This all happened a few weeks ago, so in my usual up to the minute style, here's my take.

I spent my Sunday morning battling through most of southern England at Gatwick airport as it headed off en-masse to Disney Land while I queued patiently and tried to ignore the mayhem around me. The flight didn't improve as there were kids running around literally being sick with excitement.

An excellent way to prepare for an event on a topic I'd not really looked at for some time—enterprise asset management—the interest factor now being that IBM's recent acquisition of MRO Software meant that it has the means to offer a converged approach to enterprise and IT asset management. Having listened to the pitch and seen the product road map I think they have something, summarised below by my initial thoughts:

Positive stuff:

• a significant number (if not all) of assets now have some kind of IT component to them, rendering discussion about 'what's an enterprise asset and what's an IT asset' much less relevant that it used to be.
• a consolidated view of an organisation's assets makes sense in terms of being able to better control / administer change, support, i.e. ultimately to take better control over how / where 'objects' fit into the grand scheme of things—most effectively marshaling components within 'services'.

Less positive stuff:

• (acknowledged by IBM) 'ownership' is a potential hurdle to overcome—the consolidation of traditional enterprise asset management and IT assets clearly needs to consider the requirements of multiple different groups of stakeholders. This is by no means insurmountable, as very well demonstrated by MRO's reference client, McCarren (Las Vegas) Airport).
• IBM, via Tivoli and MRO, currently offers too many ways of achieving the same thing. This is no different to any other vendor though.

and another which didn't fit anywhere so becomes more of an observation...

The fact that this convergence / asset management / IT management area is one which lends itself rather well to services capabilities (I mean the type of thing IBM GS et al would seek to provide) is either positive (IBM has people that can provide the contextual input for your business) or negative (they need an outlet for a large army of consultants) depending on your point of view / level of scepticism.

Personally my view is that, ignoring cost momentarily, ideally, the vendor you want on board is one which can make their stuff work in the context of your own business, which, clearly, needs more than product / technical know-how to achieve.

Of the first two 'negatives', one (should be) less of a hurdle to overcome though; a 'tug of war / battle of wills' vis a vis ownership was offered—but I think overplayed. This scenario doesn't need to exist in the grown up world of business; everybody is (should be) working with the same goals in mind, and hence, as long as the user of the asset and the person responsible for its 'local' management has the access to information they need about said asset in order to carry out their duties, then really, centralised / federated repositories of information will a) be an improvement and b) provide better overall manageability.

Taking this view as a starting point, i fail to see how any sensible group of people couldn't overcome any perceived or real 'political' agendas which would otherwise inhibit positive change.

The second negative brings us also to the part-title of this post. I've been saying for some time, (and we have lots of data to prove it) that one of the divergence points on the route to organisations getting to grips with any of this service management related stuff (and those that don't yet 'get it') is actually appreciating 'what services mean for their own organisation' and then doing something about it, as opposed to seeking to add to their IT footprint first and expecting the new stuff to magically help them create / manage services.

At the event, IBM, to its credit, actually bothered to define 'service' right at the start of one of its sessions—shame there weren't any customers in there but its a start.

'a desired outcome consistently executed through the application of resources and controls in a defined manner'

Not a bad effort I thought (and nicely aligned with / same as a sensible definition of business process too)—specific and short, without leading the audience down an 'IT service' or 'business service' train of thought (there really only needs to be a distinction so as to show that IT services enable business services (i.e. helping the business doing its business)) OR that they are 'background' services which keep the lights on so everyone else can do the business services (e.g. help desk / support functions).

…actually, having written that, I can see why perhaps many orgs are struggling here, the story is somewhat circular and self referencing, and when vendors which only look at very small parts of all this while showing diagrams which make it seem as though their bit is actually the centre of the universe, it can be a rather confusing / misleading place to be as a would-be customer… but that's another story :-)

On the down side: IBM has bothered to define what it's talking about to a degree, but it still stands guilty of offering far too may ways of achieving things (I know, its early days). And so the point i made about adding to the IT footprint first, then doing some service creation / management stuff second, needs addressing (not just by IBM I hasten to add) by some intermediate steps which might just need the slightly less exciting words 'audit / tidy up /take a look at existing capabilities' and then lets see what you might need to invest in. If IBM can gets its people involved here, then indeed, it may have an edge others do not.

Overall, this is a pretty fascinating area, and one which brings some real life colour to generic service management discussion, especially when you start considering some of the potentially useful tools which might help achieve a sustainable converged environment within which to effect sensible (service) management capabilities (discovery, CMDB, service catalogues all spring to mind).

Overall, I do think all this stuff makes more sense when you talk about what you could do with it as opposed to what it is / isn't and so on.

With any luck we'll get to do some Freeform-style deep dive research on this area in the future, so we can start attaching what appear to be a set of sensible ideas to reality at the coal face.

You'll be the first to know when we do :-)