Efficient Solutions

The success of a business or service is tied to the human factors like relationship management, communication, motivations, aspirations, org. of human chain, delivery models, planning of human resources etc – Yet WE (the community) most often than not neglect, if not completely ignore the human aspect of BSM.

So what are the various “Human” dimensions/perspectives of BSM

1. Skills: If you thought you can get BSM/Service Assurance implementations done by a bunch of system engineers with expertise on a bunch of tools; you are heading for a disaster. What you need is someone who can envision solution, understand the organization, communicate the ideas and implement them with agility. System engineers are an important part of the implementation, but they have biases towards what they know best which works out ok if what they know can scale to the needs of the organization.
2. Ability to work with end users is another very important aspect for the success of the BSM solution; a word of caution here – If you heard sales presentations saying BSM is only for VP’s, Directors to know the “global strategic view”; stay away!! BSM belongs as much to the VP’s as it belongs to the technician “Joe” sitting in the Operations Center trying to understand why his walk in the datacenter and him pulling the cable can cause a loss of millions of dollars.
3. P2P of value chain: No P2P is not peer to peer but people to people communication of “value” of BSM solution and understanding the importance of communication of service impacting information to all expected stakeholders.

So, next time you are working on BSM implementation, try this – WALK AROUND!!  Ensure BSM is a part of every individual goals and objectives, the value that the VP’s and Director’s are expecting out of the solution is communicated to as many folks as possible. Also, the value that the technician Joe is expecting is communicated back completing full cycle of “value” flow. That is what makes the business better!! Have you ever seen all of the aforementioned  happening in a BSM implementation? I can bet that the answer in more than 80% of the cases is “NO”; and we ask why 8 of 10 BSM efforts fail to meet the proposed expected value.

BSM will only be “BS” if WE(the community) miss out on the perspective which ensures the alignment of the most important asset/pillar for the success of a business i.e. “Humans”.

Managing vs Discarding events  has been a topic of debate for many years in the Network Management community. Both sides have merits and demerits to consider and while the reader may ask for a specific answer, the answer really is that it depends!! The real question rather is that what factors does this debate depend on?

For those of you who are not familiar with this topic, let me give a quick background. Most equipment vendors, provide MIBs/Off the shelf management modules to manage equipment from fault management/service assurance perspective based on standard TCP or UDP protocols like SNMP, TL1, Socket communication etc.  Various Telecom/Financial giants NMS teams debate the feasibility of managing huge number of events often millions in number in terms of volume per day; correlation/deduplication does reduce events to more actionable alarms but it does not solve reduce the actual root causes. So this leads us to a bigger question, what are root causes?

Does a NOC or Front office technician really care for Authentication failure alarms or those annoying informational and warning alarms provided off the shelf by vendor to “effectively manage the network”?

Following are the organizational factors to consider for effective event management:

1) The size and skills of the Layer 1 support NOC/Front Office: Ok, so if the Front Office is 4-5 guys, can they really handle 3000 critical alarms a day? Do they really need those trending alarms indicating that a T1 might be impacted in 4 hours or would they rather focus on the customer impacting outages? [I know that some would argue the very org. structure; but I will not try to influence business decisions which consider multiple dimensions of the picture, technology being one of them.]

The size of the team responsible for incident management is key for the fault management/service assurance team to ensure quality of alarming meets the expectations of the Organization.

2) The size & complexity of Application platform/Network: Size and complexity of the Application platform/Network plays an important role in defining alarms.

Example: For layer 1/core network – Technicians may want to know all trends to mitigate incidents from happening where as for layer2/layer3 network – Technicians may want only events indicating incidents impacting services.

Note: Understanding the network/applications from usage perspective helps immensely.

3) Customers & Services: Provisioned services and customer associations are important to the overall business objective. Understand them!

After understanding the aforementioned, you will know the organizational perspective and volume management perspective of events.

Now for the most important dimension of the debate on quality of alarming which constitutes of  accuracy, completeness and actionable alarms. Considering this factor, one might argue that only if we manage all identified alarms vs. whatever provided off the shelf – we can reach the goal of quality. Yes, i agree.

One the other hand, few might argue that by discarding unknown alarming we let some information which might impact services go unnoticed. Yes, i agree to this too. But the challenge is to balance these discards to the right level showing events which indicate right impact on the service.

That is why the challenge is not in getting the Right tool, its all using the tool Right!!

Association of solution to how it impacts our bottom line [tactical and strategic (tangible) benefits]:

Measuring total number of customer calls which are not for an identified issue by SA solution. This is the highest priority and would serve as a report card for SA solution.

Inputs on the overall business continuity and growth/volume planning [strategic]:
Defining the trend analysis accountability team member

Encouragement/goveranance [strategic]:
Encouraging the team members for leveraging SA solution to ensure availability of services at all times. Association of individual performance to overall application availability and csi

Updating our customers on identified issues proactively[tactical]:
What happens sometimes is although teams are experiencing an issue, teams do not notify customer right away and start fixing the problem. Two options to fix this, documenting a problem management process with the first step to be a customer notification and communication, or auto email from the tool on the issue. Starting with the former would be a better approach.

Strengths
· Displays health of organization in single pane of glass dashboard; allows tracking major initiatives and revenue streams associated to the initiatives
· Unique solution for alignment of business, operations and IT
· Only solution which reflects aggregation of Service Assurance, Fulfillment, and Billing for a service provided
· Diverse tool offerings and lack of system integrators provides a unique edge
· Integrated solution for SLA compliance, Fault management, and performance management for the entire enterprise
· Provides a strategic decision support technique which can be leveraged for executives, middle level managers, operations and IT staff
Weaknesses
· Accuracy of information displayed is very critical, this is often a big challenge
· Contextual sensitivity of the solution to fit to the environment of implementation is very difficult to achieve
· Lack of thought leadership and awareness in the industry
· Lack of open source tool availability for implementing BSM
· Lack of evaluation techniques for successful business service management solution is very often a limiting factor
· Cultural mindsets of not trusting automated systems for decision making is a significant factor contributing to resistance for BSM
Opportunities
· Early entrant in the industry, lower competition
· Multiple vendors trying to develop tools and capabilities for achieving the solution
· Open source tools are picking up the BSM theme and aligning with the BSM community; this opens opportunities for BSM consulting organization
· Multiple companies looking for aligning Business, operations and IT which creates a big client base for this solution
· SLA compliance is a mandatory for many companies and is a part of regulatory process and auditing standards
· Current economic factors play in and consolidation of systems is looked at as a strategic benefit, BSM fits perfectly in this space
· ITSM, ITIL, Problem management processes are widely followed which makes BSM a perfect solution for these companies
Threats
· Reputation and industry opinion of the solution is getting negative due to phony sales pitches and buzzwords like “8 hours to BSM” and “value of the shelf”
· Lack of standards and guidelines for implementation.
· Lack of sales pitch and strategy
· Investments required for leveraging toolsets in the organization and need to purchase if tools are not existing
· Lack of industry professionals with knowledge of BSM is a big weakness for market capitalization
· Expectation management is a problem with over-hyped solutions in the market
· Executives with old school mentality do not feel comfortable using automated solutions for decision making