Sun is having a hard time at the moment; we are making more changes, people are losing their jobs, stock prices are not good and this is a difficult time for everyone involved.  We hear these changes are necessary and that to be successful we must improve/change and change can be painful for many people.

Perhaps in Sun we should pause for breath and "Listen to our own advice". Whenever we help a customer transform their infrastructure we are honest and tell them, there will be disruption, things will change, there will be problems, but at the end of the project there will be significant business improvements. When we introduce best practice to a customer much of it is new to them and requires new skills and a different approach to their day to day job. In this difficult finanical climate surely we can ask no less of ourselves.  Many of us will be asked to undertake new roles or focus our activites in a different way but if Sun is to be successful this is a process that must happen. I like sayings and one of my favourite is;

 "If you always do what you always did;
you will always get what you always got!"

Sun is going through a period of extensive change and like any "birth" it wont be easy but for those of us lucky enough to have families we all know how rewarding it can be. All this change will make Sun more successful in the long run.

I was recently very intrigued by an article I read in eWeek on the top 10 Disruptive Technologies affecting the Datacenter. According to eWeek they are;
1) Unified Communications
2) Web Platform
3) IT Operations Process Automation
4) Server Fabrics
5) Metadata Management
6) CMDB'S
7) Mashups and Composite Applications
8) Virtualisation beyond Consolidation
9) Social Software
10) Green IT
Wikipedia says "A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is a technological innovation, product, or service that uses a "disruptive" strategy, rather than a "sustaining" strategy, to overturn the existing dominant technologies or status quo products in a market"  Well I for one as someone who is currently working on 4 of the items listed above would like to think that what we are doing, in particular, around Green IT and Virtualisation is based on a "sustaining strategy and values; or did I miss the whole point of Eco...........

Well it looks like all the efforts of the last four years have been worth it. This weekend sees us self sufficient in Pork, Lamb, Chicken and Eggs. We even have some of last years fish left from our boating trips to Lyme Regis. We still havent mastered the all year fresh vegetables though, so with this in mind we have just redesigned and rebuilt our vegetable plots, with the help of my cousin and her family. We now have a raised bed system to improve the drainage as we are on a heavy clay soil and prolong the growing period. We have 16 beds at 5x5ft and 8 beds at 5x10ft plus the poly tunnel. We have designed the beds so they can be individually netted and covered with fleece should they need to be. So I expect by this time next year we should be in a better position for vegetables as well.

When I first heard we were planning to put together a Virtualisation/Eco practice I was a little concerned that we were "jumping on the band wagon". However, we had a presentation recently about Sun's new Virtualisation Practice and I have to say I was really pleased to see that we are putting such an emphasis on this area. Sun has a fantasitic portfolio of  offerings in this space, Eco and Virtualisation Consulting, Data Center Strategy and Implementation and Virtualised Operations Management. We can do everything from general IT consulting to build contemporary global data center infrastructure, and help achieve a wide diversity of business goals, ranging from of carbon-neutral mandates to practical data center performance and real-world cost savings in their heat, power or cooling utility bills. In fact everything you need to architect, implement and manage a virtualised environment. For many of our customers this is story they havent heard and we should be out there shouting about it.

The reason I am particularly excited about this is because for years I have been espousing the merits of a "service lead" portfolio and it seems we have now built one that is fully integrated with the product pitch. Sun has significant mind share in this area and the launch and success of this practice will only increase this.

The most recent version of ITIL, V3 represents an important evolutionary step in the life of Service Management.. The advocates say “ The refresh has transformed the guidance from providing a great service to being the most innovative and best in class¹”. The detractors say “Actually, much of Version 3 is a cry for acceptance at higher levels in the organisation (or a power grab for more of the business, depending on your perspective).”

My opinion having burnt the midnight oil reading the five new books is there is truth in both. I have not yet decided if I am an advocate or a detractor; the proof for me will be in the implementation, which I or anyone else have yet to attempt.

At a high level the changes reflect the way IT Service Management has matured over the past decades.

For example:

• Where V2 talked about a Collection of Integrated Processes, V3 emphasises a Holistic Service Management Life cycle

• Where V2 talked about Business and IT Alignment, V3 emphasises Business and IT Integration.

• Where V2 talked about Incident Management, V3 talks about multi-level Incident Categorization and Request Fulfilment.

• Where V2 talked about Value Chain Management, V3 emphasises Value Network Integration.

• Where V2 talked about Linear Service Catalogues, V3 emphasises Dynamic Service Portfolios.

In addition there are other significant differences, as the main focus is on the service life-cycle with a secondary focus on process. The ISO/IEC 20000 standard has been aligned to ITIL V2 but ITIL V3 also provides for support in the form of a balanced scorecard for the fulfilment of other compliance requirements such as SOX, Basel II, HIPPA, etc. It utilises The Deming Quality Cycle as the basis for quality management in the Continual Service Improvement Book.

Regardless of what anyone may try to tell you, ITIL V3 is much much more complex than V2. This is not only because ITSM is a deeper and more advanced discipline than a decade ago, but many areas that could be quietly neglected in simpler V2 installations are now more tightly integrated and brought back into prominence. V3 covers the entire IT Ecosystem and because of that it maps more clearly onto Sun Microsystems vision for the future of Technology Management..

Over the last fifteen plus years that ITIL has been around research has confirmed the benefits of its approach, it has also highlighted its deficiencies and ITIL V3 has sought to correct them. It is claimed that the new ITIL life cycle approach will;

• Establish the integration of business strategy with IT service strategy.

• Enable agile service design and an ROI blueprint.

• Provide transitional models that are fit for purpose

• Demystify the management of service providers and sourcing models.

• Improve the ease of implementing and managing services for dynamic, high risk, volatile and rapidly changing business needs.

• Improve the measurement demonstration of value.

• Identify the triggers for improvement and change anywhere in the service life cycle.

• Address the current gaps and deficiencies in ITIL today.

The new approach changes the relationship between IT and the business whereas before, ITIL worked to align service management with business strategy, V3 integrates both into a single ecosystem. Other developments include areas that we have all had to implement but were lacking in V2, for example;

• new concepts such as the Service Management Knowledge base that helps transform captured information into organisational intelligence;

• new processes such as request fulfilment;

• process expansion, such as event management;

• new practice areas and organisational structures

• and not least of all an entirely new strategy book.

The model contains the processes needed to manage services within the life cycle structure. The core practices of the Service Management life cycle are then supported by more detailed complementary content specific to industry, stakeholder and practice topics. This makes the library more practical, easier to use and provides guidance specific to various stakeholder viewpoints to help gain further traction in ITSM.

About three years ago I worked for a year as the Global IC Manager of Advanced Services since then I have become very interested in the field of Knowledge Management. Capturing, organizing, assessing for quality and using knowledge is an extremely powerful toolset for Sun to master.

With the increasing rate of change in the industry, a more open global economy and increased access to information over the internet good knowledge management is the key to enable us to optimise the benefits of these changes.

I am convinced that effective Knowledge Management is the key to the overall viability of Sun, from capturing the competitive advantage in the industry  to decreasing cycle time and the cost of providing technology and services to a customer. Sun is in an excellent position to capitalise on these as the two essential components of successful knowledge management are an open culture and the infrastructure to support the sharing of information. Many cultures foster an environment where "knowledge is power" the more you know that others do not the more valuable you are to the company. This type of "knowledge hoarding" is not the sort of behaviour that should be or is rewarded at Sun. Another element of an open culture is an individuals willingness to learn, growing an individuals knowledge base should and is rewarded and facilitated by open support and opportunities.

Even in a culture of openess and sharing without the right tools to support it any efforts to significantly share knowledge are doomed. With IC Create, MySales, MyMarketing, AIM, CEPedia and many others Sun has to be in a fantastic position to capitalise on this area. All we need is to change our behaviours to ensure we constantly share what we learn and what we are working on.

On the home front we have been slightly hit by the Foot and Mouth problem. We were due to collect two new weaners (piglets) to fatten for Christmas last weekend. However, due to the foot and mouth outbreak there is a nationwide ban on all stock movement. And although we are about 90 miles from the area in accordance with the guidelines from DEFRA we checked every one of our animals very  carefully. The good news is we have a small amount of foot rot in the sheep due to the wet weather which we treated and everything else is fine.

 The lambs are fattening well and we are still hatching chickens we currently have 97 of them.. Our two new pigs Doris and Agatha are settling in nicely and we think Brenda is pregnant. We spent most of the weekend outside as the weather was great, we were clearling one of the island beds which is full of trees. I think a previous owner did a great job of planting dozens and dozens of trees, unfortunately they did not consider how big they would all grow a nd we are having to thin them out. We have tried to move some of them but they are to big, we have also had professional tree surgeans in to do the more dangerous work, but we do the rest.

I quite enjoyed the UK Kick Off last Thursday, even the rain did not ruin the day. I had a chance to catch up with old friends and new friends that I hadnt seen for a while. I caught up on all the gossip and found out who had resigned and who was still with us. This to me is always the great benefit of these occassions. I am not very athletic and really am not the sort of person who enjoys "games" team ones or otherwise, so I dont participate.

The presentations were the usual stuff and given the current UK position they were what I expected. But as I looked around the big top I do wonder though why so many of our good people are leaving. Most the people I started working with at Sun seven years ago are no longer here. I joined the UK Managed Services team and there were eleven of us at that time. Of that eleven only three of us our left today some have moved on to new pastures, one retired and others were RIF'd. Still I suppose that is life everything changes.

I have just started a piece of work to look at ITIL v3 and undertake a gap analysis against our current Service Management  portfolio.  From initial observations ITIL v3 appears to move from best practice to something that is largely theoretical and not proven best practice. It is difficult to understand why most companies would want to adopt it. ITIL v3 is now five books for a ridiculous price of approx £300 and on top of this the training and certification could cost you a further £2000 per person.
Having said that the new structure makes good sense the five books are now; Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operations and Continual Service Improvement. This follows the service life-cycle much better than the process stove pipes that were created by ITIL v2. And in reality this is how many of us have thought about Service Management. I suppose my main concern is that it addresses none of the real issues Service Managers are facing,

- How to managed virtualised environments?

- How to ensure good release management practices for High Performance Grids?

- How to manage the convergence in the telco market place?

These problems do not appear to have been considered by the authors of ITIL v3.


 

Well, as I said last week we expected to be collecting 5 new pigs at the weekend, but it didnt happen. I rang on Friday to confirm what time to arrive and to get the address and directions. I was phoning a mobile number in Devon and was getting a land line in Canterbury. I tried three times Friday evening and twice again on Saturaday but no response and although they had my number they never phoned. So I can come to one of two conclusions;

      1) they didnt want to sell to us
      2) they are currently flooded and got more important things to worry about.

So I am currently trying to find someone with 2 or 3 G.O.S to meet the orders we have for Pork.

Over the last 24 hours there has been a lot of traffic on the ITSM alias about SAS70. SAS70 is an auditing standard designed to enable an independant auditor to evaluate and issue an opinion on a service organisations controls. The auditors report can then be used with the organisations customers and their respective auditors to demonstrate it has control objectives and activities in place and they are effective.

SAS 70 can also be related to Sarbanes-Oxley under certain circumstances. Under section 404 a company needs to ensure that the "managements quarterly certification of their financial results and managements annual assertion that internal controls over financial reporting are effective". However, even a full Type II SAS70 report does not mean compliance with Sarbannes-Oxley.

It appears that many of our customers have started to ask for our SAS70 report prior to doing business with us. The traffic on the alias has already suggested that this is quite a significant problem across the GEM's. So I  am currently pulling a small team together to understand how much this is causing problems for our customers and what we can do about it.

Most of my career I have been learning and applying new industry standards to the work I do. I started many years ago with BS5750 the then new data center standard, this was superceeded by ISO9000 with TickIT. Within a period of four years it was ITIL, BS7799, ISO 17799, ISO 27001 and then more recently ISO20000. With all these new standards no wonder customers (who have real day jobs) cannot navigate through the minefield. On top of these dependent on the industry you are in we also have SOX, CobIT, SAS70, HIPPA, or even CFR21 Part 11.

So recently I started to look at our Managed Services portfolio with a view to clearly mapping our services to these industry standards. The more I have reviewed and compared these standards I have found that there are very few significant differences. Of course if you make money by producing training certification and publications to support these standards or best practice then of course you have a vested interest in convincing people your best practice is significantly different and will bring major market advantage to anyone who implements it.

Or perhaps I am just getting cynical in my old age......................

Over the past few weeks I have been working on a new version of Sun's Service Management Best Practice.  Jon Ford and I have taken the SunTone v3 specification and updated and re-aligned it to the ISO20000 International Service Management Standard. The document is in final review and we are expecting to release it by the end of the month. We have also launched a new i-runbook called ITSMO which is basically an ITIL based runbook for customer or internal use.

Well the lambs were born in April as expected but we only have 5 of them this year. So we currently have 12 sheep.Although they were the first livestock we really had we like them the least.

On the pig front Oprah sadly died of a gastric ulcer in the latter stages of pregnancy about 5 weeks ago. We were all pretty upset and I got the vet to check the others over. Other than Captain Pugwash needing to go on a diet all was well. He did however suggest that if we are intending to breed from them an additional bloodline would be useful as we currently only have two bloodlines. So we purchased two new gilts (young ladies) named Doris and Agatha.  We have also decided to go into  pork production and I have purchased 5 Gloucester Old Spots and we will be collecting them on Saturaday.

We have also decided to go into chickens a bit more seriously and we currently have 84 birds of which we have small numbers of rare breeds, Vorwerks, Lavender Araucanas, Salmon Favorelles etc. We are intending to breed small flocks of each before we start selling them later this year. So all in all it could be worse.

The rain has ruined alot of our fruit and vegetables this year. Despite all our hard work we dont have much to harvest. The orchard we planted nearly two years ago is looking good and we have fruit on a couple of the trees.