Dilbert on CMMI

eTOM and ITIL

It's interesting how two worlds co-existed in the large Telco environments but did not have much interaction... I am talking about IT and Telecom, even from the consulting point of view, we would only deal with IT but never touch the telecom management areas and each side had something tha the other side needed. Lately we see more interaction between the two areas and it is interesting how more advanced IT was in the service support areas with ITIL. Service Desk software are badly needed in the telecom side of the large companies and now ITIL is officially part of eTOM v8, addressing the service support areas. eTOM addresses the entire Telecom enterprise, however, it is remains higher level than ITIL in terms of detail. On the other hand, it gives a good of the Telecom company structure. In smaller telecom companies (and also younger companies) we have done for example provisioning control through service desk in the past and the telecom guys were able to keep the provisioning side organized and simplified processes and their life in general... however, looking at large telecoms, some of them struggle to keep track of the situation with little homegrown applications left and right but given the increase of demand for data networks and managed services now the situation gets more serious and is a critical revenue channel that needs to be optimized.
Shown below are the areas that ITIL v3 addresses (click on the image to enlarge):

Having said that though, people have to realize that they need to share information, centralize the information and manage the processes end-to-end in the Telecom company, and that is where the CTO and CIO roles are very critical in getting this through, especially in ex state owned telecoms where there was a big gap between upper and middle management.
HP is ahead of the competition and has developed ISM, a framework that combines eTOM and ITIL and uses the BTO software in combination with the traditional HP Telecom Management software (e.g. Temip) to address that space, as shown below:


The core of the solution is Service Manager along with the uCMDB for service support and the Parallon SLA Bus has evolved as an enterprise Telecom SLM solution and goes hand-in-hand with the HP BTO products in the complete SLM solution.








The Parallon SLA Bus is integrated with HP Operations Manager, Service Manager and uCMDB to manage complex Telecom SLAs. A couple of screen shots below of the SLA Bus v3.0 coming out in February:

Further reading for eTOM and ITIL:

Paper “TR-143 Building Bridges: ITIL and eTOM by TMForum”, the ITIL incident management processes are part of eTOM framework and the adaptation of these processes is NGOSS compliant.

Also, another reference paper that also includes the configuration management part is

“GB921V: Enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM), The Business Process Framework, Release 6.0”

Both papers above are available through TMFORUM.

Burj Dubai Tower

Burj Dubai was inaugurated today, that is the tallest building in the world at 828 meter with 168 floors. Some Parallon consultants have witnessed the rising of Burj Dubai since 2006 when we started the upgrade of Etisalat's NMS systems and today we have witnessed it's completion as we are delivering one of the largest ITSM projects in the MEMA region, the Etisalat SLM solution.
It was sad to see how the news about Dubai were misrepresented in the world media during the last month. A company asking to freeze it's debt payments for six months was interpreted that Dubai is going down and it's the end of it... Dubai went through the hard times exactly a year ago and now it is on it's way to recover. Yes, it will take a while before it comes back to the high growth it had two years ago but the important thing is that it is on it's way up. Burj Dubai was renamed Burj Khalifa in honor of the UAE President and ruler of Abu Dhabi Sheikh Khalifa.

Youli Bogdanou joined Parallon

Youli Bogdanou has joined the Parallon team as a software developer working on the development and support of Parallon SLA Logic Bus and the Paralert products.

Dubai coming back!!! Abu Dhabi taking off...

A year ago Dubai was highly affected by the economic crisis and some journalists jumped to the opportunity of exaggerating the situation. However, I am glad to say that Dubai economy is coming back. People start pouring in (and traffic is bad again..) but this is a good sign. Roads and malls are packed and Dubai is growing again at fast pace and feels great being in this vibrant city. Our business is growing fast in the UAE given the needs of companies that are growing and all the effort we have put in the past years to break into the Middle East market are now paying off.


Abu Dhabi has been developing like crazy the past few years. It feels like Dubai around 2003 and it feels like it has been taxiing in the past years and just took off. The Formula 1 race few weeks ago was the lift off sign from Abu Dhabi. The Ferrari theme park is almost ready and I personally enjoy driving the new highway through Yas Island that takes you through beautiful scenery of Sadiyat Island and gets you straight to the Corniche of Abu Dhabi. The UAE is truly the center of the Middle East region and the place that bridges East and West.

Speech by HP's CEO Mark Hurd

A speech by HP's CEO Mark Hurd at Berkeley's Haas Business School. We are grateful to Mark for turning around HP and bringing it's partner closer to HP.

IT Management Solutions and Maturity of IT departments

Having worked with numerous IT organizations around the world, it is quite interesting to see the difference in maturity and organization witnessed over the years at some of these. One side is the technical infrastructure, where shops grew fast without any standards and an enterprise level infrastructure is managed without naming standards, DNS and OS, network and applications standards. To my opinion these are the responsibility of the IT manager or technical leads of the administration and support teams. These are usually addressed with documents that the tech teams need to put together and eventually enforce these standards. Moving one layer higher, the IT director should get his people to put processes together for the various teams under him or her to work more organized and efficient. These areas should address infrastructure monitoring, incident management, release management and IT operational processes. Moving one more layer up to the CIO level, this level should address how all teams should interact between them and how to serve the business. The initiative for change management, asset management, service level management and incident management should come from the CIO who should force all directors and managers to enforce these inter-departmental functions. In quite a number of shops, the IT manager expects from the administrators to get together and come up with standards, the IT director expects from the technical administrators and their leads to come up with infrastructure management initiatives and solutions and the CIO expects from one director to enforce processes across areas that are not under his/hers responsibility with no backing from higher up. The result is an enterprise level IT organization that runs like a small IT group. Problems left and right, firefighting, finger pointing and eventually an IT organization that the business sees as necessary to the business as electricity. The failure of the IT department to run like a business is a major issue that prevents IT from showing it's value to the business and be regarded as a function critical to the business. The lack of consulting firms who can guide the customers to the right direction or the inability of the consulting firm to talk to the right level in the IT organization is also a major issue.
We have seen IT organizations with low maturity that addressed infrastructure management solutions as a tool to be used by the administrators to monitor servers, networks, etc. The management expects from the administrators who's job is to maintain the servers, networks, etc. to also monitor the infrastructure. This is the job of the IT Operations team and very rarely an administrator will proactively monitor the infrastructure. The managers fail to see the business gain from these solutions that is really the ability to find where the problem is right away and route it to the appropriate support team to fix it. I have heard IT managers going to the CIO or IT director with a request for few hundred thousand dollars and when their management asks "What is it going to do for us?" the answer is that it will tell us if a hard drive is about to fill up or if our backup failed... this would be similar to someone asking their parents for college money and when asked what they'll do with that money, the answer would be "I'll live in dorms, attend classes and get a paper". Any CIO would be out of his mind if he or she approved a requisition for few hundred thousand on the basis that it would tell his techies that a hard drive is full...
Moving on to Service Support, this is a more difficult area in the sense that it usually involves multiple departments in the design and implementation of such solution. We have seen IT managers who do not understand ITIL processes and how things should work, who inquire about a service desk solution and in their mind they are looking for a help desk software. When they hear the prices they freak out and they are right, since they are looking to buy a moped and they see the price for a large truck. However, their approach is wrong to begin with. You do not manage the finance department of a large company the same way you run bookeeping for a small company and these are the signs of an immature IT organization. We have witnessed maturity growth in Telecom organizations and particularly GSM providers and our business is growing fast in that sector. However, the banking IT organizations still have way to go before they address IT Management solutions that will be used appropriately and see high return on investment. We as Parallon typically have a high cost of sales development since it involves educating the customer during a long sales cycle but the results are encouraging when the customer reaches a level of maturity and we see initiatives coming from inside the company seeking to improve IT efficiencies and the quality of services.