Yesudas Jayson Kurisinkal posted today over on his Infosys Service Matters! ITSM & IT Management blog with commentary on the industry’s attempts at making their software or technology more consumable. He notes that this isn’t a new concept with many vendors offering “express” type products. These are often crippled down versions of their more powerful parents with the attempt at offering smaller clients an entry point with the option of easy migration or upgrade in the future to the full blown versions. Some vendors go to market with the full product and mere licensing restrictions on what can or can not be done leaving the complexity of the product.
My question to you is this. Would a Business Service Management (BSM) Appliance, Software as a Service (SaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) be a means to achieve BSM Lite or BSM in general? Would you be willing to open access into your most trusted IT and business data stores to a trusted company that would help you along the path towards BSM from the technology perspective? (people, process, organization silos/politics aside) Would you consider a private, internal SaaS/PaaS delivered as an appliance a viable alternative to the “cloud”. (private cloud)
A “BSM Manager of Managers” in the “cloud” would be an interesting concept to virtually sit atop the end-to-end business and orchestrate alignment, impact, monitoring and management of the key BSM Value Proposition components?
What are the benefits, tradeoffs, risks?
Is your company considering emerging SaaS offerings such as Service-Now.com or any of the business intelligence (BI) or simple monitoring services? Do you already use vendors such as Keynote or Gomez?
Does name brand matter? Does it make it “easier” or just give you a warm and fuzzy feeling?
What value add would you expect compared to deploying your own inside the firewall? Is the cost savings approach good enough justification?
What role should the SaaS/PaaS provider play above providing the core capability? How involved should they be in helping a client get started?
What should the level of effort be for the client to design, develop and implement their specific solution on the SaaS/PaaS platform? Should this be significantly easier? Does the client need a big time SME or just a trained administrator?
What are the core features, functions, capabilities that a SaaS/PaaS provider must have to be able to deliver on a widely agreed upon vision for BSM?
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My perspective on this resonates with Michael Portor’s famous business review on ‘Strategy’. Category under which BSM falls under are Business Strategic planning, alignment, retention and growth.
Not many companies would be willing to put up thr strategic planning initiatives/efforts for other. After all, absolute growth for everyone does not help. Its the relative growth that makes the difference.
I’m not sure I’m following you Robin. I’m not familiar with the works of Michael Portor.
Doug
Porter’s philosophy is that operational effectiveness, although important, most often turns out to be a best practiced followed by most companies in a market segment. This results in absolute growth of every company, but relative growth of none of them.
The same analogy applies here, if WE provide BSM as SAAS/PAAS to company A and company B; what is the relative advantage associated to either.
IMHO BSM is not just about a tool, platform or even a service: It is a strategic decision making solution which is so sensitve to context that generalization of BSM leads to inaccurate and not necessarily relevant information for Business executives responsible for making decisions.
For these reasons, I think BSM provided as SAAS/PAAS has similar effects as the ‘8hours to BSM’ ….
In addition to above:
In the era of personalization, where i see that even silos in the organization have distinct choices/preferences for what their strategy should be and how they want to align to the enterprise strategy, enforcing any platform or service would really not be a path worth following. Most often than not, it becomes one of those burdensome initiative that are continued to make ‘Sponsor” happy !! (Ofcourse, every rule has an exception and thr are various instances of things clicking enterprise wide; but that is rare)
IMHO lets give the silos freedom to have thr instrumentation/correlation/visualization of what fits best to thr strategy and then fill the gap of what ‘more’ is required by the enterprise solution to attain the right synergy. Most often than not: silos strategy fits very well with Enterprise strategy and very less/if no effort is required to get information for Enterprise BSM.
This lays the foundation to visualize the Enterprise BSM