One of the largest and most renowned market analysis team predicted: 3% of IT revenue for past fiscal year would be spent in BSM. Was this converted into reality? NO. Let us analyze why? Buzzwords like “8hours to BSM”, vague/wrong identification of stakeholders, false expectations have got most, if not all buyers rethinking the strategy to implement BSM. Aforementioned reasons and overpriced product/consulting costs for Business service management are responsible for what I call the existential identity crises for BSM.
These developments have urged me to ask the question, is this end of road for BSM? And the answer most certainly is: NO.
The concept of Business service management is one of the fundamental sustenance of any Business as it provides an insight into expenditures for expansion and retention of current and projected market capitalization. BSM is the only concept which enables us to measure accurate value of IT investments and it’s relation to business objectives and strategies. But unless the BSM community cuts through the bull and provides “contextual” BSM solution which is relevant, accurate, extensible and adaptable, the road ahead is going to be tough and poses a threat to the identity of BSM. The need of the hour is the practice of intellectual discipline by BSM community combined with an urgent need for forming ubiquitous language and guidelines for putting the solution into context for the line of business and stakeholders. That is where the true value of BSM is, has always been!!
Alignment of business to IT does not mean fancy dashboards, with drill down capabilities, which show the entire enterprise going red for a CXO’s dashboard, even for single processor utilization threshold violation; it means alignment to the overall business objectives, and its contextual correlation. For example: A telecom service provider, might not need one mobile subscriber to be the decisive factor to reflect the status of the Business and IT, but GSA customer contributing 100 million+ revenue (even though being a single entity) would definitely feature in the list of the decisive contributors to the overall health of business. It is this contextual discipline based on the line of business that BSM community (WE) need to understand, practice and implement.
Understanding the human capital requirements for BSM solution experts is another important aspect. Although I agree that ITIL/eTOM/TMN lays great foundational principles for BSM, they are simply not the final answer. BSM efforts need to be realized by a solution engineers with strong envisioning and correlation ability coupled with discipline of tying things together for business traceability. BSM is not to be implemented by systems engineers who specialize in tools/product implementation (they have a very important role, but not one of Solutions engineer because of the product bias).
To summarize, for solving the BSM identity crisis, the BSM community needs to come together and put forward a set of guidelines and litmus tests to ensure the meaning, value, and realization of BSM in its real sense!! Need for forming an identity and defining BSM guidelines alongwith a should be evaluated and understood by the industry in order to retain the very value and identity of this concept.
In my next post, i will give insights into the key implementation procedures for realizing a BSM solution.
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Robin, Doug
Good points. As with others disciplins there are probably too many people touting simple math calculations like “BSM-Tool(s) + ITIL = you’re done”. We all know, that this usally might not be the case.
Even though I work for a tool company, I definitely affirm that the tool alone will never be the solution. We also have to focus on the impact of these tools within the enterprise/organization and also consider adaption of the surrounding processes and the introduction of new paradigms.
Obtaining Business-IT alignment solely through the use of tools is illusive.
Roland
“Alignment of business to IT does not mean …” – many in IT might wish this were the case but usually the business expects IT to align with their needs, i.e. Align IT to the Business.
Dave
Consider this. A time before core IT workers were outsourced. Where IT was considered core to the business. Where IT workers were involved in the business before being silo’d by the swarms of ‘consultants’ that fed off the indecision of senior management.
Such a time did exist. BSM ‘Heavy’ is the result of bad management decisions. A well paid employee with a final salary pension would commit to the business and buy into it’s success. But now all trust has been lost. Hence the continued reliance on technology and procees. Good BSM results from treating IT workers with respect. It is not a tech/process problem.
@zennippon – I tend to agree. I think for BSM success, equal if not more emphasis must be put on all things surrounding the technology or product of choice. New organizational structure, new incentive programs, new compensation programs, new quarterly/annual performance review programs, new collaboration and knowledge worker programs, etc. All of these focus on integration/alignment with the business services, applications, activities, processes and transactions that enable the business to meet their goals and objectives.
What are your thoughts here? Recognizing that there has to be change and IT people must come to deal with the fact that they are here to support the business and not play with the latest sever, router, switch or SAN, what’s the new IT organization need to look like?
@Dave Schofield – Thanks for commenting, hopefully that was just a typo! I’m keen on this new concept (buzzword) that’s slowly emerging called IT – Business Integration rather than alignment. Check out this article from Michael Keen here. I’m working on doing some podcasts with him on this topic.
@Zennippon -Thanks you for your comment and Ditto on Doug’s thoughts on it.
One other thing that I would like to share is that BSM as a solution can influence a lot of business decisions, but which business decisions are scoped into BSM is an important factor that should be emphasized on early in solution planning stage.
“Alignment of IT and business” has become one of those phrases that rub me the wrong way so “business integration” is most welcome 🙂
Aligning IT with which “business”? I believe there are conflicting dynamics in play here. Senior management often sees IT as a cost center, and apply manufacturing like paradigms, attempting economies of scale, dividing IT organizations into smaller, interchangeable parts, each part with understandable function and cost, etc.
The “customers” of IT however (business users) want IT to be much more fluid, flexible and adaptable to their needs and way of doing business.
When we say aligning IT to business, we typically mean business users (lines of business, internal/external customers etc.). yet IT is typically not governed by the business users. IT organizations are facing conflicting business objectives.
Manufacturing paradigms don’t work in IT. Separating IT resources out from the business into silos does not make them more efficient. As long as there are boundaries between IT and the business units and IT is measured based on costs, not how well they serve business units, IT Business alignment will remain an elusive act. “IT – Business integration” therefore, at least points to the right direction.
I can only hope the problems with BSM is technological. We are much more capable of producing solutions for technological problems than we’re for organizational ones.
Bad me. Should have used the term business-IT aligment more carefully. For me this term is, as others also mentioned, kind of a bad term. Depending on who is using it, in most cases it means “Play my game or go home”. So by using this term silos are enforced.
If you don’t align/synchronize/integrate the goals, strategies and process of your organization at any level, you probably won’t succeed in the future.
The point is, that in most companies IT is much more then a cost factor. Coming from healthcare industry, I learned that in recent years IT has become the spine of the industry, but people don’t really care about that, so the cost effectiveness is disregarded. No integrated strategies. Just silos and conflicts.
For me it’s really remarkable, that all booming and successful companies in the recent years have business models based on IT or IT services (is that your perception as well?).
So all of us – business users, IT guys, consultants and management should think about that – and consider IT as a business factor instead of a cost factor.
Roland
Alignment is definitely not just a unidirection information flow from Business to IT, IT also provides key indicators for driving business strategy.
I’d like to refer to the classic article to put Alignment in the correct perspective and avoiding the side effect of alignment (Trap)
http://www.architectureandchange.com/2007/10/02/the-it-alignment-trap/
@berkay @roland
How will emerging technologies, initiatives, architectures help improve the ability of business to leverage IT to meet their ever changing business goals and objectives?
Is/was SoA the answer?
Will Cloud Computing be the answer?
If IT (and IT Operations specifically) always does what they’ve always done, can’t we expect the same results we always got? What must change to see BSM success throughout a company?
Unfortunately, I see it as an organizational problem rather than a technology problem!
Doug
I was recently in an environment where multiple BSM lite solutions for silo’s exist for encapsulation of each silo related information to meet thr business objectives and planning inputs to stay ahead of the curve. (Note that each silo was significantly large).
All these BSM solutions then fed into an aggregated BSM solution which provided the encapsulated information for various silo’s and provided insight into information enterprise context to plan strategies, and reflection of ‘big picture’.
This made me to think that n-tiered BSM solution can be leveraged for fitting into organization structures. Views?
@robinharwani
What types of data exists in each silo?
To some degree, this is the goal of consolidated operations management where we see the various technology silos (distributed, mainframe, network, facilities, etc.) all converging into central event stores, performance stores, etc. Upon the top of that service modeling, visualization, dashboards, reports/charts, etc.
If the n-tier approach was one that enabled each organizational silo to operate independently but yet feed the key data and information northbound to the end-to-end corporate view then that may very well be an approach that makes deployment of BSM much less painful.
Can you share more on what worked, what didn’t work, value realized, repeatability in other environments, markets, etc.?
Doug
BSM lite for each of the silo were basically very articulate solutions which had information on major initiatives/investments for the silo and provided traceability from IT to Business and vice versa. for example: aggregate infrastructure utilization (f5 cloud) would provide input to infrastructure silo for determining future requirements for infrastructure and provide qualitative information on ‘how aggressive are applications/services growing?’. these BSM lite solution indicator then appeared as an aggregated metric at the integrated solution level.
** some big advantages:
1- Personalization which is key to every organization was accomplished (we dint push/profess anyone to use our definition of BSM, they knew what made thr business good and that pretty much formed thr BSM solution)
2- Silo’s could use any open source/commercial tools which they like and suits thr needs from thr budget, enterprise team integrated to these southbound solutions via simple socket interface (enterprise bsm was based on Netcool suite)
3- Some common lite solutions were basically packaged by the different silo’s and submitted to Enterprise group as an asset, from time to time different silo’s looked at various options and reused an existing ‘lite’ solution
4 – Silo based agility, nobody had to wait for the next enterprise release and were able to achieve extraordinary agility and penetration
** some things that dint work
1 – Synchronization was an issue
2- Too much contextualization – some KPIs/KQIs/Business indicators which were only related to silos were difficult to consolidate for enterprise solution. Due care was taken to standardize this later.
@robinharwani
I sense the need for some nice pictures to show how all this can come together and how supporting systems, repositories or other meta-data would be required to tie everything together for the bigger business alignment.
We can also create a nice taxonomy or ontology here to talk about the key components or capabilities used in this approach, BSM Lite and BSM Heavy.
This also would tie into the BSM Maturity Model very nicely and support the broader BSM Value Proposition.
Doug
@robinharwani tiered BSM Lite approach you mention sounds promising. Whenever you can derive solutions that does not require wholesale organizational change and agreement of multiple organizations, there is hope of success. The approach you’ve described means each silo/department is free to use whatever tool they want and work however they want but expose information preferably in standard format so that it can be used by others. One man’s service is other man’s resource.
I think this approach is a worthy alternative to other BSM Lite approach of implementing BSM for one or two services vertically. It would have much less organizational resistance and shorter implementation times.