The glyphs above (compliments of Wikipedia) represents the evolution of the number 5. If you haven't had a chance, check out this posting on what has evolved into xMatters 5.0: xMatters Five Ohhhhhhh!

We are still tracking 5.0 for a Jan 31st release for new installations on Linux and Oracle (see the presentation reference above for our timing on upgrades and other platforms), but things are going to be close. Life in the software world is an exciting one to say the least!

Here are a few new features of our re-written installer to keep you guys warm while we finish cooking the release...

We now support directly entering Oracle RAC settings. Previously you would have to jump through a few post-install hoops to get RAC up and running. Here are a few screenshots (as always, click to see more detail):

And one other really cool feature allows you to record your installation steps so you can silently replay them on other nodes (I know... I teased Tobias about this feature, but I must confess that it really is cool):

Until next time...

Earlier this year, I ran across an interesting post on the CIO website talking about IT services firm Atos Origin and their battle against productivity losses due to email overload. 

A couple of weeks ago it came up again with stories from ABC News, Techcrunch, Business Insider, and even Engadget.  The hook?  CEO Thierry Breton wants to eliminate email entirely and move people over to social collaboration tools, exit messages, phone calls, and face to face meetings (!).

I do agree that email overload is a real issue and has resulted in some really off the wall behavior: 

• volume bragging - "I've been on a tear, getting 1000 emails a day"
• wrestling competitions - "Hit Inbox zero today"
• admissions of failure - "Finally gave up and just declared email bankruptcy. Deleted everything and starting from scratch."

However, killing email is probably a little extreme. 

One area where email is out of control is notifications for IT teams.  The xMatters Advisors team spends a lot of time talking to large enterprises about how they manage their IT environments, and in particular the communication approaches they use to engage people to take actions (fix stuff, approve things) and to give people a heads up (service outages, change windows).

A common element that we've observed is that there is a LOT of email traffic internal to the IT teams and a fair amount that is sent outside the team about what's happening with IT services.  Here's some common complaints:

• I'm on an email distro for IT alerts and get so many that I just ignore them (or have a rule that redirects them to a folder I never look at)
• We send emails out but for important stuff have to follow up with a text or phone call to actually make something happen
• When we get emails, we can't do anything with the messages themselves.  We have to call someone to approve a change or confirm that we're working on the issue. 
• We have to power up a laptop to get connected to the system that sent the email to figure out what's really going on
• We get emails for stuff on the weekend even when we're not on call
• IT doesn't let us know what's going on.  We're kept in the dark about what's going on.
• IT keeps sending us so many emails about what's going on that we just ignore all of them now.

In my view, the core of the problem isn't email itself.  It's how we use email, rely on it exclusively, and treat it like a one way communication channel.

When we deliver an IT relevance engine to a client, there are a lot of benefits that directly address this email overload problem:

• Individuals get fewer emails because they pass through many filters to ensure that communications only get sent to the people that should get it, based on schedule, on call rules, escalation structure, location, etc.
• When time is of the essence, either bypass email entirely, or use it just for a backup.  Primary communication switches over to SMS / text messages, or automated phone calls.
• Enable people to respond to the messages they receive in context of the issue and their role in the organization. Examples: I'll take the incident ticket, this change request needs more detail about impact, I'll be on the war room conference call in 15min, etc.
• Provide mobile access to IT management tools so whether you need to just get more information before making a decision, or you want to start working for wherever you are, you can do so quickly and using any smartphone or tablet at your disposal.

If you read any of the articles about the challenges at Atos Origin and thought you have the same type of problems in your IT organization, you might find this information on IT relevance engines useful.

If you're an existing xMatters client and have seen these benefits come to life at your company, feel free to share stories.

And finally, here's a Monday morning challenge:  If you record a video of yourself saying the following phrase (or a creative alternative), I'll make sure you get some awesome xMatters schwag for the holidays. Limited to first 20 responders who post as comments or to info@xmatters.com.

"If you're having notification problems I feel bad for you son, I got a relevance engine so I got none"

And yes, I realize that the grammatical structure of that phrase is far from perfect, but I have rules to comply with: Jay-Z 99 Problems

Abbas Haider Ali.

I'm at the Gartner Datacenter event this week and wanted to share some of the the highlights from the sessions that I attended today and jot down some key ideas that we can explore in future posts.

It turns out that my manic tweeting actually makes for pretty good notes and captures key soundbites from the sessions. You can browse all of them at your leisure on the Day 1 Storify that I created.

If you don't have time to go through them all, here's the crib notes:

Consumerization of IT - Don't fight it. Embrace early adopters to pick up new ideas and generate value.

Thailand floods are having major impact on HDD prices, but what you need and not anymore until prices stabilize again.

IT energy consumption needs to be kept track of closely; it's the new critical KPI

The Cloud - It's everywhere and in all forms, public, private, and hybrid. Most enterprises will stick to private and hybrid options for the most part, for now.

Social and IT - It's gong to happen with or without you.  Stop being afraid and come up with a plan already.

Services - make sure everyone who uses this word knows the definition and uses them consistently.

Application performance management - It's where you should spend your $ to know how your services are really performing.

DevOps challenges IT dogma and allows you to drop IT debt of old process, tools, management approaches

DevOps requires communication and collaboration. It's about people breaking down silos to increase velocity and deliver value to the business more quickly.

I also had some really interesting conversations about the future of Service Desk products and the most innovative work being done in this space.  But that's a topic for another post.

Watch the blog more posts this week as well as a set of follow up posts on various topics where we'll dig into social tools for IT Ops and DevOps in more detail.

Abbas.

As we approach the American Thanksgiving Holiday I find myself wondering what can a company do to be more connected and helpful to a community? 

A company, by definition, is a group of people who build products or deliver services to customers. If successful the company makes a profit and delivers a return to its shareholders.  Those that work there profit by earning a living for their time and skills.  Where in there is community? 

Well xMatters isn't just a collection of normal people.  We are, well, abnormal?  Let's go with unique.  Yep, that sounds much better.  Our community includes our clients.  Those that we work with to help be successful.  And our clients are not Company X, they are people with names.  We believe our clients are people with names who need us and we need them.  And that's why we like our work (at least I think it's that way).    

So, back to "community".  Our community is also our local community.  It's the San Francisco Bay Area.  It's greater London.  It's Victoria, BC. It's also Austin, Sydney, Chicago, Atlanta, Irvine and so on.  Our community isn't just where our Global HQ is, it's where our people are and even where our clients are.  And in those communities, this winter and holiday season - times are tight.  In our area the Alameda County Food Bank services 1 in 6 residents.  1 in 6.  That's amazing and it's not right. Our HQ team will be focusing on the Alameda County Food Bank.

The xMatters team will be completing our support of the fight against Prostate Cancer this "Movember" 30th.  What do we do in December?  Well, I'm going to challenge you.   Challenge our partners, our clients, our vendors, our neighbors, our people to work with me for sixty days. 

What if our vendors: Salesforce.com, Oracle, Marketo and Jive Software participated?  What if our partners: BMC Software, CA Technologies, HP Software and IBM Global Services all participated?   What if our clients participated?  What if a company were able to move a community to act?

I would like to launch a drive against hunger at home - from December 15 to February 15.  60 days of collecting donations, canned food and raising awareness for fighting hunger at home.  Donations go to food banks in YOUR community but we do it together.  What if you got everyone you know to do a little something and help?  What if we all did!  When the holidays end and we go back to business as usual will we still be as thankful?  We should be so let's choose to act and see just how powerful a community can be. 

Let's occupy stomach space and put a dent in hunger in your home community.  As we develop this idea further we will formalize the program.  Think about this holiday season as you enjoy all of the trimmings thankfully.  How can you share?  If you can help and want to help, respond to this post with your ideas.  In three weeks we'll launch this idea and see how many pounds of food and dollars of donation we can muster. 

What can a community do?  Let's find out.  Troy McAlpin

At xMatters we have three technical teams that fill different roles in working with clients:

Advisors - analysts and architect types who steer clients towards the relevance engines that will help their business

Consultants - the crew with the skills that put the meat on skeleton deployment plans and bring relevance engines to life

Client Assistants - if you're got questions, they have answers.  this is the group that provides support for everyone who uses relevance engines, even xPerts.

There is a fourth group of technical folks who work with our clients. Internally known as they "veeps" they include the VPs of operations, product management, and technical evangelism.

Under normal circumstances, they're all on friendly terms, helping each other out as needed to ensure that all 1000 of of our clients have the best possible experience in working with us as a company.  That is, until you pit them against each other in competition.  That's when the gloves come off, all bets are off, and comments like "there can be only one" start to get thrown around.

So here's what's up:

We're having a slightly less friendly version of the 5-5-5 days that our Engineering team runs where the 4 technical groups will face off against each other on Friday November-18 in an epic battle to see who can build the best special purpose relevance engines.  Will they be focused on IT major incident management? Service impact alerting?  Management updates? Coordinating activiites at an airport?  Who knows!

Bookmark this blog post to keep up to date leading up to, and on the day of, "The Throwdown".  The winning team gets prizes and grudging acknowledgement that they are the best of the best.  The losers get booed until the voices of the winners are hoarse.

Share your thoughts on who will win, or ideas for relevance engines as comments on this post.

May the best team win!

xMovember Background

Anyone who has met me can attest to the fact that I am one of many individuals who constantly promote the culture within xMatters.  I believe that it is one of the most compelling reasons that people love to work with and be associated with the xMatters organization.  We are personal, personable and like to have fun and do the right thing. 

So what started out as a conversation regarding the charity fundraiser known as Movember naturally turned into a company backed, competition for raising cancer research funds. The management here stepped up and agreed that xMatters will match any xPert or client private donations to the foundation up to $5,000.  We now have two teams organized and invite all xPerts and clients to join in the fun.  Any private donations may be made on one of the team pages below or may be communized directly to me at hammer@xmatters.com (yes, that is one of my real email aliases). We will tally donations and match them on the last day of Movember.

About Movember

During November each year, Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces, in the US and around the world. With their Mo’s, these men raise vital funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men.

To read all about the humorous campaign that is being put together at xMatters read part 1, to understand the more serious side read part 2.

Part 1 - xMatters for fun:

On Movember 1st, guys register at Movember.com with a clean-shaven face. For the rest of the month, these selfless and generous men, known as Mo Bros, groom, trim and wax their way into the annals of fine moustachery. Supported by the women in their lives, Mo Sistas, Movember Mo Bros raise funds by seeking out sponsorship for their Mo-growing efforts.

Mo Bros effectively become walking, talking billboards for the 30 days of November. Through their actions and words they raise awareness by prompting private and public conversation around the often ignored issue of men’s health.

The idea of participating started with the EMEA team as part of an idea to give them something to talk about with clients and to promote some of the fun culture within xMatters.  Check out the video and register on one of the team pages at http://mobro.co/xmovember/ or http://us.movember.com/mospace/1508210/ and click on Join My Team:

Part 2 - My personal motivation:

So this is a great event which raises charitable funds for men's health organizations such as Lance Armstrong's Livestrong and the Prostate Cancer Foundation.  I think many of us have experiences personally or within our families with similar health problems.  A startling fact is that 1 in 3 men will have some problem with their prostate in their lifetime!

My personal story which I have shared with few.  Many of you know that in 2009 my family spent time in the UK for many months while I was working with the xMatters EMEA team.  It was a great experience and I have such great friendships as part of this time.  My father, who has never traveled internationally was set to visit us while living over there.  On the eve of his visit I received one of those phone calls we all dread.  He annual physical results revealed some problems.  Through a very invasive biopsy process they identified a very aggressive, rapidly spreading prostate cancer.  The options as you get older may include very invasive surgery or even possibly doing nothing.  In his case, he chose surgery, but it was unknown as to the possibility of success or the possibility of post surgery functionality.  It is hard to imagine the emotional process one goes through.

After a very long surgery process and recovery, I am happy to report that my father is now 2 years cancer free and living a healthy life, spending time with his grandchildren.  I am participating in Movember to honor my father's tenacity in going through the process and not giving up for his family.

Invitation

So we hereby invite all xPerts and xClients alike to participate in any way you feel.  If you are into growing your own, we would love to see your photos and updates as you will likely see all of ours (All mustaches in the above video were fake, by the way) or join one of our teams (preferably my team, as I am more fun!).  Here are the game rules per the Movember website:

Step One: Personalize your Mo Space (Donation) page
•    Login and update your profile picture, personalize your motivation and claim your own personalized Movember URL

Step Two: Build your Team
•    Login and build your team using the suggested emails, Facebook and Twitter posts

Step Three: Grow a Mo
•    Start Nov 1st clean shaven
•    Then grow your moustache all month – nurture it, groom it, respect it
•    Remember no beards and no goatees. Click here for Movember Rules
•    For Movember style inspiration download The Style Guide

Step Four: Raise funds
•    Login and view the Donation section where you will find suggested wording to ask for donations via email, Facebook, Twitter or in person.
•    For cash/check donations follow the steps on the Donation Form

Step Five: Roam Proud
•    Host your own Movember party – for more information on how to run your own event visit the Mo Parties page
•    Show off your Mo at one of Movember’s Gala Partés. Find out details of your nearest Gala Parté and get free tickets when you raise $100 and $200

The details below are good to keep handy: 
•    Your Registration Number: 1352424
•    Team Name: xMovember

Movember – changing the face of men’s health

But it certainly is happening! What a great time in Chicago last week. It was a pleasure meeting new faces and seeing old friends. For those of you that missed out, make sure you check out the pictures and other goodies at http://www.relevancerevolution.com/chicago/.

One of the best parts of our client forums is the feedback sessions where clients share their needs, wants and desires (at least work related ones). We learn all kinds of new ideas from you guys. Here are some of the enhancements that have come out of client requests:

• Coverage Rotations - only rotate a team on the days where there is an actual coverage. Coming in in 4.1 Patch 10
• Allow current user to be in the Recently Used list - notify yourself, a lot (seriously, what are you guys doing out there?). Coming in 4.1 Patch 10
• Provide a “chicken exit” for Coverage deletions - deleting a Coverage now requires a confirmation dialog, hopefully preventing a lot of facepalming deletes. Coming 4.1 Patch 10
• Rotation Direction for teams - define if your primary moves to secondary on-call, or if your primary moves to the end of the on-call. Delivered 4.1 Patch 8
• Contains filtering for Event Activty - allows the Event Activity report to filter in a case insensitive fashion with partial string matching. Delivered 4.1 Patch 8
• Long SMS and Simple SMS replies over GSM - send long SMS messages and respond with simple replies when using a GSM modem. Delivered 4.1 Patch 8
• “Assign Existing Team” for One Time Coverages - a new (missing?) option for reusing Teams. Delivered 4.1 Patch 5
• Revise holiday coverage overlaps - majority request to change the way a holiday coverage overlaps with scheduled coverages. Delivered 4.1 Patch 3
• LDAP configuration - allows binding to multiple servers, walking across all servers and a super slick test button. Delivered 4.1 Patch 3

We hope you like getting these enhancments in our patch line. And we captured all of your new ideas and we will do our best to get them into our patches and on demand releases.

Thank you for the product feedback!

At the beginning of the year our Consulting Team transitioned to an Agile Consulting model.  I am not going to delve into the definition of Agile Consulting here, if you want more information then I highly recommend reviewing: What is an Agile Consulting Engagement (ACE) ?.

The interesting thing for me is not just the change in the process or approach to solving a problem but the subsequent evaluation of the consulting engagement and tying the elements of the success back to into process or approach change.  In this case, it was a significant change and a significant investment across the team as a whole.

So, on to the problem.  The problem with the consulting approach pre ACE was that it was static.  Customer needs are fluid and change for many reasons:

• Education - In the versatility of the tool or the underlying business proces for example
• Growth - In requirements or stakeholders for example
• Time
• Iterations
• Etc ...

So, on to the evaluation.  One of the driving elements in the Agile Consulting Engagement methodology is "demoing" the state of the engagement at the completion of a sprint. 

The obvious reason for this, it to drive a review and signoff of the latest sprint. Common sense from a consulting perspective right?  Well, the secondary benefits of this step in the ACE methodology, in my mind, are far more useful.  Let me explain

Have you ever been the victim of a change?  You know, one day someone springs a new "time tracking" or "accounting" or "ticketing system" on you ...

By the time you actually get to see it and interact with it, it is completed and you have no say in how to implement it before it is in production and inflicted upon you? 

Have you ever heard the dreaded:

"We are moving from the old system to the new system on Monday and we expect everyone to be up to speed and using it as of Monday"

without every having seen the new system and immediately started worrying?  I know I have and I am not a big fan  

Worse, it sets a bad expectation and colors the first impression of the new system in a negative fashion.

Now imagine a different approach, imagine that periodically during the project process; from planning, implementation and even through final delivery, you were asked your opinion, you were experiencing the changes first hand and you had input into helping drive/manage the changes. 

Would you expect a better outcome?

Would you be happier?

Would you feel like the owner of the change rather than the victim of the change?

Now imagine a project lasting several months or perhaps even several years.  Which approach would you feel has a better chance of success?

Last year, I had the tremendous opportunity to be involved in a project in Australia where a fortune 100 company level business process rearchitecture was happening.  During that time I realized just how important selling your process change and resulting service was.  The project lead in question leveraged my services quite often during the lifecycle of the project to help showcase the end results of the process change to his business.  The results were very interesting and very powerful.  I learned that creating internal advocates within your customer base fed upon itself to drive interest, buyin and even competition to be the first to be onboarded. 

Why was xMatters the "shiny thing to show around" you ask?  Because we are piece of the puzzle the customer actually gets to see and interact with and that interaction is a good piece of the overall perception of the entire solution.

Over the course of this year using our new ACE methodology I again experienced the power of this process to an unanticipated degree. I experienced how the impact of actively engaging your end users during the course of the project feeds upon itself and even "snowballs" to drive the project to a successful conclusion.  More importantly, how actively educating the end users and involving them in the change creates internal evangelists, driving positive change and allowing the final migration to progress smoothly and cleanly by setting the appropriate expectations in advance.

Finally, perhaps most importantly a user base asking for more rather than dreading more.

If you would like to read about an actual customer experience I would recommend the following as it is probably the best example that I have seen in my time as a consultant:Re: Benefit of "Agile Consulting Approach" and DIA