Freeform Dynamics is big on the practical aspects of business-IT alignment. One of the key attributes we have been measuring and cross referencing against all sorts of different things this year is the notion that some organisations use the concept of services when dealing with their business users, some use them within the IT department only, and some don’t have a ‘services thing’ at all.

It might surprise you to learn that despite all the talk of ‘services’ and ‘service management’, our first major research project in 2007 - involving gathering insight from approximately 1600 IT practitioners and leaders - showed that organisations using a services-oriented approach to communicating with the business were in fact in the minority - around 33 per cent. Of the remaining two thirds, another third told us they used the ‘service concept’ in the IT department but not when talking to the business, and the remainder didn’t use the concept of services at all.

We had the opportunity to ask a similar audience the same questions at the end of the second quarter of the year. Interestingly we found that the number of organisations using services to communicate with the business had risen to just over 40 per cent, while the number using services within the IT department only had fallen slightly, and the number not doing services at all was constant.

Now, while I am wary of comparing statistics from two different sample groups (albeit of the same general profile and size) it is of interest to note the movement in the numbers, and also to acknowledge that a sizable number of organisations simply don’t yet see the need to express their IT-business related activities in terms of services. There does appear, however, to be a relatively rapid turnover from a ‘halfway house’ - having a services oriented approach within the IT department - to a full blown services mindset, which doesn’t surprise me at all. I also think that it is only a matter of time before the non-services-oriented organisations come around to this way of thinking, not least because it will make a lot more of what the rest of the industry is talking about, doing and selling more accessible in the context of IT enabling the business.

I have been criticising vendors recently for not bothering to define service, the assumption being everyone already gets this, and, as discussed above, this isn’t the case – so I should do so here. Actually, it’s IBM’s unofficial version – which I happen to like because it doesn’t send the reader down any specific pathways, and is applicable to any business or IT related area which involves a consumer (service user) and a provider (IT or the business itself):

A service is: ‘a desired outcome consistently executed through the application of resources and controls in a defined manner.'

So, I hope you are thinking, just what do these services-oriented organisations get that the rest don’t? In a nutshell, the way the industry is evolving just gets easier to engage with. Things just line up better. There are two ways of acknowledging this. The sceptic might consider that organisations which ‘get’ the services thing are simply opening themselves up for a lot more vendor-related messaging and new kit to buy. A more positive view is that there needs to be a common language between IT and the business – for obvious reasons – and a sensible way of achieving the appropriate level of mutual understanding and meeting of requirements is to consolidate both business requirements and IT activities, in the way they are requested, designed, managed and consumed, into a services-oriented approach. That indeed may open up new requirements for investment - though not always in technology - but the key thing to remember is that looking ahead, these new requirements should be the right ones, not simply additional ones.

And so to the configuration management database (CMDB) – the focus of a project we carried out earlier this year. It’s one of those areas which appears more desirable if you look at it from the corner of your eye instead of straight on, and something which appears more achievable and relevant if you don’t talk directly about it.

A good example of a topic which can generate a need to ‘talk CMDB’ is discussed here http://freeformcomment.blogspot.com/ and involves the potential for convergence between the disparate worlds of enterprise asset management and IT asset management. Back to the point. Take a look at the chart below, which is a good example of some specific benefits achieved by organisations that take the service / alignment thing seriously across their business. Again, simply put, things just make more sense.

Fig 1: Responses to question: ‘what risks have there been or would you anticipate in association with a CMDB implementation?’ Organisations that considered their IT department as being strongly tuned into the business versus rest of sample.

To add some meat to the previous statement: you can see that the differences in actual and perceived risks are significantly lower for organisations which have already taken steps to achieve business-IT alignment, by communicating via a services orientated approach, and those which have not.
I don’t believe that getting to the point where what IT does for the business is categorised in terms of services requires a huge amount of effort in terms of change – initially at least it’s a mindset thing, one which requires decent communication and liaison between business and IT. Needless to say, organisations that do the services thing have these sorts of people in place, and it works. But what we were able to capture in our CMDB study was that the benefits, especially in terms of bringing the right people together, and frankly, planning the hell out of what is undeniably a complex project to undertake, are clear, and not just by a few percentage points either.

Ultimately, whether considering a CMDB or related project or not, taking a different view of the world in terms of what IT does, and what the business does with IT is paying dividends for those organisations which have already set off down this route. For those that have not yet explored this, it is high time to do so, because while the competition is gaining incrementally and constantly, everyone else is slipping further behind.

By Martin Atherton

Download Freeform Dynamics’ reports, including Deploying CMDB Technology free of charge from www.freeformdynamics.com

I've just bought some more RAM for my laptop, a 2GB upgrade to be precise. Now, before I get into the ramifications (no pun intended), here's some context. I'm of the generation that recalls trying to fit software into the smallest possible of orifices, and while I never really got on with assembler myself, I could understand the elegance of a well-put-together piece of code. Some of my then-colleagues continue the embedded programming challenge, these days trying to fit large-screen video decoding into the RAM equivalent of a matchbox, and managing to squeeze in a copy of Space Invaders to boot.

And so it is - you know what's coming - that I find myself looking at my laptop screen and wondering exactly how Window Vista could manage to fill an entire gigabyte of memory, almost by itself.

Perhaps that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's worthy of a look. Right now, my wonderfully handy sidebar gadget is telling me that my computer is consuming 713MB of memory - which is on a fresh boot with only Notepad running so I can type this - Notepad takes up a megabyte, by the way. The other 712 is used up by processes that I have not invoked personally.

This is all a far cry from "640K ought to be enough for anybody," as Bill Gates is reputed to have said (and later denied, but where's the fun in that). Indeed, that wouldn't even support Notepad! But what exactly is the rest doing? A cursory glance at the task manager (5MB) tells me that, as a user, I am taking up:

- 25MB for Skype ("Take a deep breath," it tells me)
- 20MB for that “wonderfully handy” Windows Sidebar
- 10MB for Windows Explorer
- 8MB for Bluetooth
- 8MB for CSRSS - an RSS service perhaps
- 6MB for MSN Messenger
- 3MB for Samsung battery and display tools
- 3MB for Groove

Together with the nearly 10MB of various bits and bobs, that's 93MB by my reckoning. Meaning that the other 600MB plus, is taken up by non-user processes. I could strip out about 30MB for the AVG antivirus and shield I'm currently running, there’s probably some processes that are part of other apps I’ve installed but the rest does look like it is part of the core operating system (OS).

I would say "phew" but I'm mostly sanguine about this. My processing is down at three to five per cent as I type, meaning that whatever's being stored, it's not necessarily clogging up the system. There is the whole debate about poorly written, bloated OS code, which shouldn't be ignored but equally, I'm sure there are a number of things I could switch off and save a goodly percentage; also, I am using certain features that have an understandable overhead, such as the search indexer (26MB). Ultimately however, while RAM may be cheap, I do feel slightly frazzled that quite such a large quantity of it should be required just to keep the lights on, and I'm not absolutely sure why "tuning" should be seen as a geek pastime, and not a core capability.

What other options exist? Get a Mac of course, and I am seriously considering this, not just to satisfy my feelings that memory should be treated as a precious commodity but for a number of other reasons. Get Linux is another possibility, but that's usually back to the geeky-tweaky thing and it raises a whole bunch of compatibility issues. Get a life and stop worrying about it, is where my thinking is at currently, particularly now I have gone through the "get more RAM" option. All the same, I do find myself wondering, or indeed hoping, whether Microsoft is reaching the point where it will run out of things to add. The only thing I can think of round the corner is virtualisation, but I do believe that a well-written virtual layer should exist as part of the operating system anyway, in which case it could itself be part of the solution. Wishful thinking, perhaps?

In the meantime, should I bite the bullet and re-enable all those sexy Aero features? I think I'll leave it just a while before I do, as I want to enjoy the feeling of that glut of memory just a little bit longer. It'll be nice while it lasts.

By Jon Collins