Why should I have a Business Service Management (BSM) Strategy?
Last week I talked about the first reason you need to have a BSM Strategy is that it is used to establish just what BSM means to your company. It’s establishing an intimate definition that supports your business goals, objectives and culture.
This is all well and good and will help you speak intelligently about just what BSM is across the company. It will help you focus the discussion on what matters most to the business and not some apparent gee-whiz thing the next BSM vendor touts in front of an executive. But unfortunately, that’s not enough.
The second reason you need to have a BSM Strategy is that it’s used to set YOUR vision, YOUR value statement, YOUR governing principles and how YOUR company will use BSM to achieve value and competitive differentiation.
The BSM Strategy includes YOUR own defined strategic goals and objectives specific to the business’s goals and objectives and how BSM will enable you to meet them. It’s how you’ll adopt BSM to enable the business to achieve things such as better cost controls, higher margins, increased availability, better performance or improved user experience.
At a high level, the BSM Strategy should introduce how your company will operationalize the value statement and governing principles within specific lines of business, business or IT initiatives, within IT, IT Operations or Application Support groups. If you’re adopting SoA, Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Green IT or whatever, capture how you’ll leverage YOUR BSM approach to increase the success and overall value of those initiatives. If you’re not aligning BSM’s value to these initiatives and key business services, applications, activities, processes or transactions, you are going to FAIL and not realize what true value oriented BSM can offer.
Yes, I do strongly believe that when BSM and the broader BSM Value Proposition is properly adopted and implemented that you can link these initiatives quite easily to significant value and competitive differentiation within your business.
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Doug,
you’re absolutely right saying that individual BSM strategies have to be adapted to computing paradigms. BSM must not only be degraded to a set of disperate or integrated tools.
That *is* the reason why discussions on topics like Cloud Computing are touching this area.
Dumb question: Is BSM a synonym for ‘Business-IT-Alignment’?
Roland
Exactly. BSM’s success is absolutely dependent on positioning the specific value one expects from how they’ve defined BSM with things important to the business.
Companies who truly want to be successful adopting the latest in IT hype must incorporate a BSM way of thinking from top to bottom in the organization. The broader BSM Value Proposition (BSM, BTM, BQE, SLA2.0) is key!
The most common definition of BSM includes language about how it helps IT align better with the Business. I think it’s that plus a lot more! (http://dougmcclure.net/blog/business-service-management-defined/)
Doug
working on solutions over the years, i have created mental models of BSM maturity levels(till now i have reached only level 4). I think it implicitely does encompass what BSM constitutes of.
Matunity Level 0: Desparate tools available for individual team for accomplishing Service Assurance solutions, ‘plumbing’ teams available for developing tool functionalities
Maturity Level 1: OSS implemenations and Integrated Tools set available
Maturity Level 2: Business Service Level Correlation accomplished (IT – Service Alignment) ; TILL This stage most organizations dont explicitely concentrate on “BSM” but call these solutions various names.
Maturity Level 3: Business indicators included + Maturity Level 2
Maturity Level 4: Business Correlated to IT, Traceability of initiatives to investments, and historical reports, trends to provide strategic, capacity, and directional inputs.
@robinharwani
The BSM Maturity Model is sooo much more than that. I go from 0-5 in a pattern similar to Gartner’s famous model. I’ll introduce this to you as I launch the big BSM Value Proposition plan.
In general, it’ll be an easy way to stair step up in simple to understand terms across any vendor and product mix.
I’ll need your help on it!
Doug