Creating the BSM Strategy Draft
In my last post [sorry for delay, traveling too much!], the overall theme for starting to put together a plan of attack for drafting a BSM Strategy was to take the K.I.S.S. approach. Your goal for developing the BSM Strategy is to keep it at as high level as possible with a focused effort at keeping out low level details.
Building upon this K.I.S.S. thought, you should not talk about specific vendors, products or technologies within the strategy document. The objective here is not to bet the chances of a successful outcome, return on investment or effort and competitive differentiation from Business Service Management on any one vendor, tool or technology. The focus instead must be on the outcomes expected from investments and adoption of BSM within your company’s IT and Business units, not on how vendor X or Y spreads their gospel of value and ROI.
Think about this. Are you willing to bet your success (career, promotion, bonus, reputation) on anything other than the sound business decisions based on what you’ve found out to be important to your business units, IT organization and your boss? Keeping focused on these things in the BSM Strategy is critical. You’ll have plenty of time to evaluate vendors, technology and tools AFTER you’ve established an agreed upon BSM Strategy and BSM Requirements and Capabilities document. You’re setting yourself up for failure if you veer off course here.
Technical standards, concepts, methods and practices can be mentioned if they’re ones you wish to adopt as key guiding principles for enabling your Business Service Management Strategy within your company. Avoid the urge to dive into the technical details and only incorporate if you’re reasonably sure that what you’re talking about is understood by those who will read the BSM Strategy document. It may be reasonably safe to talk about ITIL v3, CobIT or ISO 20000 (or others important to your business, industry) if the audience is fairly technical and best practice oriented. If they’re not, don’t! And NEVER copy and paste anything from these best practices or any vendor’s literature. Be original and focused on your company and business objectives.
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I like the work you do here. For BSM and three letter terms, I often wonder why not call it a plan to make more money or a project to get more customers. BSM is a vendor term. To keep it simple, use a whiteboard and talk to the folks who do the work. Once you understand what those folks do and their challenges, go out and find the right “stuff” to help them do the job better. It may not require any technology at all!
I agree with your KISS thoughts. I believe that BSM is simply anything that can be done to enable someone to “Think, Operate and Respond Differently” than they would have before because they have new contextual information about how they support the business.
Thanks for commenting!
Doug
@Doug
I agree with your thoughts completely. What I have observed is that strategy documents do not connect with the real world or “as is” enterprise enviornment?
For addressing this IMHO the strategy document should also document how the current stategy “as is” aligns with the future strategy with BSM? And how the current business capabilities “without BSM” would be enhanced by the “future” Business capabilities? Futhermore, how will my current resources align to these capabilities with the help of BSM?