Cameron HaightI along, with colleagues David Cole and Jarod Greene have written recently about the emerging adoption of social media technology in support of IT operations and service management activities (for examples see here, here and here). On the IT operations side, there are several use cases that are evolving, i.e., end users helping one another, end users interacting with IT operations teams and intra-IT operations team activity coordination.
The latter was case was more fully explained in my earlier note Collaborative Operations Management: A Next-Generation Management Capability. In this I explained that the current crop of IT management tools provide little in the way of support for many of the unstructured activities that go on within an operations team (I state that the acronym ITSM really stands for IT Structured Management and the subtle irony that in order to actually get work done within an ITSM product today, that you usually have to go “outside” the tool to get it initiated, i.e., via email, etc.).
In addition, because so much IT operations activity remains unaccounted for, the knowledge of how to perform specific IT operations processes often fails to be captured and turned into reusable assets. The adoption of social media technology potentially presents IT organizations with a means to better retain this information while positioning to become the future “glue” that ties together many of the more conventional IT management technologies. Social ITM technology may also be a means by which to improve collaboration between development and operations teams ala DevOps. Stay tuned for more on this evolving technology area.
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5 responses so far ↓
1 roger reynolds September 6, 2011 at 5:43 pm
IBM has been providing this capability across their global internal employees and contractors via SameTime – the type of global collaboration you are describing differs only in the population (closed or open) and the delivery mechanism (tweets, facebook updates vs. SameTime).
Open collaboration raises the issue of authoritative vs. non-authoritative or ‘would you bet your job on the answer you received’. With closed loop populations, there is a feedback loop to address this, with open systems, not such much. Work is being done with reputational factors, but lacks consistent coverage across platforms and any arbitrary scoring system for reputation.
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