Accelerating Enterprise Software Engineering with Platformless
CMG Brasil 2011 Keynote por Adam Grummit
1. CMG Brazil – Sao Paulo 18 Aug ’11 The Computer Measurement Group is a not-for-profit, worldwide organization of IT professionals specializing in Performance, Capacity and Service Management Adam Grummitt MA, C. Eng, MIEE, MBCS, CITP - Founding Director of Metron - Director of CMG (USA) - Past chairman of UKCMG - Past member of itSMF UK executive sub-committee adam@ grummitt.com
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6. UKCMG & ITSM UKCMG – The independent ITSM User Forum , sharing best practices and experience in capacity management of enterprise IT infrastructure Independent The group is independent of particular hardware, middleware and software suppliers. It relates to the discipline of capacity management on all platforms and domains. ITSM The group includes experts on service, server, performance and capacity optimisation, as well as communications and testing, in both technical and managerial roles. User Although ‘user’ is in the title, the group is made up of users, outsourcers, contractors, consultants and vendors who meet and contribute on an equal footing. Forum The group meets at a number of events, including an annual conference, masterclasses, regional meetings and an annual forum in the Autumn.
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10. Common approaches to ITSM ITIL for the sake of ITIL ITIL to the letter The great tool hunt The paper chase IT’IL be alright on the night!... Approach Attitude / Trust Communication Issue Technology Focus IT Growth “ a fool with a tool is still a fool…” “ the sleight of hand” “ garbage in, garbage out…” “ That’s what it says in the book” Avoid: Super-hero (sysprogman) Paralysis by analysis (ITIL) Process perfectionist (BPR) Instead: Just DO IT (Real ITSM) Output Focus Goal Alignment Customer Focus Service Change Programme Business Demand
11. Deming cycle (ideal/real for ITSM?) Effective Quality Improvement Consolidation Maturity Time PLAN ACT DO CHECK ITIL V3 CSI 5.5.1 Plan goals and measures gap analysis next actions Do project to implement Check re-measure and audit Act decide on status consolidate timeline for next cycle
12. ITIL v3 – Knot ITIL S Strategy S Design Transition Operation Improv’t Financial M Demand M SLM SPM/SCM Capacity M Availability M Change M Release M Configuration Problem M Incident M Continuity M Security M Event M Request M Access M S Reporting 7 step CSI S Measure Supplier M Evaluation Validation Planning Asset M Knowledge M Technical M Application M IT Ops M Service Desk Process? Function? New in V3 In V2 & V3 Changed in V3 Intro
13. Six Top Entities/Processes (steps) Delivery do it Start, deliver, stop Bug? diagnose it Assets with what CMDB, CDB… Finance do what SLA, OLA… Efficiency do it well Availability, capacity… Change correct it CAB… Y N
15. Capacity management balance & tasks Capacity Management Diagnostic monitoring and metrics Event & Bottleneck analysis Accounting and chargeback Consolidation, FM, outsourcing Virtualization, Clouds Load balancing System tuning Device patterns, usage Process pathology anomaly detection Domain and application architectural expertise Workload characterization Performance optimization Performance engineering Application sizing, testing Business demand: Effective SLAs, BMIs Useful service forecasts Current performance: analysis, alerting and reporting Past performance: trending and reviews Future capacity: workloads & capacity planning Service Level Target Cost Budget Service Workload Demand IT Resources Supplied Too much Too little Too good Too bad Business Demand Development Application Infrastructure Framework
16. ITIL (com)promise Perfection ITIL ITSM Pandemonium Process Procedures, Practice Plans, Projects, Protocols Price Priorities, Profit, Planet Products Platforms H/W Product tools S/W N/W People Personnel, Partners Politics, Policies, Psyche Purpose Paul Wilkinson ABC card deck
17. See you at CMG'11 Dec 5th - 9th, 2011 Washington, DC, USA www.cmg.org
Notes de l'éditeur
It is a pleasure and a privilege to address this keynote session to you all. I apologise that it is in English and hope you can follow it, despite my accent which is Irish. Although I may have in the past been able to make this presentation in a little bit of schoolboy Latin, Greek or French, I fear that I have only poor tourist German and Spanish and no Portuguese. CMG is a world-wide organization and I have had the pleasure of speaking at CMG (USA) over 20 times and at other chapters (some now moribund) quite often, including UKCMG, CECMG (Germany), CMG Austria, CMG NL, CMG France, CMG S Africa and CMG Auz. I have also given workshops and presentations at other events in these and other countries including Canada, Malaysia, Japan, China and Korea. However, this is my first visit to S America, so that now I have been to all the continents (excluding Antarctica). I have been playing with computers since graduating from Cambridge way back. I did research in mass spectrometry using a PDP-8 and early IBM mainframes. I have since been an analyst, designer and programmer for end-users, software houses and as a consultant. I have been in performance management and capacity planning for over twenty years, specializing in performance engineering. I was a founding Director of Metron and now do international strategic consultancy. I was Chairman of UKCMG and I am a director of CMG in the USA. I was on an executive sub-committee of itSMF UK. I give workshops on capacity management worldwide and am a well-known speaker at many CMG international chapters. My book Capacity Management - A Practitioner Guide was published by Van Haren in 2009.
I was not sure of the official theme for this conference, so I chose one in order to provide a generic keynote to underpin all the following sessions. My theme is ‘Capacity Management is a Good Thing’. This is a quote from a well-known book (in the UK) being a gentle parody of confused schoolboy memories of history as taught in England. ‘History is what you remember, not what actually happened’. In 1930 the authors summarised 2000 years of history in 128 pages. They made reference to many Good Things, bad kings and just two Genuine Dates. (55 BC and 1006 AD). In 2009 I tried to summarize 30 years of ITSM capacity management into 218 pages. I made reference to some Good Practices and identified many Bad Practices. I would note that ITIL V1 capacity management book was 200 pages long and written by Brian Johnson. It was summarised into 50 pages in one book in ITIL V2 and then the same text was spread about a bit across five books in V3. Interestingly, ISO.IEC 20000 describes capacity management in a couple of pages of checklists. My session following this keynote is in the form of a postscript to this book.
I was delighted to receive the invitation to give a presentation to this conference. I decided to check out some more about Brazil. I have always enjoyed the different perspective offered by the equal area inverted world map, which I first came across in Australia where they liked their increased profile. I presume the same applies in Brazil. It has the opposite effect on Europe in general and the British Isles in particular. I looked forward to seeing the great Amazon forest, enjoying fantastic beaches, meeting top soccer players and, but for the time of year, Carnival. Even better, given the summer we are enjoying in Ireland, even the winter in Brazil is very inviting. Then it was clarified that I would be giving this keynote session and all thoughts of holidays evaporated as I began to prepare this material. Clearly it was time for some research, nowadays known as Google. The web advises me of the stature of Brazil, being fifth both in terms of area and population. And 7 th in GDP terms, but moving in the right direction (unlike Ireland and the UK) with 5 major companies in the global top 100.
This traditional projection shows the population densities across the world. Brazil is a pleasant shade of green with only 22.5 per sq Km. The UK is dark blue with 224 and Ireland lighter blue with 60. Of course, in all cases, the average hides the black areas where the densities are much higher. In the UK only 10% of the land is under urban development. Judging from my vast experience of Sao Paulo coming from the airport to my hotel, the density here is also quite high locally. In the UK, as well as only 10% development, there is a huge North/South split with the concentration around Greater London in danger of tipping the entire island into the sea. Ireland on the other hand, although it has an East/West population divide (as well as a North/South political one) is much more pleasant to my taste. It is interesting to see the statistics on population growth in the British Isles over the last two centuries. The first census in the UK in 1801 revealed some 10 million inhabitants. That doubled in the next 50 years and again so that by 1900 it was around 40 million (actually 38) and more like 60 million in 2000. Ireland had around 5 million in 1800 which has stayed fairly much the same for 200 years despite all the improvements in medicine, largely due to famine and emigration in the past – and again now after the Celtic Tiger bubble burst.
This is a brief summary of Metron and Athene which I have worked on for over 25 years. Metron was founded in 1986 in the UK and now has over 300 capacity management clients world-wide. Metron’s product is a comprehensive suite of applications called Athene which works across all leading platforms to provide performance analysis, reporting and capacity planning. Athene is supported by development and testing teams, with an ActionLine help-desk and extensive pre-sales and post-sales account managers, consultants and trainers.
Being founded in the same year as Metron and itSMF UK, there has always been a lot of overlap between all three organizations. So I have been involved with both UKCMG and itSMF over the years. UKCMG has produced a booklet to promote its activities and this picture represents a summary of the areas of interest. The summary statement of the organization and its objectives are indicated in the slide. I imagine much of the same philosophy applies to CMG Brazil. I have to say I have always been impressed by what I have heard about the large numbers of delegates you manage to attract and the small numbers involved in the management. UKCMG is probably quite similar, whereas CMG USA has an ornate structure based on times when there were five times as many delegates as today. UKCMG has also dropped pro rata but has learned over the years to live with a simpler life-style.
ITIL V1 was developed roughly between 1986 and 1990 as a series of books (or booklets in some cases). Metron was involved in the review of the capacity management book and the implementation of a Demonstrator system to show an integrated ITSM regime. Sadly this was developed for a mainframe platform (ICL’s VME) which was soon afterwards superseded by Open Systems. The launch of V2 in the mid-90s heralded a remarkable growth in world-wide interest, based largely on the use of the Foundation course and exam on two of the books to generate interest (if only in pin badges). This interest spread to the USA where there was concern about the lack of zee. Sadly, in 2007 V3 refresh was launched which had a lot of good stuff, but was seen by some as just a way to exploit a training market. ‘Where’s the meat?’ ‘ITIL tells you what to do, CMG tells you how to do it.’ 2011 has seen a refresh of the refresh.. ITIL has created a large number of neophytes who spread the gospel with fervour. However, the whole philosophy of ITIL was originally to avoid CCTA paying consultants to rework standard material at each public site in turn and instead issue material at cost. The originators nowadays would have espoused an open source solution with free pdf downloads. The counterpoint to the ITIL theme is played by many, including myself. We all espouse ITIL in a pragmatic way but eschew the excessive adoption of it as a ‘solution’. It is only a set of books. There are many others and I have listed here some I would recommend as being much more realistic than the mildly academic approach of ITIL.
The ‘smiley’ face is used to indicate a slide that is not meant to be taken seriously in any way - apart from the acknowledgement at the bottom for the plagiarism of the next two slides and some cartoons. These have been approved by their authors for use in this session. Brian Johnson wrote much of the technical aspects of ITIL V1, co-founded itSMF and is life vice-president of itSMF. He wrote ITSM from Hell – Not ITIL and the cartoonist was Paul Wilkinson. Paul has written about The ABC of ICT describing the dominant impact of Attitude, Behaviour and Culture.
This slide shows the difficulty of achieving Business- IT Alignment (BITa). I can only agree with this, having been at a Bita conference of 150 where only one delegate was from business and the rest were IT. Note one of many ITIL hang-ups, where it calls itself ITIL but suggests we should all refer to ICT to incorporate Communications. There have been the two main streams of expertise, servers or communications, for some time and although they are tightly integrated in service provision, the domain expertise remains largely separate. Also note that the main misunderstandings are revealed as mutual ‘lack of knowledge’ of each others domain, be it server and communications or business and IT. This is where the issues raised in The ABC of ICT comes in.
This slide shows the dangers of blind adoption of ITIL. Four main kinds of error are shown. The first is ‘ITIL for the sake of ITIL’. This is where there is no real ownership, authority, responsibility or management commitment. It can lead to a bureaucratic overload of procedures and work instructions that nobody uses and leads to the observation that ‘ ...ITIL is too bureaucratic.’ The second is ‘ITIL to the letter.’ Blind adherence to someone’s interpretation of the books. Some people carry ITIL books around in their pockets and smugly quote huge sections from it whenever confronted by any questions about its relevance to this organization. It is failing to understand that ITIL is a good practice framework not a prescriptive model. Third is ‘the great tool hunt.’ The characteristic of strong technical organizations is to immediately jump to a tool based solution. There is loose talk of ‘installing ITIL compliant certified verified toolsets.’ Very often, the characteristic is to implement a tool and not predefine the processes necessary to determine what information and workflows should be managed. Fourth is the paper chase or slight of hand. Large amounts of reports are produced each month detailing lists of changes, incidents, problems. The IT director feels a false sense of security…he assumes that all those reports are useful for something…somebody is surely using them. The process managers declare that the reports are for the IT director, what he does with them they don’t know?
The ITIL V3 books cover a wide range of ITSM issues. The Service Improvement book is perversely called Continual Service Improvement to allow the authors to explain why it should not be called Continuous Service Improvement (as it often is). By this bit of pedantry, we lose the opportunity to use a standard two letter prefix to describe the 5 books. The sixth book was the belated introduction which could usefully have defined a common glossary, process framework and other standards instead of being the retrospective summary of the five books which it was. Section 5.5.1 describes the Deming cycle for a process, where in order to improve the maturity of a process over time, a cycle of improvement is applied. This is summarised as Plan, Do, Check and Act. They are traditionally shown as four equal steps in the process, but it is to be hoped that the DO stage is dominant, rather than the repeated PLAN to do. Note the cog-wheel used to indicate the need to consolidate on a process and leave it active for a while to establish a fully working regime before undertaking the next cycle. This is often left out of this graphic and suggests a continuous cycle of revision with little focus on actual production.
ITIL V2 had an appeal in that the examination focussed on just two books, service delivery and service support which identified 10 major processes and one function. V3 incorporated all the other books in V2 which led to a profusion of processes and functions with a perverse pride in treating them as randomly implemented. It also led to a dilution on examination level given the same amount of training that used to focus on just two books. This slide shows a comparison of V2 and V3, highlighting the changes. It then overlays some standard V3 material which indicates the level of information being described. It leads many to cry out ‘too much already.’ This was much the same as the problem of undoing the Gordian knot, which when presented as a challenge to Alexander the Great, he solved with just one stoke of his mighty sword. In the same way, the complex inter-relationships described in ITIL for capacity management may be addressed and simplified by consideration of the book Capacity Management: a Practitioner Guide which may act as an effective sword .
I wrote a paper on 06/06/’06 about Knot ITIL and a spurious description of ITSM in terms of the perfect number six. Six is perfect in that its factors add up to itself (1+2+3 = 6). I applied this dogmatic approach to ITSM and capacity management and identified many lists of six items, including Six Top Entities/Processes (or STEPS). The slide shows the six steps involved. It has the advantage of simplicity in that the steps can be identified as A, B, C, D, E, F. It also has the advantage of using a standard glossary that is already well known in IT (eg asset rather than configuration item or bug rather than incident/problem). It further has the advantage of dealing neatly with some issues about processes requiring measurement and feedback for optimization. Jan Van Bon neatly puts this point across by asking a capacity manager “How many capacities did you do today?” It has the disadvantage of only being used by me, which demonstrates the key advantage that ITIL offers as a world-wide framework, so long as it is viewed as just that rather than a gospel.
Once the six primary steps are appreciated, they can then be used in the description of other ITSM functions, processes, procedures or whatever. As well as providing a much clearer approach, this would hugely reduce the volume of checklists within any description. One sure way to make a book thick is to define 30 different entities and then describe the interfaces between all the boundaries from the point of view of each entity. This whole area of functions, processes and their relationships is discussed in obsessive detail in the first appendix in my book.
This slide indicates the objective for capacity management and the tasks involved in achieving them. The objective is not to run the most up-to-date IT datacenter, but rather to provide the optimum service for the business to achieve its own objectives. It is a financial business case with some risk insurance incorporated. It has to find the right balances between supply versus demand and resources versus cost. The list of tasks involved covers a wide range and not many sites do them all. Sites vary from ‘triplex everything’ to ‘just in time’ and ‘do more with less’. The implementation varies across domains (with typically a wide appreciation within the mainframe area, less so in open systems *NIX systems and much less so in Windows. The maturity of implementation is typically described in CMMI terms from 0 (inactive) through 1 (ad hoc) to 2 (reactive) to 3 (proactive) to 4 (measured) and 5 (optimized). These are somewhat arbitrary and rarely apply across the board, but are useful to highlight gaps. But Gartner has identified that the sites which show the greatest maturity in their implementation of ITSM in general and capacity management in particular are the sites where IT is held in greatest esteem by the Directors, shareholders, management and users.
ITIL describes an overall objective in somewhat idealistic terms. In practice a lot of real issues arise. These are sometimes mentioned in ITIL but not as the dominant drivers they are. The relevant work has to be done by a limited team in a limited time. Priorities have to be set. Budgets have to be met. ITIL talks of the need for a triumvirate of People, Process and Tools or Products. I have extended the alliteration to incorporate a lot of other factors as shown. I have borrowed a card from Paul Wilkinson’s ABC deck of cards, the 5 of diamonds. It highlights a popular problem. Management Commitment. “ You have my full commitment. Apart from time, money, resources, effort and just so long as I don’t have to be involved.” If you need a take-away from this keynote, that is it. Make sure you get management commitment in real terms for your next steps in capacity management. And good luck in what is one of the most interesting aspects of IT, albeit little appreciated or understood by many. As Aale Roos put it mischievously in his blog to new IT professionals in ITSM and Incident Management (which should have been written on 1 April): Congratulations, you are now among the chosen people at the top of the technology pyramid. ITSM is the most important activity in any modern corporation, without it there would be no invoices and no salaries. IT leads the way in development and builds the future of the company using all the latest technology. So carry on the good work – especially in capacity management.
Thank you for your time and attention. I hope to see some of you at CMG’11 in Washington DC this December.
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