Creating the Business Service Management (BSM) Strategy Draft

One of the consistent themes you’ve read about throughout this series is the importance of clearly linking BSM to the expected value that it will provide to your business and the goals and objectives it has established. We don’t want to talk about how things are today but rather focus on how the BSM Strategy and its adoption will change the status quo, address reoccurring pain points and enable IT – business integration and alignment.

Dr. Michael Loebbert writes “If a strategy works, it must be told as a thrilling story. The people involved with the company need to understand the strategy, reproduce it in their experiences and realize it in their actions.”

He continues by providing some thought provoking questions that are perfect for guiding you through development and review of your BSM Strategy.

1. What decisions have to be made in the overall context and to implement in action? What is the difference before and after? How do I know when I’m the right track?

2. What are the obstacles, risks, resistors which must be overcome? What “adventure” must be dealt with? With what result?

3. What is the key difference to the competitors? What is the pivotal point for success of the strategy? When exactly does the strategy come into reality?

4. How does the strategy fit to our company, the characters and the temperaments of people, to our values and cultural patterns, which are available for the necessary decisions and actions?

5. Is the designed suspense conducive and full with power? Is it overstraining or subchallenging for the development of company? Must there something be added?

6. Is the story, which tells the strategy, in total coherent and credible? The people involved can they identify (relate)? Which adapters still need to be supplemented?

Based on his guiding advice for how a strategy should be written and ultimately understood, think through each of these points and how you’ll address them within your BSM Strategy. This will prepare you for the most challenging parts of BSM – everything external to the technology!

Here are a few other areas you should put some thought into to incorporate into your BSM Strategy “story” or sales and marketing campaign:

• Will your BSM Strategy be well read and understood at each level of IT and the business?
• Are you speaking in terms that are understandable and relevant?
• Would an IT person walk away with a different understanding than a non-IT business person? Should they?
• How about a lower level person compared to a higher level person (position, rank, grade, education, experience)? Should they?
• What training, workshops or other sales and marketing campaigns will be required to ensure successful adoption of your BSM Strategy?
• Do you address “WIIFM”? Do you understand and speak to the things that motivate people within each of these area? (Compensation, recognition, advancement, etc.)
• Are you in alignment with individual and group goals and objectives? (they *should* align to the businesses goals and objectives, but may not)
• Do you have an organizational change plan ready? Have you thought about what changes may be required (org structure, people, roles, workflow and processes)

Keep the following in mind as it is the basis for how simple or complex your BSM Strategy needs to be. How do you want people to Think, Operate and Respond Differently within your environment? Tell me a story about how things will be in the future when your BSM Strategy has been broadly adopted and operationalized across all organizations.

Your BSM Strategy helps you begin with the end in mind and guides development of the BSM Roadmap and ultimately your success. You will not only have a technology component to create project and work plans for, but components ensuring the BSM Strategy story is successfully told, understood, adopted and relevant for the long haul.

To catch up on the BSM Strategy series, visit here.

Links that I have found interesting for May 27th:

• It is Time to Think Beyond IT – let’s revisit the premise of EMA’s old idea of the “Global Corporate Control Center” which suggests collapsing a whole new set of “feudal kingdoms” into a more efficient, more risk-free, more automated, and more accountable fabric of people and technologies. One thing that should become apparent just from reading the press is companies in many industries are accelerating their quest to find new and more effective ways of working.
• How to Assign Value to an IT Service – If the phrase “aligning IT with the business” has become an onerous cliché, it’s because both IT and the business have evolved to become so non-generic that the phrase is now little more than a vapid equation. And if the “BS” in BSM (business service management) suggests more colloquial roots, it’s because the monolithic idea of BSM quickly disintegrates before these varied realities. I haven’t done any more than scratch the surface with this list of questions and examples, but I hope I’ve gotten at least some of your creative energy going around this challenge. And, as always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts and perspectives, as well.
• Video: How CIOs should spend their day – CIOs often have difficulty balancing their time and focus between their IT staff, their management peers, and the CEO. This episode of Sanity Savers for IT executives introduces one effective time management strategy: Forrester’s 30-30-30-10 model, which is designed to keep IT front-of-mind in the business and allow CIOs to do what they do best — prove and deliver IT value to the enterprise.
• Video: Three reasons why the voice of IT gets ignored – IT leaders sometimes feel like their voice gets ignored, which leads to failed projects and technology problems that IT ultimately gets blamed for. This episode of Sanity Savers for IT executives looks at three ways you can communicate effectively with your fellow company leaders and establish yourself as the authority in the IT decision-making process.
• Capacity Management In 90 Days – Effective capacity planning starts with customer experience and measuring IT Service quality compared to customer requirements as expressed in Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

  There are three important “management views” of capacity. The three views build upon one another and deliver a roadmap for effective capacity planning:

  Resource Capacity is measuring and monitoring all components comprising IT Services. Practically, this means reporting on the utilization of discrete CIs.

  Service Capacity is ensuring that IT Services meet Service Level Requirement (SLR) targets within Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Practically, this means measuring and monitoring IT Service performance. Service Capacity is a function of the Resource Capacity of all the service CIs.

  Business Capacity is planning and implementing IT Services to meet future business requirements. Practically, this means trending and forecasting of projected IT Service saturation based on observed Service Capacity.