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I’ve been speaking this stuff for five years now and the analysts are now singing the same song. Refer to my link post from yesterday which includes some recent commentary from the EMA folks on Business Service Management (BSM). What we need to do is learn from the Europeans who figured this stuff all out years ago (another article discusses this). Guess I should’ve been an analyst and got paid the big bucks for this stuff…

From this article.


For IT to be focused along these lines, and hence for BSM to succeed, the collaborative, cross-domain processes recommended by best practices such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) need to be implemented, or BSM will remain a pie-in-the-sky dream. As a model, BSM is first and foremost not about technology, but about a cultural shift in how IT professionals collectively (and individually) think and work, both among themselves, and in support of their customers’ businesses.

We would like to share a few quotes to reinforce this; quotes taken from CMDB adoptions, but which could just as well apply to true BSM initiatives. Because, in the end, even CMDB systems are little more than foundational enablers for more effective BSM.

  • “Organizational fragmentation is our biggest obstacle in moving forward.”
  • “I think the issue is political. We have people who are wedded to systems and toolsets they’ve had for years.”
  • “I see the biggest obstacle as being the POLITICS – the religions that are built into the enterprise as each group and sometimes each professional adopts tools and ways of working in a religious manner.”

This pretty much reinforces the realities that I deal with every day. Fortunately, I have the vision, determination and capability to help clients get through the muck and reach their desired end state.

I think there is an opportunity to do things a different way, a BSM 2.0 way. There is an opportunity for someone, some company to take advantage of the predicted market surge for Business Service Management over the next five years. Will it be the incumbents, the OSS community, Google or an emerging company such as FireScope?

I encourage everyone to talk about these challenges, seek a new way to think about these problems, break the traditional IT organizational models apart, include Business Service Management and the monitoring tools group in the “secret club” (Enterprise Architecture Council, etc.) and finally recognize that this stuff is critical to the success (revenue, cost control, compliance, etc) of your company!

Now let’s all roll up our sleeves and figure out HOW to do it. Check out DevCampTivoli. This could easily be the foundation for BarCampBSM or DevCampBSM events in the future. What are YOU going to do to help?

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