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:

[View with PicLens]

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.

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.

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.