Cloud-yo!

DSOM proceedings, Springer and Liquidpub

2009-11-12T16:57:00.000-08:00

Springer asks me to put a link to the DSOM proceedings on my web page (which I had already done), but here is a nice picture of it.

This all made me think of Liquidpub. Liquidpub is a collaborative project sponsored by the European Commission and coordinated by the University of Trento. Liquidpub aims at changing the whole academic publishing industry, and quite cleverly Springer is a partner to it (if you can't beat them, eat them). I'm involved in Liquidpub through my connection with Fabio Casati's group at Trento, and quite excited to be part of it. One of the use cases we're working on is that of liquid journals, that will allow anyone to publish first, and gain acceptance later; embed and value liquid contributions, including contributions other than standard academic papers (blog entries, etc...). Quite promising and a lot of fun.

It's BDIM time again

2009-11-09T23:36:00.000-08:00

The fifth edition of BDIM - the IEEE/IFIP Business-driven IT Management workshop will be held in Osaka, Japan on April 19, 2010 - co-located with NOMS 2010.

And this year we'll be on twitter too.

DSOM '09 proceedings

2009-11-07T10:19:00.000-08:00

The proceedings of DSOM '09 are now available, published by Springer in LNCS. At some point I'll post about the workshop too, which was quite good, definitely better than the last few previous editions.

Splunk

2009-11-07T07:33:00.000-08:00

Splunk is the subject of one of the invited talks at CHIMIT '09. Splunks is an IT search company. Their solution indexes various sources of data in IT, associates rules to them and provides analytics and dashboarding on top of them. There was no demo, so I'm trying to find out what I can from the website, but seems to me that Splunk is to IT what Autonomy is to the enterprise.

Curiously, all the questions that the keynote got were about privacy concerns - maybe not surprising, given that the audience is mostly made up of SysAdmins.

CHIMIT '09 in Baltimore

2009-11-07T07:24:00.000-08:00

I'm attending CHIMIT '09, (almost) co-located with LISA '09 in Baltimore. Interesting agenda at the intersection between HCI and system administration. HCI is definitely not in my background, though it's an interest of mine, because systems should be designed from the user interface in. This is the third edition of CHIMIT, and it started a few years ago when researchers started to get together who had carried out field studies to look in depth at how system administrators do their job.

Web page update

2009-10-15T08:15:00.000-07:00

I finally also got to update my web (1.0) page at HP Labs.

What's left to do now?

2009-10-08T21:47:00.000-07:00

Wave is to the Cloud what email has been to the Internet.

Watch the video. Long but worth it.

Cloud-yo!

2009-10-06T17:59:00.000-07:00

Ah, yes, and I'm now jumping on the Cloud bandwagon too. Impact of Cloud on ITSM that is. Hence the revamping of this blog site, from its title down

DSOM 09 in Venice, Italy

2009-10-06T17:39:00.001-07:00

I managed to let one year pass without a post, which is quite an achievement.

Luciano Paschoal Gaspary and I are organizing the twentieth IEEE Symposium on Distributed Systems Operations and Management (DSOM 09), in the context of Manweek 09 on October 26-28 in Venice, Italy.

This year's theme is "Integrated Management of Systems, Services, Processes and People in IT", continuing on our push to raise the level the research on management from infrastructure to service, processes and people.

We'll have keynotes from Nikos Anerousis from IBM Research TJ Watson, and George Pavlou from University College London. (I know, that's a spoiler, because the program hasn't been updated yet.)

Business-driven IT management workshop at LISA 08, San Diego, November 9th, 2008

2008-10-06T14:55:00.000-07:00

Mark Burgess from University College Oslo, Norway and I are organizing a half-day workshop on business-driven IT management, co-located with LISA 08 - the 22nd USENIX large installation system administration conference.

The workshop will be held on November 9th. If you are traveling to San Diego to attend LISA 08 or any of the related workshops, please consider attending the business-driven IT managent workshop.

This blog is too boring

2008-09-07T13:59:00.000-07:00

I'm experimenting with ideas. Reading back, all I wrote so far is a little (very much actually) on the boring side. I guess I'll mix things up a little, just for fun. The title stays the same, for the moment.

Danny Raz visits HPL

2008-08-26T16:21:00.000-07:00

We hosted Danny Raz from Technion (on sabbatical at Google) today. He gave a very entertaining talk on cost aware service optimization,
based on joint papers with David Breitgand, Rami Cohen, and Amir Nahir.
The main message of his talk was that when one takes the cost of management into the equation, there are non trivial tradeoffs to be made. In particular, he presented alternative approaches to load balancing and how the optimal amount of monitoring overhead depends on variables such as load, arrival rate, and relative cost of transferring information between dispatcher and servers.

Tutorial al BPM 2008 in Milan

2008-08-22T22:42:00.001-07:00

Vladimir Tosic, Patrick Hung and I (well, Vladimir mostly...) will present a tutorial on "Management of Service-Oriented Implementations of Business Processes: From Quality of Service to Business Value" at the Business Process Management (BPM 2008) conference in Milan on Sep 3rd.

Abstract follows:

Management (monitoring and control) of business processes is needed to ensure regular operation, attain or surpass the guaranteed quality of service (QoS), accommodate change, keep track of the consumed resources, and perform billing. Monitoring is used to measure QoS and/or business value attributes, while control is used to reactively/proactively ensure that the measured quantities are within desired (guaranteed) boundaries. To successfully perform management activities, a comprehensive specification of management goals is necessary. Management of business processes can be viewed from several aspects and at several layers of granularity. In this tutorial, we will discuss monitoring and control of service-oriented implementations of business processes, with particular emphasis on QoS management and maximization of business value. That is, we will assume that services implementing business process activities are using Web service technologies such as SOAP and the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and that they are composed using technologies such as the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL). By QoS we will mean technical metrics such as response time, throughput, and availability, while by business value we will mean both financial metrics such as prices, profit, and return on investment (ROI) and non-financial business metrics such as number of customers, market share, and customer satisfaction. The tutorial will first clarify the importance of these topics and why the widely used basic Web service technologies are not enough. Then, it will explain theoretical principles for specification, monitoring, and control of QoS and business value attributes. Examples of these principles are contracts (including service level agreements - SLAs), policies, intermediaries, probes, and multiple request queues. Next, it will provide a critical analysis of several important specification languages, research infrastructures, industrial products, and standardization efforts in this area. Currently there are many more results on management maximizing QoS than on management maximizing business value, but the latter promises better alignment between business and information technology (IT). Therefore, this tutorial will also present a brief introduction into business-driven IT management (BDIM) and will discuss possible approaches to extend QoS driven management solutions into business value driven management solutions. At the end, a number of open topics and resources for further study will be identified. After attending this tutorial, participants will have general knowledge and understanding of the challenges and fundamental concepts related to the specification, monitoring, and control of QoS and business value attributes of Web services and business processes implemented with Web services, the state of the art in the area, and open research issues. This knowledge can help them in making decisions about using some of the existing technologies and/or in conducting further research and development in the area.

BDIM lives on!

2008-08-22T20:04:00.000-07:00

So business-driven IT management lives on through. Jacques Sauve, Kamal Bhattacharya and I are submitting a workshop proposal to IM 2009, fingers crossed. We will also be having a BDIM session at the USENIX Lisa 2008 event in San Diego, on Nov 9th (Sunday!), hosted by Mark Burgess and myself.

If you are interested in helping out with the organization of BDIM-related event please get in touch with any of us. (Do insist if you don't get a response the first time, as you probably know by now I'm lousy at emails).

Friend of a friend

2008-04-03T14:12:00.001-07:00

I have created my foaf.rdf file. Now let's see what happens. The foaf project predicts that I'll have many friends soon...

Tutorial on IT Service Management and Business-Driven IT Management at NOMS 2008

2008-04-02T20:31:00.000-07:00

Next Friday, April 11th, On the last day of NOMS 2008 in Salvador, Brazil, Jacques Sauve and I will give a tutorial on IT Service Management and Business-Driven IT Management (look it up at the conference website under program -> tutorials).

Here's a description of the tutorial. Join in, it should be fun. If successful, we could make a roadshow of it :)

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The importance and difficulty of managing IT resources and services is driving IT organizations to adopt best practices developed over the last few years. The paradigm being used to project IT to the enterprise and its clients, partners and suppliers is the "IT Service". The tutorial examines IT Service Management (ITSM) in its various aspects. The complete lifecycle of a service is covered, including service strategy, service design, service transition, service operation and continual service improvement. Best practices for service management are examined with the help of the very popular IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework in its latest version (v3).
Service providers are increasingly focusing on aligning IT services with business goals and, to that end, Business-Driven IT Management (BDIM) is currently in the initial stages of formalization and product offerings. The second part of the tutorial maps the state-of-the-art in this rapidly emerging field. The tutorial will cover definitions of BDIM, challenges posed by IT-business alignment and will provide concrete application examples as well as a description of current BDIM tools available.
The tutorial provides a mix of practical aspects, recent research results and descriptions of real tools concerning ITSM and BDIM.The attendee will understand and appreciate the terms ITSM, ITIL, IT governance, COBIT, and will gain familiarity with important IT processes dealing with service design, service transition and service operation.

IT professionals - yes we can

2008-03-27T20:35:00.000-07:00

From a CompTIA survey (see Infoworld article) I found out that: 1) US IT professionals mostly classify themselves as conservatives (at least more conservative than the general US population), and that 2) they'd split their vote equally between Obama and McCain with Clinton distant third. 1) seems surprising. Wonder if that goes for Europe too. This polls was taken at the beginning of March, things might have changed since then.

Vladimir Tosic's book

2008-03-17T19:10:00.001-07:00

Vladimir Tosic of NICTA, Australia is editing a book on "Information Technology Aligned with Business Objectives and Values: Integrating Software Engineering, System Management, and Governance". The book will be be published by IGI in 2009. Find a call for chapter at http://www.nicta.com.au/people/tosicv/igi_book. Deadline for chapter submission is March 31st, 2008.

BDIM 2008 program online

2008-03-16T20:05:00.000-07:00

The program of the Third IEEE Workshop on Business-driven IT Management (BDIM '08) is online at http://www.businessdrivenitmanagement.org/bdim2008/program. We will have a keynote address by Prof. Mark Burgess of University College of Oslo, Norway title "Business promises", applying promise theory to IT management.
The rest of the program is divided in four sections on Service Design, Risk, trust, security and economic aspects of BDIM, Service Operations and Continual Service Improvement.
Workshop registration is open at http://www2.dcc.ufmg.br/eventos/noms2008/.

Many eyes

2008-02-17T00:15:00.000-08:00

Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg at IBM research have created ManyEyes, a social experiment allowing people to visualize datasets and share their comments with people either on the ManyEyes site or on other forums. Pretty cool.

Questions I'm pondering right now

2008-02-16T23:24:00.000-08:00

What are the most pressing problems to do with information management in the ITSM domain?
Why the wikipedia ITSM page describe ITSM as "an enabler of IT Governance (or information management) objectives". This is interesting, and it's totally opposite the way I'm thinking about it right now: information management as an enabler of ITSM.
Can't trace back who might have edited the ITSM page to that effect let alone what they meant. I asked a clarification in the talk page

Manweek 2007

2007-11-10T15:45:00.000-08:00

I attended a few sessions of Manweek 2007 in San Jose week before last. Mostly was in for DSOM, where the Bottom Line team's (Jacques Sauve et al.) paper on risk consideration in IT change management got the best paper award (congratulations to them!).

Besides that I have to say that I was not overall very impressed with the quality of the workshop. I found some of the sessions at MACE fresher and more interesting, though the presentations tended to be more about work-in-progress.

The workshop was anyway very well organized, with social dinner at the Tech in San Jose, during which we felt - very close - a 5.6 earthquake that made the whole structure swing. That was quite cool, being at the Tech it felt like a demo of what it is like being on the San Andreas fault.

Italy beats Team USA 6-2 at the baseball world cup in Taiwan

2007-11-09T23:38:00.001-08:00

Slightly off-topic, but I needed to write about, because it's amazing. Read on. I'm behind with a couple of posts on BDIM 2.5 and another visit from Luciano Gaspary and Lisandro Granville, will post about it in the weekend.

Third IEEE workshop on Business-driven IT Management (BDIM 2008)

2007-10-29T13:51:00.000-07:00

BDIM 2008 is on.

On April 7th at Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, co-located with NOMS 2008.

Working on the CFP now, submission deadline will most probably be in January 2008.

Back from RuleML 2007

2007-10-28T23:00:00.000-07:00

I attended the RuleML 2007 symposium at Orlando, Florida, which was co-located with the Business Rules Forum.

My main motivation for attending was to build bridges between the BDIM community and the business rules research community, and I was quite happy with the outcome in the end. The symposium was really well organized (Adrian Paschke of Technical University Munich and Yevgen Biletskiy of the University of New Brunswick did a really good job). It definitely helped that it was co-located with the Business Rules Forum, so that they were able to put together a very strong program with four invited addresses and a very interesting panel discussion. They also ran a "challenge session" that was actually more of a demo session than something along the lines of the trading agent competition. However, it got the audience engaged and made the whole experience more interesting.

The most promising connection at this point for BDIM seems to be with the editors of the OMG's Business Motivation Model (John Hall et. al.). The business motivation model could be the basis of the framework to express business objectives and map IT metrics to them.