Secrets to BSM Success: End-to-End Visibility and Customer Focus

Secrets to BSM Success
End-to-End Visibility and Customer Focus
A WHITE PAPERBy Tony PerriSecrets to BSM Success: End-to-End Visibility and Customer Focus
Business Service Management (BSM) has a lot of people meeting them. What many adopters miss-and this is the real tipping talking, but not necessarily about the same thing. No point for BSM-are the critical changes in people, processes, and technology that IT must initiate. Once these three elements are visibly one would dispute that BSM requires IT to forge a closer aligned to serve the business, IT is poised for BSM success.relationship with business. But among IT decision makers and technology vendors, there is a wide range Different Practices, Diverse Productsof opinions as to what that relationship looks like and BSM has moved beyond the buzzword stage. In fact, leading analysts how to manifest it. Marketplace confusion, coupled with report that BSM initiatives for 2008 were up by more than one-third unmet expectations, has led some adopters to conclude year-on-year. Underlying this enthusiastic adoption is a wide variety that BSM is a timely, but seemingly unattainable, of approaches. Depending on the IT services maturity level of the IT concept. organization, BSM might involve anything from IT asset management and basic Information Technology Infrastructure Library® (ITIL®) But then there are success stories of businesses that applied BSM with services implementation to business process mapping and integrated well-documented, bottom-line results. What do these organizations 1IT management.know that their discouraged counterparts don't? Is there some secret formula that IT teams can follow to make BSM achievable? There appears to be no single way to practice BSM, nor does it seem there is a one-size-fits-all BSM solution. Technology vendors have Effective BSM begins with common sense, namely, a clear used BSM to pitch a wide array of dissimilar products, including understanding of how BSM fits within a specific IT organization and service catalogs, automated discovery tools, and self-learning what it can realistically accomplish. Using this basic knowledge, IT technologies-all with the promise of bringing IT closer to business. teams can then set achievable goals and determine strategies for
Taking BSM One Step at a Time
BSM is not something that can be achieved all at once, but rather, by reaching consecutive goals of IT optimization, beginning with monitoring tools, moving on to dashboards, CMDB implementation, and, finally, true BSM via multiple, federated CMDBs.
3For many BSM beginners, it's unclear which tools and processes can Reasons for BSM Failureactually accomplish BSM. Equally perplexing is pinpointing where BSM fits within the alphabet soup of IT disciplines. How does BSM While not every IT group has the infrastructure visibility it needs relate, if at all, to IT service management (ITSM) and service level to put business first (i.e., meet its SLAs through performance and management (SLM)? What about business activity monitoring (BAM) availability) many recognize the need to operate more closely with and business process management (BPM)? business. Studies show that IT and business alignment is a top concern of CIOs and other senior IT managers. BSM investments A Top-Down Approach reflect this priority. Remarkably, IT spending plans show that BSM purchases are beginning to surpass investments in SLM software and Cutting through this confusion is a simple observation: BSM adds 2services. business to the IT side of the house. This distinction involves much more than semantics. Case in point: Calling an IT service a business In spite of increasing financial commitment, businesses may feel service does not, in fact, make it so. that their BSM efforts have failed if they aren't able to manage IT as a business right away. BSM challenges IT to do more than acknowledge business service delivery; it requires IT to make service delivery the primary However, BSM progresses in tandem with an IT organization's growing consideration-the very starting point for IT strategy. This marks maturity. An IT team that functions chaotically is likely to be focused a radical change in the way we traditionally think about IT on fixing things when they break, as opposed to one that operates management. Rather than fixing broken technologies, IT addresses proactively, which devotes its efforts to preventati... [download for more]