Wikipedia defines strategy as a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal, most often “winning”. Strategy is differentiated from tactics or immediate actions with resources at hand by its nature of being extensively premeditated, and often practically rehearsed. The key words here we want to focus in on for our Business Service Management strategy are “long term plan of action”, “extensively premeditated” and “practically rehearsed”.
Each year about this time, companies go through some sort of strategy and planning session for the new year. Businesses meet to talk about how they’ll spin up new or dust off existing marketing campaigns, product releases or how they’ll win more business in a certain market or geography. IT departments work on how they’ll align to the new business plans in addition to cleaning up their house through wide ranging technology initiatives, upgrades, outsourcing, etc.
This year will not be different. We’re going to see an increase in sexy sounding initiatives, programs, technology and products. We’re going to hear about doing more with less, wringing out costs in everything we do, greening, automating, virtualizing, moving to the cloud or some other dynamic infrastructure. All great and important things for companies to do to be successful and competitive in the new year and beyond.
What’s the tie in to Business Service Management (BSM) you ask? In order for Business Service Management to stick for the long haul within a company, it must be thought of as equally important within the company as other key business or IT initiatives. It must be elevated to these same levels within the company, with the same buy in, commitment and top down support within IT and within the business AND have the same types of tangible aligned value proposition and return on investment and effort.
If you’re considering a new strategy or initiative around dynamic infrastructure, infrastructure 2.0, datacenter 2.0, cloud computing, virtualization, green IT, etc. you’ve obviously had or will need to draft business cases, plans, capital funding requests and the like to be able to move forward. Did or will you incorporate how your service management strategy will evolve to adapt to these new initiatives? How about how IT operations and support organizations will need to mature? What investments or changes will be needed to really be able to achieve the expected value or return on investment these initiatives are expected to bring? Your cost savings may be washed out by the fact that your people, processes and procedures are still flying blind, using legacy products or inefficient workflow in disparate IT silos.
While each may require strategic and tactical investments in very domain specific areas, a business service management strategy is what ties all the pieces together and ensures that IT operations and support are both integrated and aligned with delivering the expected value to the business. It links the lowest level IT operations and support teams into the bigger value statement. It ensures that everyone thinks, operates and responds differently to the new initiative because they understand the expected business value and returns from the initiative investment rather than just treating it as a new server, router, device or toy to play with or support.
Stay tuned to these short weekly posts on the importance of establishing a business service management strategy.
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