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Business Service Management Strategy Tip of the Week #8

in Best Practices, BSM, BSM Strategy, Business Service Management, Strategy

To review the other key BSM Strategy series posts, please visit here.

Creating the BSM Strategy Draft

Ever wish that after you’ve made a significant investment in a new car or home that you would’ve purchased option X, Y or Z, chosen a different color, floor plan, etc? You may be able to change some things after the fact, but more often than not there’s a significant cost involved. The point here is that while your investment meets its stated purpose, flexibility or change doesn’t come without a cost.

Your Business Service Management strategy should be flexible and change based on the dynamics of the business yet fixed enough to allow planning and progress to be achieved.

F-L-E-X-I-B-I-L-E && A-D-A-P-T-A-B-L-E && D-Y-N-A-M-I-C

One of the biggest challenges facing most companies today is the constant pressure to change things in their environments. Change to cut costs, change to remain nimble/agile, change to stay competitive, change to deliver new products, services or offerings. One of the challenges this constant change brings is that legacy applications, tools and processes are often very difficult to change. When you’re used to performing steps X, Y and Z in a certain way for a certain technology and that technology changes, how will you now perform steps X, Y and Z? Are they still applicable? Do you need to re-tool or more likely deploy something entirely new to support steps X, Y and Z because they’re still required?

The BSM Strategy needs to be established and underpinned by asolid foundation of your core stated goals, objectives, expectations, values, ROI, ROE, competitive differentiation, etc. This is something you should have focused on as you defined what BSM means to your company. These are the things that shouldn’t change without significant extenuating circumstances. These things are repeatable and reliable, employees and management can rally behind these foundational tenants and benefits. They are the things that from which management can expect stated benefits to be realized for the long haul.

The flexible, adaptable and dynamic part of your BSM Strategy may seem to actually be more tactical. It’s the near term zig or zag to meet the day to day business and IT needs of a new campaign or product launch. It’s a change in your BSM Strategy to more closely align to a business or IT initiative in its early stages. It’s raising the bar in a certain business service area due to new technology, clients, governance or other change.

The point here is that you want your BSM Strategy developed in such a way that it’s easy to align, adapt and integrate the foundation into any key business or IT initiative. What you do not want to have happen is a “throw the baby out with the bathwater” scenario where it may appear easier to abandon the BSM Strategy because the business or IT environment changed.

Focus on what works within your environment, with your culture and business and IT environments. Be willing to change and evolve to keep your focus on how you’ve stated the value of BSM to be for your company!