Why data and information management remain elusive after decades of deployments and how to fix it

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Why is it still difficult for businesses to get the information they want in the way they can use? Why has this been a persistent problem for decades?

We recently conducted a panel discussion, held in conjunction with the recent Open Group Conference in Austin, Texas, to explore these questions and examine the state of data and information management strategies. The discussion centers on the latest in the framework approach to information and data, and takes a fresh look at how an information architect can make a big difference.

To help better understand the role and impact of the information architect, and also how to implement a successful data information strategy, please welcome the panel: Robert Weisman, CEO of Build The Vision Inc.; Eugene Imbamba, Information Management Architect in IBM's Software Group, and Mei Selvage, the Lead in the IBM Community of Information Architects. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a Sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Tell me, Robert, why it is that it's so hard for IT to deliver information access in the way that businesses really want.

Weisman: It's the general insensitivity to information management concerns within the industry itself, which is very much becoming much more technology and tool-driven with the actual information not being taken into consideration.

As a consequence, a lot of the solutions might work, but they don’t last, and they don’t, generally speaking, get the right information to the right person at the right time. Within The Open Group, we recognized this split about four years ago and that’s one reason that in TOGAF 9 we redefined that information technology as “The lifecycle management of information and related technology within an organization.” We didn’t want to see an IM/IT split in organizations. We wanted to make sure that the architecture addressed the needs of the entire community, especially those requiring information and knowledge.

Gardner: Eugene, do you think if we focus more on the lifecycle management of information and the architecture frameworks like TOGAF, that we'll get more to this requirement that business has that single view of reality?

Imbamba: Definitely, focusing on reference architecture methodologies are a good way to get going in the right direction. I don’t think it's the end of all means to getting there. But, in terms of leveraging what's been done, some of the architectures that have been developed, whether it's TOGAF or some of the other artifacts out there, would help organizations, instead of spinning their wheels and reinventing the wheel, start building some of the foundational capabilities needed to have an enterprise information architecture.

Getting to the finish line

As a result, we’re seeing that each year with information management, projects starting up and projects collapsing for various reasons, whether it's cost or just the process or people in place. Leveraging some of these artifacts, methods, and reference architectures is a way to help get started, and of course employing other areas of the information management disciplines to help get to the finish line.

Gardner: Mei, when it comes to learning from those that have done this well, what do we know about what works when it comes to data and information management?

Selvage: Eugene and I had a long debate over how we know that we've delivered a successful information architecture. Our conclusion comes out three plus one. The first piece is just like any strategy roadmap. You need to have a vision and strategy. To have a successful information architecture vision you really have to understand your business problem and your business vision. Then, you use applicable, proven referenced architecture and methodology to support that.

Once you have vision, then you come to the execution. How do you leverage your existing IT environments, integrates with them, keep good communication, and use the best practices? Finally, you have to get implemented on time and on schedule within the budget -- and the end-user is satisfied.

Those are three parts. Then, the plus part is data governance, not just one time project delivery. You’ll have to make sure that data governance is getting consistently implemented across the projects.

Gardner: How about in the direction of this organizational definition of what works and what doesn’t work?

Weisman: The information architect will soon be called the knowledge architect to start realizing some of the promise that was seen in the 1980s and in the 1990s. The information architect’s role is essentially is to harmonize all manner of information and make sure it's properly managed and accessible to the people who are authorized to see it.

It's not just the information architect. He has to be a team player, working closely with technology, because more and more information will be not just machine-readable, but machine-processable and interpretable. So he has to work with the people not only in technology, but with those developing applications, and especially those dealing with security because we’re creating more homogenous enterprise information-sharing environments with consolidated information holdings.

The paradigm is going to be changing. It's going to be much more information centric. The object-oriented paradigm, from a technical perspective, meant the encapsulation of the information. It's happened, but at the process level.

Gardner: How do you see the role of the information architect as important in solidifying people’s thinking about this at that higher level, and as Robert said, being an advocate for the information across these other disciplines?

Imbamba: It's inevitable that this role will definitely emerge and is going to take a higher-level position within organizations. Back to my earlier comment about information really becoming an issue, we have lots of information. We have variety of information and varied velocity of information requirements.

We don’t have enough folks today who are really involved in this discipline and some of the projections we have are within the next 20 years, we’re going to have a lot more information that needs to be managed. We need folks who are engaged in this space, folks who understand the space and really can think outside the box, but also understand what the business users want, what they are trying to drive to, and be able to provide solutions that really not only look at the business problem at hand but also what is the organization trying to do.

The role is definitely emerging, and within the next couple of years, as Robert said, the term might change from information architects to knowledge architects, based on where information is and what information provides to business.

A lot of new folks come from data modeling backgrounds. They really have to understand business language, business process, and their roles.

Gardner: Please update us on what took place at the Austin Conference.

Weisman: We had some super presentations, in particular the one that Eugene and Mei gave that addressed information architecture and various associated processes and different types of sub-architectures/frameworks as well.

The Information Architecture Working Group, which is winding down after two years, has created a series of whitepapers. The first one addressed the concerns of the data management architecture and maps the data management body of knowledge processes to The Open Group Architecture Framework. That whitepaper went through final review in the Information Architecture Working Group in Austin.

We have an Information Architecture Vision paper, which is an overall rethinking of how information within an organization is going to be addressed in a holistic manner, incorporating what we’d like to think as all of the modern trends, all types of information, and figure out some sort of holistic way that we can represent that in an architecture.

The vision paper is right now in the final review. Following that, we're preparing a consolidated request for change to the TOGAF 9 specification. The whitepapers should be ready and available within the next three months for public consultation. This work should address many significant concerns in the domain of information architecture and management. I'm really confident the work that working group has done has been very productive.

Gardner: Now, you mentioned that Mei and Eugene delivered a presentation. I wonder if we can get an overview, a quick summary of the main points?

Selvage: Essentially, we need to understand what it means to have a successful solution information architecture. We need to leverage all those best practices, which come in a form of either a proven reference architecture or methodology, and use that to achieve alignment within the business.

Eugene, do you have anything you want to specifically point out in our presentation?

Three keys

Imbamba: No, just to add to what you said. The three keys that we brought were the alignment of business and IT, using and leveraging reference architectures to successfully implement information architectures, and last was the adoption of proven methodology.

In our presentation, we defined these constructs, or topics, based on our understanding and to make sure that the audience had a common understanding of what these components meant. Then, we gave examples and actually gave some use cases of where we’ve seen this actually happen in organizations, and where there has been some success in developing successful projects through the implementation of these methods. That's some of what we touched on.

Weisman: Just as a postscript from The Open Group we’re coming with an Information Architecture and Planning Model. We have a comprehensive definition of data and information and knowledge; We've come up with a good generic lifecycle that can be used by all organizations. And, we addressed all the issues associated with them in a holistic way with respect to the information management functions of governance, planning, operations, decision support and business intelligence, records and archiving, and accessibility and privacy.

This is one of the main contributions that these whitepapers are going to provide is a good planning basis for the holistic management of all manner of information in the form of a complete model.

Gardner: Why will the data and information management professionalization, this role of the information architect be more important based on some of the trends that we expect?

Weisman: Right now, it's competitive advantage upon which companies may rise and fall. Harvard Business School Press, Davenport in particular, has produced some excellent books on competitive analytics and the like, with good case studies. For example, a factory halfway through construction is stopped because they didn’t have timely access to the their information indicating the factory didn’t even need to be constructed. This speaks of information quality.

In the new service-based rather than industry-based economic paradigm, information will become absolutely key. With respect to the projected increase of information available, I actually see a decrease in information holdings within the enterprise itself.

This will be achieved through a) information management techniques, you will actually get rid of information; b) you will consolidate information; and c) with paradigms such as cloud, you don’t necessarily have to have information within the organization itself.

More with less

So you will be dealing with information holdings, that are accessible by the enterprise, and not necessarily just those that are held by the enterprise. There will also be further issues such as knowledge representation and the like, that will become absolutely key, especially with demographics as it stands now. We have to do more with less.

The training and professionalization of information architecture, or knowledge architecture, I anticipate will become key. However, knowledge architects cannot be educated totally in a silo, they also have to have a good understanding of the other architecture domains. A successful enterprise architect must understand all the the other architecture domains.

Gardner: Eugene, how about you, in terms of future trends that impact the increased importance of this role in this perspective on information?

Imbamba: From an IBM perspective, we’ve seen over the last 20 years organizations focusing on what I call an "application agenda," really trying to implement enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, supply chain management systems, and these systems have been very valuable for various reasons, reducing cost, bringing efficiencies within the business.

But, as you know, over the last 20 years, a lot of companies now have these systems in place, so the competitive advantage has been lost. So what we’re seeing right now is companies focusing on an information agenda, and the reason is that each organization has information about its customers, its products, its accounts like no other business would have.

Where I see a lot of trends is that many outsource basic database administration, kind of a commodity or activity out to a third-party where they keep the information architects in-house. That’s where we can add in the value.

So, what we're seeing today is leveraging that information for competitive advantage, trying to optimize your business, gleaning the information that you have so that you can understand the relationships between your customers, between your partners, your suppliers, and optimize that to deliver the kinds of services and needs, the business wants and the customer’s needs.

It's a focus from application agenda to an information agenda to try and push what’s going on in that space.

Gardner: Mei, last word to you, future trends and why would they increase the need for the information architecture role?

Selvage: I like to see that from two perspectives. One is from the vendor perspective, just taking IBM as an example. The information management brand is the one that has the largest software products, which reflects market needs and the market demands. So there are needs to have information architects who are able to look over all those different software offerings in IBM and other major vendors too.

From the customer perspective, where I see a lot of trends is that many outsource basic database administration, kind of a commodity or activity out to a third-party where they keep the information architects in-house. That’s where we can add in the value. We can talk to the business. We can talk to the other components of IT, and really brings things together. That’s a trend I see more organizations are adopting.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: The Open Group.

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HP's eye on Autonomy means it sidesteps RDB and middleware in favor of enterprise information infrastructure

We knew that HP was in acquisition mode for enterprise software, and it seems the $10 billion apple in HP's eye is UK-based software giant Autonomy. [UPDATE: HP also said it's discontinuing it WebOS operations and TouchPad line.]

We'll know more after the US markets close today and HP has its earnings statement for the most recent quarter. But if the Autonomy acquisition is true, it tells us some very important things about HP, its direction and strategy.

Let's look at what HP did not buy (yet). No open source platform and infrastructure (Red Hat), no open source relational data bases (Ingres), no middleware (TIBCO). No business apps (NetSuite). [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Instead HP is apparently targeting the element of IT that cuts across all growth areas: information management. Information is exploding and the places it needs to go are expanding rapidly, including all manner of mobile devices.

HP has the data center server hardware, storage and networking infrastructure to support a converged infrastructure -- from soup to nuts -- that supports information in all its forms. That is information inside of applications, databases, flat files, PCs, Tvs, smartphones, cars, refrigerators, and anything else connected and always on. These days that's just about everything.

This information is the key ingredient and life blood to business intelligence, business process management, cloud computing, integration, overall management/governance, social media and networking, and the web of sensors and embedded devices that will create even more … information.

Apple has its various business revenue lined up around consumer content, media and entertainment, and is doing quite well. HP has he opportunity to do the same to the content, media and data that under girds all business, all over the world, all the time.

We also hear that HP will spin off -- ala Agilent -- its PC business. Smart move. This is a global and vibrant business that will continue to generate nice profits on thin margins, but not the growth business HP needs to be in to prosper against IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft. They too, incidentally, know the value of having a business that earns based on the flow and ebb of data and information. But they are too relational database (RDB)-centric.

If we're in the post PC-era, and we are, we may also well be in the post-RDB era, too. And so then what's the era still going strong? Information, and how to make it strategic and managed for all aspects of business and commerce. The middle of the middle of all that grows is a good place to be. Information is the common denominator to all computing and business alignment.

We now know that HP is basing its future of the business of supporting businesses, and in working to dominate the next growth areas. Information use and management will drive the growth in hardware, networking, storage, consulting, and applications development and testing.

And, back to the future, IBM is the only other firm with a similarly full arsenal to take on this task, with Oracle as the third-place wildcard.

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Interview: Ariba's Jason Kurtz on how IT financial trends are maturing technology procurement and spend management

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Ariba.

A number of major trends are changing the finance game for IT leaders, especially in terms of how they operate like a business within the business. There's a heightened emphasis on measuring cost, service management, hybrid computing, and outsourcing that leverage software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud models.

There's also a recognition that collaboration and coordinated business processes need to expand to far outside the four walls of the company. IT needs then to increasingly support ecosystems and better apply extended enterprise process governance, while striving to save money.

So how can IT adjust to these financial pressures? What must they do differently? BriefingsDirect recently interviewed an executive from Ariba to learn how CIOs specifically are seeing the world anew financially, and how they can develop mature strategies for making IT more central to helping businesses innovate productively.

Jason Kurtz, Vice President of Network and Financial Solutions at Ariba, is interview by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: Ariba is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Kurtz: We've certainly seen several big changes. One is in the resource-constrained world. There are bandwidth constraints to support business innovations.

When I talk to CIOs, one of the biggest issues on their minds is, how do I make sure I am allocating more of my time and efforts in technology that supports business growth and innovation, versus the maintenance of existing systems? That's very different than the focus that you would have had in years past in terms of driving internal automation. That's one big change we've seen.

Two is clearly the adoption of SaaS technologies and the impact that's having on IT organizations. We see it completely changing the way companies think about IT investment, not just capital expenditures versus operating expenditures, but the roles and responsibilities that an IT organization has and how it interacts with its internal customers within the functional parts of the organization.

Three, I think you referenced it a little bit earlier, is not just a maniacal focus on managing costs, but also the adoption and return on investment (ROI) that is generated from IT investments. There's always been a focus on getting a good ROI, but I think it’s a much more significant focus across the organization on doing that, and particularly from an IT organization in terms of making sure that they have the ability to measure that.

Inter-enterprise collaboration

Four was just a focus on inter-enterprise collaboration. Rather than focusing on the internal process efficiency and effectiveness within the four walls of a company, CIOs are starting to realize that the next wave of productivity will be outside their four walls, what some refer to as inter-enterprise collaboration, meaning how an enterprise automates the processes and the way it collaborates with its customers and suppliers throughout the supply chain.

... About 50-60 percent of companies who are moving to a SaaS environment or the cloud are doing it because of the cost reduction opportunities inherent in not having to deploy, manage, and support applications.

Not only do they get the cost benefits of that, but they typically have time-to-deployment benefits and less time-to-realize-value and flexibility benefits that they didn’t have due to resource constraints within an organization. That's a very common trend in the market, and specifically within Ariba’s customers, and we expect to see that trend continue.

Gardner: I'm really interested about this notion about how IT needs to operate more like a business. What is it that IT needs to do in terms of becoming more like some of the other business units or functions?

Kurtz: It starts with a really well-defined set of goals and objectives. Why are we going to undertake something, what are we hoping to accomplish with that, and how are we going to measure that? What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that we'll be able to track success with.

To your point, there were certainly times in the past when everyone was buying into the latest and greatest technology, or something that was new and cutting edge, and wanted to try and experiment with it. Given the economic times over the last several years, the willingness of companies to just experiment and see what happens is dramatically less, and you see IT organizations taking on a much more ROI-driven approach.

Given the economic times over the last several years, the willingness of companies to just experiment and see what happens is dramatically less.

So it's having a very well-defined business case for investments or initiatives that they're taking on, and making sure not only they understand what that business case is, but their internal stakeholders understand what that business case is and are committed to signing off on delivering those resources.

And it's not just an IT approval, but it's a CFO approval in many cases, and they're really holding their internal customers and stakeholders' feet to the fire and measuring on a regular basis what the ROI is for that specific initiative. We've seen a dramatic shift in the governance around that kind of ROI and adoption process with all of the initiatives that we see our customers undertaking, much more so than we would have seen two, three, or five years ago.

Gardner: I've seen where the way that IT is able to cut cost, but also actually increase their influence and impact within the organization, is to identify core-versus-context types of IT activities, and for those non-core ones, look to increasingly outsource or partner.

Non-core activities

Kurtz: Again, a trend that fits exactly in line with that is that we see customers taking advantage of the cloud or SaaS, particularly for non-core activities.

Take, for example, integration. Integration is required in today's world, whether you're integrating within your four walls or outside your four walls, but is that really a core competence that you want to have as an organization. Or, do you want to rely on third-party integration as the service solution providers who can usually do the integration work faster, cheaper, and more flexibly? We're seeing that's just one example of ways customers are taking advantage of that.

Also, of course, the solutions that Ariba provides in the spend management space, we're seeing where customers want to focus on the core enterprise resource planning (ERP) capabilities around finance and operations and leverage tools like Ariba's Spend Management Suite to help their organizations buy better and connect with their ERP, but do it in a cloud-type of way.

Gardner: One of the things that I keep coming up against when I talk to folks in IT is that there’s still the manual paperwork at the spreadsheet level, when it comes to managing contracts and licenses and keeping track of use-pattern licensing, and how to charge back for that. It’s a nightmare for them.

Kurtz: We have many customers who use our spend management solutions to manage their IT spend, whether that’s the sourcing and negotiating of hardware or infrastructure or contract labor or software licenses, managing the contracting process and the ongoing contracting lifecycle of that, all the way through the procurement of it and then the relationship management aspects of it. We absolutely support those processes that IT organizations need to manage their cost within their organization.

We see 80 percent of business-to-business transaction still completed completely manually. We see 85 plus percent of invoices and payments still being paper based or people cutting checks.

Gardner: Is IT really a laggard when it comes to automation at this level?

Kurtz: You would be really surprised how much we see in terms of the world continuing to be a very manual set of processes and capabilities. If you look at it not just within IT, but if you take a step back and look at it on a broader basis, across the market, we see 80 percent of business-to-business transactions still completed completely manually. We see 85-plus percent of invoices and payments still being paper based or people cutting checks.

We see the vast majority of early payment discounts are completely missed. Some estimates indicate that 70-plus percent of all early payment discount opportunities, which procurement and other organizations work so hard to negotiate, get missed. The estimate on what this cost companies around the world is $650 billion in economic impact annually.

The very core of this problem is how an IT organization connects their internal systems, most likely ERP, within an organization to the systems and ERPs of their customers and suppliers to automate that supply chain. That’s where the big automation opportunity, efficiency, and effective gains are, or will be, next is just because the proliferation of all the combinations of systems within your organization, your suppliers, your customers.

Just think about the number of combinations that can be and how it can be very, very challenging and difficult to connect those systems into the optimal or most efficient supply chain.

Gardner: For the benefit of our IT audience, tell us about Ariba. How does Ariba take what it does and then apply to IT?

That community includes our network that connect buyers and sellers, whether they're collaborating with suppliers, looking for new business opportunities, or helping to manage their working capital.

Kurtz: Ariba, at the highest level, helps companies buy better, sell better, and manage their cash better, and we do that in a couple of ways.

One, by providing technology or applications that have capabilities across each of those functions around buying, selling, and managing cash. Then, we have a community that is part of our Commerce Cloud, as we refer to it. That community includes our network that connect buyers and sellers, whether they're collaborating with suppliers, looking for new business opportunities, or helping to manage their working capital. It's a network that facilitates documents, information, and financial supply chains.

Then, we have a variety of capabilities to help our customers adopt and be successful. Some of that’s delivered by us and some of it by partners who plug into the cloud. At the highest level, that’s a little bit of what we do.

How our IT organization is taking advantage of that I think was your next question. We see a proliferation of organizations taking advantage of the ability to plug into the Ariba Commerce Cloud in different areas.

Some organizations start with our legacy, which is spend management and helping customers buy better, whether that’s identifying savings opportunities, identifying new sources of supply, negotiating better agreements, managing the contracting process, all the way through, procuring solutions, collaborating with your suppliers and receiving invoices back from your suppliers to managing cash, including payment term optimization, invoice reconciliation, and even working-capital management solutions.

Finally, for sellers, it helps create a marketing channel, new business opportunities, improved efficiencies, and collaborating with and transacting with your customers and prospects.

Modular basis

The nice thing about the way Ariba works is that you can plug in and use any of those pieces on a very modular basis as you need them. That’s been particularly attractive to IT organizations for the exact reasons we talked about before, which is looking for very specific ROI and very specific initiatives around their pain and needs within an organization. We've got the flexibility to help solve those on an individual or holistic need.

And 100 percent of what we do is offered through the cloud.

Supply chain activity

Gardner: We've been describing IT and its relationship to a provider like Ariba through primarily a consumption framework. But it seems to me that there is also the opportunity for IT to take something like the services you offer with your Ariba Discovery and your ability to use the cloud and ecosystem of providers to initiate a process, and then to manage it as a procurement or a supply chain activity.

Kurtz: This is really the next evolution of where companies are going for automation benefits. It's what we think about as extending the ERP into inter-enterprise collaboration. That’s where companies like Ariba can really help IT organizations.

There are some great examples of customers out there who are doing that. If you think about it on the buying side of the world, take a company like Nalco, which is the largest sustainability company in the world. They had really struggled with lack of automation around purchase orders with their customers and then the purchase orders being delivered to their suppliers from Nalco.

They were literally losing five percent of their orders that they just couldn’t track being delivered from their organizations to their suppliers. These lost and delayed orders meant that they couldn’t bill customers in a timely manner. It meant lost sales. It meant extending "days sales outstanding" and significant customer satisfaction issues.

By leveraging Ariba Solution and the Ariba Network they were able to collaborate with suppliers and customers to significantly improve their customer satisfaction.

A team of people were having to call and check on order status and invoice processing payments and payment status, a completely inefficient processes between Nalco's customers, and its supplier partners.

By leveraging Ariba Solution and the Ariba Network they were able to collaborate with suppliers and customers to significantly improve their customer satisfaction, reduce "days sales outstanding," and cut headcount that were very involved in working on things that could be easily automated.

Let’s take another example from the side of the business everyone gets most excited about, the revenue growth or sell side of the house. Fastenal is a great example, where an IT organization helps extend the services it provides internally to its customers externally to Fastenal’s customers by leveraging eCommerce and the Ariba Network to connect and collaborate with its customers.

Real-time acknowledgments

One of the benefits of the extension that Fastenal has done is the ability to collaborate with its customers to provide real-time purchase order and delivery acknowledgements, which have greatly improved customer satisfaction. It has reduced their purchase order error rates by over 80 percent, and it reduced "days sales outstanding" by over 70 percent, a significant working capital improvement.

Other companies are doing the same kind of thing as Fastenal and receiving really good revenue growth or new business opportunities as well. It is not uncommon to see companies like Fastenal finding 50 percent-plus increases in product line cross-sells and up-sells, and seeing even 20 percent plus year-over-year sales growth within existing customers. Then, we have solutions like Ariba Discovery even finding new business in customers that they have never done any business with before.

That’s just an example on the sell side of the house of how IT organizations are extending and can extend the service that they are providing.

One of the most important things to keep in mind is that at Ariba our mission in life is to help extend or complement the ERP investments that many IT organizations have made. We help extend those outside the enterprise and the enterprise collaboration, whether that’s buying, selling, or managing their cash.

You mentioned a few examples of spend management, but also it’s about helping companies sell better, drive revenue growth, and manage their cash better by automating functions like accounts payable and providing benefits to accounts receivable on the sell side.

If you look at it in those terms, we help companies free up their limited IT resources to focus on innovation, not supporting applications or integration or customization, and focus on driving business adoption and leveraging the core internal capabilities of ERP.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Ariba.

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Architect certification increasingly impacts professionalization of IT in the cloud era

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: The Open Group.

We've assembled a panel in conjunction with the recent Open Group Conference in Austin, Texas, to explore the impact and role of certifications for IT professionals. Examine here how certification for enterprise architects, business architects, and such industry initiatives as ArchiMate are proving instrumental as IT organizations seek to reinvent themselves.

There are now a lot of shifts in skills and a lot of movement about how organizations should properly staff themselves. There have been cost pressures and certification issues for regulation and the adoption of new technologies. We're going to look at how all these are impacting the role of certification out in the field.

Here to help better understand how an organization like The Open Group is alleviating the impact and supporting the importance of finding verified IT skills is Steve Philp, Marketing Director for Professional Certification at The Open Group; Andrew Josey, Director of Standards at The Open Group, and James de Raeve, Vice President of Certification at The Open Group. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a Sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

de Raeve: The primary driver here that we're hearing from members and customers is that they need to get more out of the investments that they're making -- their payroll for their IT staff. They need to get more productivity. And that has a number of consequences.

Realizing talent

They want to ensure that the people they are employing and that they're staffing their teams with are effective. They want to be sure that they're not bringing in external experts when they don’t need to. So there is a need to realize the talent that they've actually got in their internal IT community and to develop that talent, nurture it, and exploit it for the benefit of the organization.

And professionalism, professionalization, and profession frameworks are all tools that can be used in identifying, measuring, and developing the talents and capabilities of your people. That seems to be the major driver.

Philp: Something I have noticed since joining The Open Group is that we’ve got some skills and experience-based certifications. They seem to be the things that people are particularly interested in, because it’s not just a test of your knowledge about a particular vendor or product, but how you have applied your skills and experience out there in the marketplace. They have proven to be very successful in helping people assess where they are and in working towards developing a career path.

That’s one of the areas of certification that things are going to move more towards -- more skills and experience-based certification programs in organizations.

Looking at certification in general, you still have areas like Microsoft MCSE, Microsoft technical specialist, application development, and project management that are in demand, and things like CCNA from Cisco. But I've also noticed a lot more in the security field. CISSP and CCSA seem to be the ones that are always getting a lot of attention. In terms of security, the trends in mobile computing, cloud computing, means that security certification is a big growth area.

There is a need for people too in the building of teams and in the delivering of results to nurture and grow their people to be team players and team participants.

We're just about to put a security track into our Certified IT Specialist Program at The Open Group, so there will be a skills and experience-based track for security practitioners soon.

de Raeve: There is a whole world out there of technology and product-related certifications that are fulfilling a very important function in helping people establish and demonstrate their knowledge of those particular products and technologies.

But there is a need for people too in the building of teams and in the delivering of results to nurture and grow their people to be team players and team participants and to be able to work with them to function within the organization as, for want of a better term, "t-shaped people," where there are a number of soft and people-related skills and potentially architecture related skills for the IT specialists, and skills and capabilities enable people to be rounded professionals within an organization.

T-shaped people

It’s that aspect that differentiates the professionalization and the profession-oriented certification programs that we're operating here at The Open Group -- The Open Certified Architect, The Open Certified IT Specialist. Those are t-shaped people and we think that makes a huge difference. It’s what’s going to enable organizations to be more effective by developing their people to have that more rounded t-shaped capability.

Josey: We see the certification as being the ultimate drive in the uptake of the standards, and so we're able to go from not just having a standard on the shelf to actually seeing it being deployed in the field and used. We've actually got some people certification programs, such as TOGAF, and we've got some over 20,000 practitioners now.

We've gone through the certification program and we've been using and evangelizing, TOGAF as a standard in the field and then feeding that back to our members and, through the association, the feedback improvements to the standards. So it’s very much part of the end-to-end ecosystem -- developing a standard for deploying it, and getting people on it, and then getting the feedback in the right way.

Philp: It’s very much an important part of the process now. TOGAF and IT Architect Certification (ITAC) have appeared in a number of RFPs for government and for major manufacturing organizations. So it’s important that the suppliers and the buyers recognize these programs.

Similarly with recruitment, you find that things like TOGAF will appear in most recruitment ads for architects. Certainly, people want knowledge of it, but more and more you’ll see TOGAF certification is required as well.

ITAC, which is now Open CA, has also appeared in a number of recruitment ads for members like Logica, Capgemini, Shell. More recently, organizations like the CBS, EADS, ADGA Group, Direct Energy have requested it. And the list goes on. It’s a measure of how important the awareness is for these certifications and that’s something we will continue to drive at The Open Group.

In development

Josey: ArchiMate certification is something new that we’re developing right now. We haven’t deployed a certification program as yet. The previous certification program was under the ArchiMate Foundation, which was the body that developed ArchiMate, before it transferred into The Open Group.

We’re currently working on the new program which will be similar to some aspects of our TOGAF program, and it’ll be knowledge base certification with an assessment by exam and a practical assessment in which the candidate can actually do modeling. So this will be people certification and there will also be accredited training course certification.

And then also what we're going to do there is actually to provide certification for tools. There will be certifications there.

That’s pretty much what we’re doing in ArchiMate, so we don’t have a firm timeline. So it will not be available it looks like, probably towards the end of the year would be the earliest, but possibly early next year.

ArchiMate is a modeling language for enterprise architecture (EA) in general and specifically it’s a good fit for TOGAF. It’s a way of communicating and developing models for TOGAF EA. Originally it was developed by the Telematica Instituut and funded, I think, by the EU and a number of commercial companies in the Netherlands. It was actually brought into The Open Group in 2008 by the ArchiMate Foundation and is now managed by the ArchiMate Forum within The Open Group.

The latest version of TOGAF is TOGAF 9 for certification. As we mentioned earlier, there are two types of certification programs, skills and knowledge based. TOGAF falls into the knowledge based camp. We have two levels. TOGAF 9 Foundation, which is our level one, is for individuals to assess that they know the terminology and basic concepts of EA in TOGAF.

Level two, which is a superset of level one, in addition assesses analysis and comprehension. The idea is that some people who are interested in just getting familiar with TOGAF and those people who work around enterprise architects can go into TOGAF Foundation. And these enterprise architects themselves should initially start with the TOGAF Certified, the level two, and then perhaps move on later to Open CA. That will be helpful.

For TOGAF 9 Certification, we introduced that by midyear 2009. We launched TOGAF 9 in February, and it took a couple of months to just roll out all these certifications through all the exam channels.

Since then, we’ve gone through 8,000 certifications. We've seen that two-thirds of those were at the higher level, level two, for EA practitioners and one-third of those are currently at the foundation level.

A new area

Philp: Business architecture is a new area that we've been working on. Let me just to go back to what we did on the branding, because it ties in with that. We launched The Open Group’s new website recently and we used that as the opportunity to re-brand ITAC as The Open Group Certified Architect (Open CA) program. The IT Specialist Certification (ITSC) has now become The Open Group Certified IT Specialist or Open CITS Program.

We did the rebranding at that time, because we wanted to be it associated with the word “open.” We wanted to give the skills and experience-based certification a closer linkage to The Open Group. That’s why we changed from ITAC to Open CA. But, we’ve not changed the actual program itself. Candidates still have to create a certification package and be interviewed by three board members, and there are still three levels of certification: Certified, Master, and Distinguished.

However, what we’re intending to do is have some core requirements that architects need to meet, and then add some specific specializations for different types of architects. The one that we’ve been working on the most recently is the Business Architecture Certification. This came about from an initiative about 18 months ago.

We formed something called the Business Forum with a number of platinum members who got involved with it --companies like IBM, HP, SAP, Oracle and Capgemini. We’ve been defining the conformance requirements for the business architecture certification. It's going through the development process and hopefully will be launched sometime later this year or early next year.

“For the first time we feel like management is paying attention to us.”

de Raeve: There's a very good example [of the importance of staffing issues in IT] ..., and they’ve done a presentation about this in one of our conferences. It's Philips, and they used to have an IT workforce that was divided among the business units. The different businesses had their own IT function.

They changed that and went to a single IT function across the organization, providing services to the businesses. In doing so, they needed to rationalize things like grades, titles, job descriptions, and they were looking around for a framework within which they could do this and they evaluated a number of them.

They were working with a partner who wass helping them do this. The partner was an Open Group member and suggested they look at the Open Group’s IT Specialist Certification, the CITS Certification Program, as it provides a set of definitions for the capabilities and skills required for IT professionals. They picked it up and used it, because it covered the areas they were interested in.

This was sufficient and complete enough to be useful to them, and it was vendor neutral, and an industry best practice. So they could pick this up and use it with confidence. And that has been very successful. They initially benchmarked their entire 900 strong IT workforce against The Open Group definition, so they could get to calibrate themselves, where their people were on their journey through development as professionals.

It’s had a very significant impact in terms of not only enabling them to get a handle upon their people, but also in terms of their employee engagement.

They’ve started to embrace the certification programs as a method of not only measuring their people, but also rewarding them. It’s had a very significant impact in terms of not only enabling them to get a handle upon their people, but also in terms of their employee engagement. In the engagement surveys that they do with their staff, some of the comments they got back after they started doing this process were, “For the first time we feel like management is paying attention to us.”

It was very positive feedback, and the net result is that they are well on their way to meeting their goal of no longer having automatically to bring in an external service provider whenever they were dealing with a new project or a new topic. They know that they’ve got people with sufficient expertise in-house on their own payroll now. They've been able to recognize that capability, and the use of it has had a very positive effect. So it’s a very strong good story.

I think that the slides will be available to our members in the conference’s proceedings from the London conference in April. That will be worth something to look at.

Philp: If you go to the Open Group website, www.opengroup.org/certifications, all of the people based certifications are there, along with the benefits for individuals, benefits for organizations and various links to the appropriate literature. There’s also a lot of other useful things, like self-assessment tests, previous webinars, sample packages, etc. That will give you more of an idea of what’s required for certification along with the conformance requirements and other program documentation. There’s a lot of useful information on the website.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: The Open Group.

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Case study: MSP InTechnology improves network services via automation and consolidation of management systems

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion focuses on a UK-based managed service provider’s journey to provide better information and services for its network, voice, VoIP, data, and storage customers. The network management and productivity benefits have come from an alignment of many service management products into an automated lifecycle approach to overall network operations.

We explore here how InTechnology has implemented a coordinated, end-to-end solution using HP solutions that actually determine the health of its networks by aligning their tools to ITIL methods. And, by using their system-of-record approach with a configuration management database, InTechnology is better serving its customers with lean resources by leveraging systems over manual processes.

Hear from an operations manager, Ed Jackson, Operational System Support Manager at InTechnology, to explore their choices and outcomes when it comes to better operations and better service for their hundreds of enterprise customers. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Jackson: We've basically been growing exponentially year over year. In the past four years, we've grown our network about 75 percent. In terms of our product set, we've basically tripled that in size, which obviously leads to major complexity on both our network and how we manage the product lifecycle.

Previously, we didn’t have anything that could scale as well as the systems that we have in place now. We couldn’t hope to manage 8,000 or 9,000 network devices, plus being able to deliver a product lifecycle, from provisioning to decommission, which is what we have now.

It's pretty massive in terms of the technologies involved. A lot of them are cutting-edge. We have many partners. Our suite of cloud services is very diverse and comprises what we believe is the UK’s most complete and "joined-up"set of pay-monthly voice and data services.

Their own pace

In practice what we aim to do is help our customers engage with the cloud at a pace that works for them. First, we provide connectivity to our nationwide network ring – our cloud. Once their estate is connected they can then cherry pick services from our broad pay-as-you-go (PAYG) menu.

For example, they might be considering replacing their traditional "tin" PBXs with hosted IP telephony. We can do that and demonstrate massive savings. Next we might overlay our hosted unified communications (UC) suite providing benefits such as "screen sharing," "video calling," and "click-to-dial." Again, we can demonstrate huge savings on planes, trains and automobiles.

Next we might overlay our exciting new hosted call recording package -- Unity Call Recording (UC) -- which is perfect if they are in a regulated industry and have a legal requirement to record calls. It’s got some really neat features including the ability to tag and bookmark calls to help easy searching and playback.

While we're doing this, we might also explore the data path. For example our new FlexiStor service provides what we think is the UK’s most straightforward PAYG service designed to manage data by its business "value" and not just as one big homogenous lump of data. It treats data as critical, important or legacy and applies an appropriate storage process to each ... saving up to 40 percent against traditional data management methods.

Imagine trying to manage this disparate set of systems. It would be pretty impossible. But due to the HP product set that we have, we've been able to utilize all the integrations and have a fully managed, end-to-end lifecycle of the service, the devices, and the product sets that we have as a company.

[Our adoption of the HP suites] was spurred by really bad data that we had in the systems. We couldn't effectively go forward. We couldn't scale anymore. So, we got the guys at HP to come in and design us a solution based on products that we already had, but with full integration, and add in additional products such as HP Asset Manager and device Discovery and Dependency Mapping Inventory (DDMI).

With the systems that we already had in place, we utilized mainly HP Service Desk. So we decided to take the bold leap to go to Service Manager, which then gave us the ability to integrate it fully into the Operations Manager product and our Network Node Manager product.

Since we had the initial integrations, we've added extra integrations like Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB), which gives us a massive overview on how the network is progressing and how it's developing. Coupled with this, we've got Release Control, and we've just upgraded to the latest version of Service Manager 9.2.

For any auditor that comes in, we have a documented set of reports that we can give them. That will hopefully help us get this compliance and maintain it.

... We recently upgraded Connect-It from 4.1 to 9.3, and with that, we upgraded Asset Manager System to 9.3. Connect-It is the glue that holds everything together. It's a fantastic application that you can throw pretty much any data at, from a CSV file, to another database, to web services, to emails, and it will formulate it for you. You can do some complex integrations in that. It will give you the data that you want on the other side and it cleanses and parses, so that you can pass it on to other systems.

From our DDMI system, right through to our Service Manager, then into our Network Node Manager, we now have a full set of solutions that are held together by Connect-It.

We can discover the device on the network. We can then propagate it into Service Manager. We can add lots of financial details to it from other financial systems outside of the HP product set, but which are easy to integrate. We can therefore provision the circuit and provision the device and add to monitoring automatically, without any human intervention, just by the fact that the device gets shipped to the site.

It gets loaded up with the configuration, and then it's good to go. It's automatically managed right through to the decommissioning stage, or the upgrade stage, where it's replaced by another device. HP systems give us that capability.

So this all has given us a huge benefit in terms of process control, how ITIL is related. More importantly, one of the main things that we are going for at the moment is payment card industry (PCI) and ISO 27001 compliance.

For any auditor that comes in, we have a documented set of reports that we can give them. That will hopefully help us get this compliance and maintain it. One of the things as an MSP is that we can be compliant for the customer. The customer can have the infrastructure outsourced to us with the compliance policy in that. We can take the headache of compliance away from our customers.

More and more these days, we have a lot of solicitors and law firms on our books, and we're getting "are you compliant" as a request before they place business with us. We're finding all across the industry that compliance is a must before any contract is won. So to keep one step ahead of the game, this is something that we're going to have to achieve and maintain, and the HP product set that we have is key in that.

Due to the HP product set that we have, we've been able to utilize all the integrations and have a fully managed, end-to-end lifecycle of the service.

In terms of our service and support, we've basically grown the network massively, but we haven’t increased any headcount for managing the network. Our 24/7 guys are the same as they were four or five years ago in terms of headcount.

We get on average around 5,000 incidents a month automatically generated from our systems and network devices. Of these incidents, only about 560 are linked to customer facing Interactions using our Service Desk Module in the Service Manager application.

Approximately 80 percent of our total incidents are generated automatically. They are either proactively raised, based on things like CPU and memory of network devices or virtual devices or even physical servers in our data centers, or reactively raised based on for example device or interface downs.

Massive burden

When you've got like 80 percent of all incidents raised automatically, it takes a massive burden off the 24/7 teams and the customer support guys, who are not spending the majority of their time creating incidents but actually working to resolve them.

When we originally decided to take the step to upgrade from Service Desk to Service Manager and to get the network discovery product set in, we used HP’s Professional Services to effectively design the solution and help us implement it.

Within six months, we had Service Desk upgraded to Service Manager. We had an asset manager system that was fully integrated with our financials, our stock control. And we also had a Network Discovery toolset that was inventorying our estate. So we had a fully end-to-end solution.

Automatic incidents

Into that, we have helped to develop the Network Operations Management Solution into being able to generate automatic incidents. HP PS services provided a pivotal role in providing us with the kind of solutions that we have now.

Since then, we took that further, because we have very good in-house knowledgeable guys that really understand the HP systems and services. So we've taken it bit of a step further, and most of the stuff that we do now in terms of upgrades and things are done in-house.

One of the key benefits is it gives us a unique calling card for our potential customers. I don’t know of many other MSPs that have such an automated set of technology tools to help them manage the service that they provide to their customers.

Five years ago, this wasn't possible. We had disparate systems and duplicate data held in multiple areas So it wasn’t possible to have the integration and the level of support that we give our customers now for the new systems and services that we provide.

Mean time to restore has come down significantly, by way over 15 percent. As I said, there has been zero increase in headcount over our systems and services. We started off with a few thousand network devices and only three or four different products, in data, storage, networks and voice. Now we've got 16 different kinds of product sets, with about 8,000, 9,000 network devices.

In terms of cost saving, and increased productivity, this has been huge. Our 24/7 teams and customer support teams are more proactive in using knowledge bases and Level 1 triage. Resolution of incidents has gone up by 25 percent by customer support teams and level 1 engineers; this enables the level 3 engineers to concentrate on more complex issues.

In terms of SLAs, we manage the availability of network devices. It gives us a lot more flexibility in how we give these availability metrics to the customers.

If you take a Priority 3, Priority 4 incident, 70 percent of those are now fixed by Level 1 engineers, which was unheard of five or six years ago. Also, we now have a very good knowledge base in the Service Manager tool that we can use for our Level 1 engineers.

In terms of SLAs, we manage the availability of network devices. It gives us a lot more flexibility in how we give these availability metrics to the customers. Because we're business driven by other third party suppliers, we can maintain and get service credits from them. We've also got a fully documented incident lifecycle. We can tell when the downtime has been on these services, and give our suppliers a bit of an ear bashing about it, because we have this information to hand them. We didn’t have that five or six years ago.

With event correlation, we reduced our operations browsers down to just meaningful incidents, we filtered our events from over 100,000 a month to less than 20,000 many of these are duplicated and are correlated together. Most events are associated with knowledge base articles in Service Manager and contain instructions to escalate or how to resolve the event, increasingly by a level 1 engineer.

Contacting customers within agreed SLAs and how we can drive our suppliers to provide better service is fantastic because of the information that is available in the systems now. It gives us a lot more heads up on what’s happening around the network.

We're building a lot of information, taken from our financial systems and placing it into our UCMDB and CMDB databases to give us the breakdown of cost per device, cost per month, because now this information is available.

We have a couple of data centers. One of our biggest costs is power usage. Now, we can break down by use of collecting the power information, using NNMi -- how much our power is costing per rack by terms of how many amps have been used over a set period of time, say a week or a month. where previously we had no way of determining how our power usage was being spent or how much was actually costing us per rack or per unit.

From this performance information, we can also give our customers extra value reports and statistics that we can charge as a value added managed solution for them.

It's given us a massive information boost, and we can really utilize the information, especially in UCMDB, and because it’s so flexible, we can tailor it to do pretty much whatever we want. From this performance information, we can also give our customers extra value reports and statistics that we can charge as a value added managed solution for them.

[In terms of getting started], one of the main things is to have a clear goal in mind before you start. Plan everything, get it all written down, and have the processes looked at before you start implementing this, because it’s fairly hard to re-engineer if you decided that one of the actual solutions or one of the processes that you have implemented isn’t going to work. Because of the integration of all the systems, you might tend to find that reverse engineering them is a difficult task.

As a company, we decided to go for a clean start and basically said we'd filter all the data, take the data that we actually really required, and start off from scratch. We found that doing it that way, we didn’t get any bad data in there. All the data that we have now is pretty much been cleansed and enriched by the information that we can get from our automated systems, but also by utilizing the extra data that people have put in.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

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New HP Service Manager tackles time and cost associated with help desk productivity

HP today announced the latest version on its Service Manager software in an attempt to drive out a large portion of help desk cost, 85 percent of which is estimated to be spent on personnel. Version 9.30 introduces several innovations aimed at ease of use for the help desk staff, the end users, and the administrators who maintain the system.

According to Chuck Darst, HP's ITSM Product Manager, three key features underlie the updated version: a mobile client, enhanced service catalog, and enhanced knowledge management (KM). [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Aimed at service desk personnel involved in the incident management and change approvals processes, the new mobile client (included at no additional cost) has been built for a smart phone form-factor and is supported on a wide range of devices, including the Apple iPhone and iPad, Google Android devices, HP WebOS devices and RIM Blackberry. Prior to this, users who wanted smart phone functionality had to rely on third-party plug-ins.

The service catalog portal provides an interface to cloud environments, providing options, sources, and methods for provisioning requests. Also, with a customizable mySM dashboard, IT can directly access information when they need it. The new dashboard can tailor data from HP Service Manager or other external sources, without the need of an administrator.

The service catalog portal provides an interface to cloud environments, providing options, sources, and methods for provisioning requests.

The new KM offering provides searches using updated search engine technology and new search forms designed to increase the amount of first-call resolutions and to reduce the number of calls that need to be escalated.

Other features include:

• Graphical “Process Designer,” which allows IT organizations to speed implementations with a new GUI-based workflow designer and rules editor that simplify the editing and configuring of workflows, conditions and rules.
  
• New survey capability, so IT can tune services to better serve its customers with a new survey instrument from MarketTools that captures end-user feedback.
  
• End-user self-services, which organizations allows users to access self support help or place a new support request.
  
• A new migration tool and an assessment tool for migration planning.

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