these tools.

2. BSM on the contrary covers the biggest part of the map and surely is one of the newer approaches. I think BSM is a great idea but it has to go though some iterations of focusing in order to be applicable to an average IT and business landscape. Introducing BSM not – the way in should be – means turning everything inside out and even though the economic crises does put a lot of pressure on companies businesses have more important things to focus on that having themselves turned inside out by a changing IT.

3. BTM is a practical approach to achieve some of the goals – especially in the accounts of visualization and quality management – set by BSM without having to turn over every stone in our IT.

4. I really do not understand the hype around DCA and Run Book Automation. While DCA seems a logical step (is not IT centralization itself, so its management should be centralized) Run Book Automation actually solves the “problem of missing documentation” – maybe. Other industries would never start their processes without having a clear set of procedures in place how to handle foreseeable situations. Imagine what we would tell an energy provider running a nuclear power planed if they came up and says “sure, we develop best practices how to react to glitches in the systems we go”. No way Hose! So the big buzzword of Run Book Automation is just a fancy way to get the sometimes anarchic IT guys to document what they are doing…

5. All these tools claim to be focused on automation and most of them may carry some minor seeds of automation in them, but they are in the end clearly focused to be tools. They want to be used by someone (or something) to perform their tasks and they do not act by themselves. So in this map of software used in IT delivery or IT operations the actual automation engine is still missing.

003366;">Part of the latter conclusion makes me happy, because this means we are one of the few people who actually have a machine that operates It by itself and does it automatically at that part. On the other hand this give me the creeps, because this means a lot of people and companies are not ready yet to have IT delivery run in large part autonomously. Looking at al other industries this is the way they have gone and I do think it is about time we get the noting in the IT world.. Let´s get rid of all the boring tasks and let them be handled by the machines. Yes this means giving some control to an engine but on the other hand it means your business is much more in control because reaction becomes predictable and is documented, as well as IT jobs become more interesting since the everyday stuff is nothing IT gurus have to deal with.

For those of you not quite so familiar with IT delivery buzzword bingo here is the elaboration of the abbreviations: NSM = Network and Systems Management – tools aimed at facilitating tasks performed by network and system administrators. ITSM = IT Service Management – tools aimed at supporting the ITIL Service management processes from a delivery point of view. RBA = Run Book Automation – tools aimed at giving staff the proper procedure for handling a given situation. DCA = Data Center Automation – tools used to perform tasks from a central point of administration rather than having to connect to all servers or services involved. ITPM = IT Process Management – tools used to track and escalate processes and communication between the silos of It delivery and also business users. WLA = Work Load Automation – a much spoken set of tools to automatically provision IT resources and distributing workload across these systems as required. BPM = Business Process Management – tools used to improve IT´s alignment with business processes though modeling It from a business point of view. BSM = Business Service Management – a set of tools used to manage IT services from a pure business point of view. BTM = Business transaction Management – a quite new approach to tools created to manage IT with business transaction as the controlling parameter. This seems to be a practical approach to narrow down the too broad view of BSM as you can read at Doug McClure´s blog.

Talking about automation on the way to IBM PULSE 2009 got me some interesting insights. I did know that most people do not really feel comfortable, when a machine actually acts autonomically. But that most people would expect to actually get a tool that forces them to click though their whole IT infrastructure and application landscape in order to DO something was really astonishing to me.

Why? Well because we have been working so differently for many years now. Thus I feel obliged to give some examples of automating tasks in an environment like the one I have been writing about for almost a year now. Maybe some of the things you found quite interesting will become clearer after reading this practical example.

Ok, let us think you would want to automate the task of deleting a user across your IT landscape. A rule we have entered years ago and have been using ever since. In an automated environment like ours all you would have to do is set an „issue“ onto the automation engine bus that says „delete user XYZ‘. This issue will be set upon the graph of the IT dependency model and look for any node that has rules attached to it that know how to handle „something“ with the data „user“ and the action „delete“. For this issue the graph of the IT dependency model will reduce itself to these nodes that know how to handle it. The issue will then map out a road though the nodes –this is what the engine does and this is the real secret behind automation. Each node the issue visits will perform some action – in accordance with the rules – and will return some input to the engine. The engine can  make out whether it needs to add additional nodes onto the issue’s travel list, remove nodes – because some other action has already taken care of the demands of the issue requesting action, or whether the issue in resolved, because there are not more actions to be taken. If the latter is the case the engine will look for any other issue that may be able to use or issue’s data and if that isn‘t the case, dismiss the task as completed.

So what does this mean practically?

For every OS you have to write one action rule that specifies how to delete a user. For every kind of directory or IAM application you have running you will have to write a rule respectively. That‘s it! These are probably scripts you have anyway and you simply upload them into the engine with the rules. The engine will determine what nodes the rule should attach itself to and will execute the rule for any issue that seems suitable.

So compared to a system where you actually have to define what to do where before it will delete a user across your infrastructure this is remarkably simple. Not only the time for deleting a user will go down from 40 minutes to 1 as some other vendors say, but the time for installing this neat gadget will go down from 2 days to 0 because the rule is already there for most OS and IAM solutions. If you really want to add some exotic system, then you will probably need 10 mins to do so.

So the next logical step in automation is not just improving the tool that lets you execute some commands, maybe remotely or maybe with a good archive of scripts, but to have an intelligent tool that will actually work for you. You tell it the result you want, in this case remove user, and it will find out how to go about to achieve this result.

Deleting a user is a change and most likely an unplanned one as such. The same technology can also be applied when reacting to incidents, problems or user error reports. Then you can tell the engine that the desired end result is that you want the problem to go away. It will find out what to do where in your IT infrastructure by itself and it will do it – well maybe it will go and ask you for permission though integration into a process management system, (that is the way we do it) for some critical actions, but other than that it actually goes on and does the job – it actually figures out what to do, follows through and documents all actions taken.

So there is not much difference between what you use as automation today and what AUTOMATION can actually do from a „do I have to be afraid“ point of view. But there is a great difference in result. An automation technology, that will actually figure things out will much better align to business requests, work with a changing IT landscape and will integrate into all the ITIL operating processes.

000080;">Got you interested? See some examples at IBM PULSE 2009 tomorrow. Conference Center 123, 3:30-4:40pm. See you there….