What do ITIL, Alfresco Dining, and Enterprise Open Source Software have in Common?

A new client of ours recently asked me why I had pursued ITIL v3 certification ( Information Technology Infrastructure Library). Actually, she was more direct than that. “Doug, why is it relevant?” She asked this within the context of our discussion on the types of implementations we deliver in our enterprise open source consulting practice. She was quite satisfied with my answer, but only after I cited a specific engagement where another client of ours is beginning to offer an enterprise content management (ECM) system as a managed service to a diverse set of business units across their global organization.

A fresh set of empowered stake holders found themselves inheriting and a series of legacy ad hoc design and deployment decisions that resulted in initially poor performance, a lack of clarity amongst the business users regarding the value the ECM system, and a somewhat demoralized yet highly competent development staff. To date they had only been able to point to limited successes in a fraction of the business units the system was ultimately intended to serve. The new team discovered that there was significant lack of knowledge and abundant misinformation amongst the target business units about the capabilities of the system. Perhaps vendors of alternative offerings had tainted their view, perhaps they had seen a deployed system that had been configured for another business unit, and assumed that what they saw there was all that would be available to them. Comments were coming from business users like....”oh, it has a Wiki”, “oh, it can replace a shared drive with a 5015.02 certified electronic records management repository”, “oh, .....Google like search...we did not know it could do that” …. and all this, several months after the system became available.

Clearly the relationship between the IT department and their internal customers will benefit from the development of a services catalog, a central concept within the ITIL framework. Not rocket science, heck, not even computer science, just simply the development of a standardized list of what they offer. Imagine these two scenarios:

First scenario, customer view – with ad hoc services:

You come to my house hungry, and I offer to cook you something to eat, you have never eaten my food so you don't know if I am a good cook, and you are a picky eater. That is this the business units view of the IT group responsible for ECM at this client, and only a few have even tasted my food, and even fewer have looked in the fridge or pantry to see what is really available.

Second scenario, customer view – with services catalog:

We go to a well known restaurant drive through, famished and on a limited budget, with 30 minutes left on our lunch break. I order a “number #1”, and you, being a picky but hungry customer, order a number #3 with cheese, hold the tomatoes, mayo on the side, and super size that please with extra ketchup. We both get exactly what we expected.

Scenario one is where they are now, scenario two is where we feel they need to be in part via a services catalog as suggested by ITIL.

That was looking at the challenge from the business users view, now lets consider the applications development and operations teams that are expected to deliver and maintain the system for the business units. Clearly, setting up a RACI matrix will help everyone understand their role, and drive successful outcomes. Setting up a configuration management data base system (CMDBs) will record configuration items (CI) and details about the important attributes and relationships between CI's will improve overall results. Let's take the same example, but from the view point of the two kitchens and their chefs, one at my house, the other, at the other end of the drive-through pick up window. Imagine again these two scenarios, this time focusing on the development team and RACI:

First Scenario, delivery team view – ad hoc services:

Your hungry ( customer ) so I (developer) decide to whip up an omelet for you. I grab some eggs, butter, cheese....and tomatoes. I arrive proudly at the table minutes later with my creation, you smile politely, and quietly pick out the tomatoes, and eat around their remnants as best you can.

Second Scenario, delivery team view – with responsibility assignment matrix:
(This one takes longer to describe. A lot of effort went into distilling a menu down to 9 main choices and....over 20 billion served.)-

First, the person who takes your order knows their role, they are responsible ( the R in RACI) for taking your order, and then placing the items cooked by others into your bag, then delivering them to you, and finally, taking your money accurately.

If they routinely give incorrect change, mess up orders, or are too slow, then their boss, who is accountable ( the A in RACI ) will take corrective action up to and including termination.

If there is a highly belligerent customer, the order taker knows they should consult the manager ( the C in RACI ) who may chose to intervene in dealing with that customer.

Finally, when an order takes longer than the company defines as acceptable, then according to policy the meal should be comped or discounted, and a record of this action is made... “Hey boss, I gave that customer a free burger with their meal, it took so long because the cook cut his finger and we all got backed up”....and the boss is informed ( the I in RACI).

Again, scenario one is where they are now, scenario two is where we are helping them move, in this case via RACI, which predates but none-the-less is part of the ITIL framework.

Regarding the CMDB's, this is analogous to the framework provided to the fast food restaurant franchise owner which supplies most of what they need to run the business, from fryers of an exact size with automated temperature control, and bags of fry's pre-measured to fill the basket, to a set menu, building plans, standard employee policies, and even standardized point of sale (POS), labor management and financial systems. In an IT setting, leveraging ITIL's notion of a CMDB is a worthy goal, but it is not always the first goal. More on CMDBs' at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Configuration_management_database

Effective use of the ITIL framework demands an understanding of where a project is at a given point. If we had been working with this client when the setting up of an ECM was just an idea, rather than 2 years into a struggling project, our initial emphasis would have been on strategy and design. But in this case everyone involved, including us, needed a quick win, short on arm waving, and long on tangible results. Job one, remove the visible warts that caused the business users that were actually using the system the most grief. Job two, set the stage for successful role out to other business units, and in so doing improve the moral of the beleaguered delivery team with the most effective ointment of all, success.

So when is leveraging of a services delivery framework useful? Whenever the risks of confusion regarding the delivery of that service outweigh the effort required to invoke the framework. If the offering has a managed service component, whether you are outsourcing any, all, or none of it, it behooves you to present the offering in the language of your target audience. The notion of a services catalog (menu) service level packages (menu items) and the creation of service level agreements (external contract) and organization level agreements (internal contract) is spelled out in ITIL and provides a simple framework for just that. Enterprise open source application vendors tend to interact first and most often with the developer community. This makes it hard for the message to reach the business users that these systems are often very powerful and frequently at least on par with the closed source systems with which they compete. Immense war chests funded by license fees create effective marketing machines for closed source vendors that intentionally contribute to the fog, but a services catalog can help lift it.

Viewed in its entirety, ITIL provides logical common sense framework to help guide us through strategy, design, transition, operation, and continuous improvement in the delivery of IT services, and we are hard pressed, at least in our practice, to find situations where leveraging these principles does not help our clients succeed, whether we chose to attach the ITIL label or not, and regardless of where our current situation dictates that we should begin. But keep in mind that too say leveraging ITIL is a recipe for “best practices” is like saying putting two pieces of bread around some ground beef is the best way to make a burger. We have to create our own best practices within the context of the situations we face. When we put some ground beef between two pieces of bread we end up with a sandwich. Whether we end up grabbing a burger from a bag, or dining alfresco on steak tartar, toast points, and capers depends on the chef.


Doug Bock is a Principal at Wide Open Consulting and is available at:

doug@wideopenconsulting.com
404-290-1981

Is there life without Sharepoint?

A few weeks ago I spent the entirety of an entirely beautiful Saturday cooped up in a Microsoft building in Alpharetta, GA with 200 or so Sharepoint integration partners and Microsoft representatives, with the goal of coming away with a greater knowledge of Sharepoints capabilities relative to the myriad of open source technologies we are likely to employ in our projects, chief among them Alfresco. How do they compare? What silver bullets does Microsoft possess to put Alfresco in its place? I still don't know, and I am pretty sure Microsoft doesn't either. I make this leap after asking more than several people at the event how they thought Alfresco stood up to Sharepoint. None had ever even heard of Alfresco, and equally remarkable, none could present a cogent explanation of what was better about Sharepoint 2010 than previous versions. Don't get me wrong, I am sure there are “things” that are better.

To be fair, I did find a list of 2010 improvements online in a blog by “Sharepoint Joel”, many of which where mentioned at the aforementioned wasted Saturday. Hold on to your seats, this is some earth shattering transformational stuff, and clearly, your enterprise won't survive without it. http://tiny.cc/dbshu

Ah, but I did learn one thing of value... while the new 2010 offering is “better”, “really”, the Sharepoint 2010 BPOS cloud offering has a significantly truncated feature set. So I sacrificed my gorgeous Spring [ the season ] day to bring you this take away.

Similarly, Russell Stalters, BP's Director of Information & Records posts in his “Better ECM” blog, his similar frustration with a lack of knowledge transfer around Sharepoint he experienced at 2010 AIIM Expo and Conference in Philadelphia last month, this despite Microsoft's utter dominance of the event, which is the pinnacle yearly conference for all things information management ( http://tiny.cc/fffaq ). Microsoft is living in a bubble with Sharepoint, albeit a very large bubble, and one not likely to pop any time soon, but there is life without Sharepoint, yet it exists only in an alternate universe that is only now being discovered.

Dogmatic views on Open Source

Why begin a blog named "Pragmatic Enterprise Open Source" with an entry starting with the word dogmatic?

Since I was first introduced to the notion of open source software in the late 1990's I have become increasingly intrigued by opinions on both ends of the spectrum relative to open source, and bewildered by the dogmatism and sometimes utter irrationality with which holders of these wildly divergent opinions opine, especially when they come from leaders in enterprises with otherwise nearly identical business models.

"From which well doth he drink his kool-aide"? Sometimes the answer is obvious, others times, indiscernible. As is the case in political movements, we run the risk that the shouts of zealot's and detractors at the fringe might drown out the mass of sane and often better informed yet quieter voices in the middle. While this is my blog, I hope that if you stumble upon it and are so moved you will post a comment telling me "how wrong you are", or better yet how, "you have it almost right, but missed such and such important element."

There are many thousands of blogs, wikis, and forums that delve into the bowels of the most prolific as well as the most obscure open source projects, and in the time it took me to right this, likely another novel sized body of text on this immense subject was spawned. If you have contributed code to an open source project, and don't know what a P/L is, then I apologize, I have wasted your valuable time, and now is a good time for your to throw it in reverse and head back to your favorite development environment or aforementioned social posting site. By the way, thank you for your work!

So let's start with enterprise open source's own 800 pound gorilla.
Walk into the front lobby of Redhat/JBoss Headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia and you will be greeted by a lovely lady over whose head is posted a very large indelibly inscribed quote attributed to Mohandas Gandhi..."First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win". Judging by the size of Redhat ( ~$650 M 2008 revenue) and the several years running 30+% year over year growth, there have already clearly been some "winners", not the least of whom are the crew that grew JBoss from an idea to a sale to Redhat for $360 million in just a few short years. Redhat's current CEO left a position as COO of Delta Airlines where it is reported his 2007 earnings topped $8 million. Open source has grown up, or at least eight or ten companies have built businesses around supporting these ready for the enterprise code bases, now available packaged similarly to proprietary offerings with which they compete, sans the initial licenses costs and overhead associated with paying for 458 foot private yachts and decommissioned fighter jets. More power to Larry Ellison, but it is nice to have a choice sometimes.

The time for intellectually honest debate about the commercial viability of several enterprise ready fully supported open source products is over. If you do not agree, please don't take my word for it, but do remove your head from the sand and call the CIO down the street who is likely running circles around you. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of great reasons to run a pure Microsoft shop, or to heavily leverage IBM. But if you are running significant web applications, you are probably already using open source and are just unaware of it. If this is the case then you are likely running unsupported product, which in turn may be in violation of your own IT Governance. The good news is that there is likely someone out there who will take your money in exchange for support and indemnification of these rogue technologies, and they will do so at a fraction of the cost for proprietary products, and the quality of support will likely be as good or better than what you would get from similar closed code providers.


Today open source is in the enterprise in a pretty big way, and while the above quote from Gandhi accurately describes the "you've come a long way, baby" progress of the open source movement, it is flawed in that it suggests an end game. Open source is just an attribute, an attribute that now is affixed to products owned by and / or supported by some of the largest companies in the world, including Oracle, with its purchase of Sun / MySQL. IBM was a founder of the Eclipse Foundation, and has recently formed an even stronger relationship with EnterpriseDB, a professionally supported enterprise open source alternative to Oracle database.

Ellison may have ignored, then laughed, but he is now in fight mode, a fight he will take to his grave, which will most assuredly include open source spoils and pillage.

So save your dogma for politics, open source is in the enterprise, but so is Larry, Gates, and the rest of the usual suspects, and they have inextricably entered the game. The sourceforge.net open source repository hosts over 180,000 open source projects, with 1.9 million registered users, and 28 million annual visitors to the site. Translation...there will continue to be an increasing flow of open source projects that bubble up, harden, and become enterprise ready. The genie is out of the bottle. Rub it right and it may grant you a wish or two.

Open source is no longer just languages like PERL, Java, and Ruby, and it is no longer even just operating systems like Linux and its many flavors, or even limited to middleware. There are now viable options for many business needs that reach up the stack all the way to CRM, business intelligence, etc. There is even a huge amount of open content in education and entertainment. The wildly popular band RadioHead put a recent album on sale on-line for "free", and suggested buyers pay what they thought it was worth. The fans spoke with their pocketbooks and paid an average of 8 dollars for the download, many paying zero, and others paying much more. While RadioHeads songs are not "code", and they are not registered with Apache or GNU ( open source licensing modes ) the monetization parallels are helpful in understanding the phenomenon of open source, and in explaining why on earth someone would "give away" their IP, or even their "help" to a stranger in support of something neither of them owns.

At the level of the developer it is largely about being a part of something bigger than you, that you can be a part of...using open source it is truly a part of practicing your craft. I use this "product" because I can see it, there are no secrets, and if I want to bad enough, and I am good enough, I can even change and build upon it. Literally millions do. It is this mass participation that has made some open source products simply the best in class, regardless of how they are licensed. Most well informed technologists would put no peer next to Linux.

At the level of the CIO, she can say, I want to use these three open source products at the platform level, but I only want to buy support for those two, on top of which I will place my custom built applications, and several others I purchased from IBM and SAP, and I am going to use Oracle data base for some applications, Mysql, for some, and Postgres Plus for still others. I am running SAP / Business Objects for some of our business intelligence needs, and Pentaho or JasperSoft for still others. Maybe I will migrate my content management from Documentum to opensource contender Alfresco. For CRM, I could use Oracle on site, Salesforce.com in the cloud, or open source "SugarCRM" either hosted internally, or pay for a Saas version.

The quiet, technology agnostic open source pragmatist is the winner of this war, but that does not assure he won't be gassing up Larry's boat for his next Mediterranean cruise . What say you?