Neil Macehiter and Neil Ward-Dutton over at Software Infrastructure for Business Value have a great post that’s in complete alignment with the strategies and methodologies I’ve been talking about here for some time for working towards a real Business Service Management solution.
This is perfect – and really describes every vendor’s Business Service Management solution (including the one from the company I work at if not implemented properly).
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“The problem is that the vast majority of the technology and practice out there does nothing of the sort – at least not without the expenditure of a lot of blood, sweat and tears. To characterise the ITSM/app management/BSM “stack” probably crassly unfairly, all that happens as you move higher up the stack is that events and alerts are correlated at ever more abstract levels. Events from routers, servers and switches are aggregated to give higher-level views of health and performance of infrastructure; infrastructure events are correlated with stats from DBMS instances, application servers, web servers and more to give higher-level views of health and performance of “applications”; and information at the application level can sometimes be aggregated further.
But fundamentally all we’re doing is reporting on more chunky technology outcomes. The outcomes we’re reporting on are still technology outcomes. The insight is about performance, uptime, security, and so on. There is no business context.”
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They follow this up with the most difficult part – not focusing on the technology. As a former boss of mine said, “Doug, you’ve got to work the organizational problem”.
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“The real underlying point is that do really manage services that make sense in a business context, the whole mindset of the IT organisation has to be turned inside out. IT organisations have to stop focusing so much on internal perspectives of process improvement and efficiency (are we doing things right?), and start focusing a bit more on a more external perspective (are we doing the right things?)”
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It’s easy to ask the questions, but not so easy to change the status quo. As most of the Business Service Management or ITSM technologies and tools live far down inside the IT organization, these groups aren’t positioned nor generally encouraged to “rock the boat”. It takes a change agent who can offer some amount of “push” from the top to clear roadlocks and enable a different perspective such as is suggested in this posting. Unfortunately, this type of proactive support and change is not seen much and it’s usually a significant outage, pain point or “loud” LoB executive that forces this type of change and technology adoption to occur.
I hope the approach that we’re developing for Business Service Management, our methodologies and readiness assessments will help clients understand the importance of this line of thinking and that we can really help them “get there”!
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Doug,
It’s great to see that we’re “aligned” 😉
You’re absolutely right that although it’s easy to ask the questions, it’s not so easy to change the status quo. Our research (for our book on IT-business alignment) absolutely bore this out. You need people in IT or business who are prepared to drive “service thinking” into the organisation, to really make this work.
I think we should all view this as an opportunity, though, rather than simply say “oh well, it’s a people problem, we can’t do anything about that”. You and me and others all need to keep pushing the dialogue forward, and hopefully we can help move things along.