Service Portfolio Management or How Cloud Computing puts an end to bottoms up Service Management

This blog features both under our Service Management and Portfolio Management sections and revolves around a video we created earlier this year.

In the video a demand manager tries to convince an operations manager of the benefits of a portfolio approach. The operations manager is not easy to convince as he feels his approach of monitoring his hardware and software gives him good insight into what is going on.


Such a bottoms up approach, starting from the technical components we are running in our datacenter, is a common approach when implementing traditional service management (if we do not run it ourselves, it can’t be very important so we don’t need to support it, let alone document it). Cloud Computing puts a spanner into this logic. Starting from the components we run ourselves will give an increasingly incomplete picture.

Does that make the video less applicable? On the contrary! A top down portfolio approach now becomes even more essential. So suggest you have a quick look, if only for the undeniable entertainment value.

BTW If you’re interested to see how Service Management, Portfolio Management and Cloud Computing are also coming together in terms of popularity have a look at my Cloudy Xmas trends blog.

Cloudy Xmas cards and new year’s predictions

At the end of the year - and in this case the end of a decade - I thought it made sense to look back at what has been and try and predict what may be. Many already have named 2010 the year of Cloud Computing, so I decided to call on Google Trends to put this into a little perspective.

Below you see the results, I expect you may be as (pleasantly) surprised as I was.

As I personally spend the last decade dabbling in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), Service Management (ITIL) and Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) I used these as anchor points for this perspective. In addition I decided to include Cloud Computing's slightly more mature nephew (SaaS) also in to the fold.  The epiphany for me personally was that it explained why I had found it so hard to choose between SOA, PPM and ITIL (design, build and run). But enough about me.

The rise of Cloud Computing’s from zero to hero in just 2 years is amazing. And with regard to news volume, shown in the bottom graph, it actually has already surpassed the others. But even more amazing is the geographic areas in which each term has the highest relative interest. For me it reinforced where the true competition of the future will be coming from, and it is not from the traditional countries. Sure, Australia is big on ITIL and the UK is big on SaaS. For Ireland, the only other European county in the top 10, the data was inconclusive on whether their current deep economic crisis makes them more eager or the Irish weather stimulates queries on clouds. The outlier for SOA in Dutch is unfortunately a fluke. It is not because we are all striving to be brilliant OO programmers here, I am afraid it is because SOA is a Dutch acronym for something complety different (which I was directed not to mention here).  

So are we done for 2011? All that needs to be said about cloud computing has been googled? Not yet.

As you can see Cloud Computing has surpassed Saas (Score 5.3) and is closing in on SOA (score 8.8), ITIL (score 8.4) and PPM (score 7.6). But any comparison with IT terms like Linux, Mac and Windows is quit sobering. Cloud Computing is not a household name yet.

But 2010 is still young, so I am sure we can propel it some more.

PS want to have some fun yourself, here is the URL of this Cloud Application: http://www.google.com/trends?q=cloud+computing%2C+saas%2C+itil%2C+ppm+%2C+soa&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=1

Cloud Computing becomes Cool Computing?

Last month InformationWeek’s Bob Evans started a contest asking their readership to come up with a better name for “Cloud Computing”. Reason was that the CEO’s of both HP and IBM recently expressed some discontent with the current name. Something about “Cloudy not being clear enough”. Not clear enough for what, for justifying really large invoices? And then we are not even mentioning Oracle’s CEO, who has been on a contra-Cloud quest for ages.

The overwhelming majority of the 500 names the contestants submitted were acronyms, which make you wonder whether IT is truly beyond salvation. No amount of Cloud can save people that speak mnemonics, especially now IT's role is changing so significantly. Bob’s personal favorites for a new name were Cloud 9, Univac, the Matrix, and Rain. I secretly suspect some of these are acronyms in disguise.

Personally I was very surprised that nobody took the opportunity to

repeat the IT scam of the century. About twenty years ago someone called one type of computing OPEN, thus instantly making all other types of computing “closed” and therefore bad.

So what would the equivalent of OPEN be for Cloud?

Cloud Computing becomes Easy Computing - not believable enough?

Cloud Computing becomes Clear Computing - not compelling enough?

Cloud Computing becomes Open Computing - too early?
(some of the original open folks are still alive)
Cloud Computing becomes Cool Computing - Yes, even sounds familiar!

So we have a winner! Cool Computing

Now we just need to change the name of this blog.
Good thing that name changes are truly a core competency around here.

Re: Top 5 causes of IT project failures - an insurer's view

Tony Cox of Computer Weekly described the Top 5 causes of IT project failures by analyzing the records of project insurer Hiscox.

Comment: Funny how all five normally occur before most people think the project has even started.
BTW I hope that somewhere during my career there will be a time when there won’t be a monthly blog or article about constant project failures. I have some hope, new research we are publishing soon (at twitter.com/@leanitmanager) does seem to indicate in that direction.