In Part 1 of this outing, I proposed that Sun Microsystems, Inc.'s DTrace offers some nifty benefits, to IT infrastructure managers and to those trying to develop and deploy effective, human-centric BPM. Herewith, a continuation and extension of those observations.
The folks who created DTrace and others at Sun are pursuing a set of initiatives collectively known as "FISHworks," where "FISH" stands for "fully integrated software and hardware." At this week's Sun Analyst Summit in San Francisco, members of the Sun team demonstrated the ability to morph general-purpose computers into purpose-specific appliances intended to replace devices ranging from network-attached storage (NAS) managers to firewalls.
The most interesting part of the demo to me, though, was the DTrace-powered dashboard with pre-built, easy-to-customize scripts and routines. These made it incredibly easy to identify and resolve performance anomalies, and to gain significant insight into who was doing what with what on a network – at least in the demo.
So why not an eventual "BPM assistant" or "BPM orchestration" appliance? One with a dashboard that consolidates and concatenates real-time and near-real-time information about how IT is performing, and what people are doing and using on the network? In ways that information can be used directly to help to craft and refine, and perhaps even "roll out" and "roll back," processes that govern the access to and use of enterprise IT and IP resources?
An example might help. Your company decides that everyone must use the same processes to get business expenses submitted and reimbursed. Once the process becomes law, performance information indicates a sudden spike in problems with a particular server, which is causing slow performance of the expense-processing application. This leads to high user dissatisfaction – with the process, not the application or server per se. However, comprehensive, robust technologies such as DTrace help to isolate and resolve the problem rapidly – or, perhaps in conjunction with modeling, simulation, and testing technologies, to avoid it in the first place.
Yes, it's an aggressively simplified example. And yes, there are still many, many steps to be taken before most enterprises could do something like this, let alone more subtle and profound BPM-related, IT-enabled things. But aggressive, ambitious goals are an essential element of successful enterprise BPM strategies. And besides, it's good to dream.
Meanwhile, back here in real life, you should know that Sun described the prototype general-purpose-computer-to-specific-function-appliance-transmogrifier with the DTrace dashboard I saw as somewhere "between concept and product." Hmm. And other IT infrastructure management solutions and vendors already offer dashboards that at least promise to deliver consolidated, comprehensive information about IT and network performance. Some of these even promise further to enable and support more effective BPM. Examples include BMC Software, Inc., CA, Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP)'s OpenView portfolio, and IBM's Tivoli unit, among others.
All of these vendors' offerings have constraints and shortcomings, cost and complexity historically being the two most profound and consistent. But technological evolution, the rise of open source, and other factors are helping to tilt things a bit further in favor of buyers and users.
The more usefully IT infrastructure management and BPM can be integrated, the more events and developments in one area can inform and potentially improve events and developments in the other. Also, the more effectively systems-centric process management can be automated and left to IT-based solutions, the more human "bandwidth" should be available to address the more human-centric BPM challenges.
If your company is already pursuing BPM, those efforts should be as closely aligned with IT infrastructure management policies, processes, and solutions as possible. If your company is already pursuing comprehensive IT infrastructure management, those efforts should be as closely aligned as possible with any current or future BPM initiatives. If your company is not pursuing either, you may want to keep an updated résumé handy. Meanwhile, check out the RFG Research Note "Best Practices for IT Infrastructure Management and Business Alignment" in the ebizQ Analyst Corner for more "deep thoughts" on these and related subjects, and let me know if you'd like to discuss any or all of these further, here or otherwise.
Michael Dortch has been an analyst, 'information entrepreneur,' speaker, and writer about IT and 'the real world" for the past 30 years. After almost 10 years at the Robert Frances Group (RFG), Michael begins a new position with Aberdeen Group in September.
Dennis Byron is an analyst with ebizQ, focusing on Open Source Software as well as Business Process Management technologies.
