The friendly analysts at Forrester are trying to paint a picture for BSM 2.0. I haven’t read the material, but from this summary, I don’t entirely agree. Maybe this is Application Dependency Mapping (ADM) 2.0 he’s really talking about. I may agree with some of his potential paths to BSM 2.0.
I certainly agree that BSM will become irrelevant without a 2.0 evolution.
Stay tuned in 2009 to hear what I think BSM 2.0 is all about (if you can’t tell already from reading my blog, podcasts, tags, etc.) and I won’t charge you $775 to find out.
BSM 2.0 Predicting The Evolution Of Business Service Management
by Jean-Pierre Garbani with Peter O’Neill, Reedwan Iqbal
Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)
Business service management (BSM) has been the battle cry of IT management software vendors for several years now. As a technology, it is founded on the ability to map business services to infrastructure components. This should provide visibility into IT from a business standpoint and give IT the ability to become more efficient and better-aligned with the needs of the business. However, the foundation technologies of application mapping and the CMDB have not yet fulfilled their promise.
The result? BSM runs the risk of disappointing customers and eventually becoming a piece of IT management software detritus that litters the road to IT improvement. To avoid this fate, IT management software vendors need to revive their efforts in automated discovery and provide a mapping of applications to business services on top of what exists today — as well as a more granular discovery of the details of online applications underneath what currently exists. We call this evolution BSM 2.0 and highlight the major differences that these improvements will bring to IT management.
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BSM is not working for many companies because the majority of tools used to manage service performance rely on manual rules, scripts and thresholds – basically human guesswork. How can any administrator grasp the thousands of changing KPIs coming from all the configuration items that comprise the health of a given service? I agree that automated application mapping tools are important for making BSM a success. However, beyond the physical dependency mapping , what’s needed is an understanding of the hour-to-hour, day-to-day performance relationships between these configuration items and the ability to analyze and forecast resulting service levels. This can only be accomplished with some sort of self-learning, statistical analytics technology. BSM 2.0 should be about adding automated mathematics to the equation (pardon the pun). Only by adding a math-based, adaptive technology can you successfully track actual performance. Of course, my company has a vested interest in seeing this come true. However, given the success that companies like AT&T are already having with this approach, as Doug wrote about in another posting, the direction for BSM 2.0 seems clear.
Thanks for commenting Daniel. There is definitely a place for tools to automate many of the components of a maturing and value oriented BSM solution. Applying predictive and proactive concepts to both IT and business metrics, smart event management, smart workforce management and bringing in the context of time (time of day, day of week, business calendar) are all areas for emerging companies to innovate in this area of BSM 2.0. I have many many more thoughts on this area to share in 2009.
Doug
I’ve had the opportunity to read this paper from Forrester. It’s not worth the $$ unless you’re fond of what I call the “process oriented approach” to BSM. There’s nothing wrong with this type of BSM approach, but it’s the path that takes the longest to implement and realize any value or ROI. I will share my thoughts in detail on these topics in 2009.
There is little to no innovative thinking presented in this work. There is no consideration of what startups or emerging players may be working on to reinvent or revolutionize BSM. Some are already doing what Forrester has portrayed as BSM 2.0.
This work left me wanting more. It’s also pretty much slanted towards one of the many players in the BSM space and their approach for process oriented (read ITIL) BSM.
Doug
Doug, thanks for saving us 800 Bucks. We are longing to learn more about BSM 2.0, because from our point of view, there is much word left in the BSM-field. Most tools available today are mainly made for presenting errors and events to a admin, incident manager or user and possibly show the business impact.
To advance systems management we are developing an intelligent, automated incidend handler. After learning from you about the freshly discovered term BSM 2.0, we would be interested in finding something like a blueprint for a BSM 2.0 architecture.
We know about the IBM autonomic computing ideas, which seem to be neglected for the past years. Are we right with this assumption? How do autonomic computing and BSM relate? What is, will be or should be the revolution with BSM 2.0? More user interaction? More dashboards? Less user interaction? More automation? Self provisioning, monitoring and healing systems? Questions over questions.
I’m really looking forward to this discussion and I’ll promise to participate.
In the mean time I wish you all a merry christmas and a happy new year.
Roland