Links that I have found interesting for May 4th:

• Business Service Management: Strategies for Success in 2009 – To answer these questions and more, EMA has completed a new primary research study of the BSM space. For this groundbreaking study, EMA surveyed 160 North American and global IT and business professionals involved in selecting and using BSM solutions for their organizations. Several of the survey respondents also participated in follow-on focal interviews to gain a more detailed understanding of their BSM experience and perspectives.

  Two main reports have been developed based on this research, one targeted to the BSM vendor community and one targeted to the BSM customer community. This is the customer focused report.

• EMA Survey Finds 89 Percent of Business Service Management Initiatives Meeting or Exceeding Expectations – * BSM is a strategic initiative for the majority of organizations adopting it, with 57 percent having c-level roles responsible for their BSM mission.
  * 77 percent of respondents chose definitions that describe BSM as a process or approach to managing IT, leaving out the role of IT products.
  * Yet, products are instrumental in implementing BSM strategies. 71 percent of respondents indicated that associating business metrics with end-to-end IT services is a critical technical capability that must be supported in BSM solutions.
  * Organizations need to go beyond IT metrics to gather business and customer metrics when assessing BSM success.
  * Respondents identified the top business benefits achieved through BSM as visibility into IT's impact on the business, increased user satisfaction and ability to prioritize IT activities based on business needs.

Links that I have found interesting for April 30th:

• Knocking The NOC: Enter The New Operations Center by Glenn O’Donnell – Forrester Research – The operational hub of any well-run and complex organization is a strong operations center. In IT, this function is often fragmented into pockets that tend to be too isolated. Such isolation is a principal cause of much of the chaos that characterizes IT, therefore leading to an eventual crisis of punitive outsourcing. To address the increasingly complex needs for delivering business value, the IT organization must consolidate and streamline these functions. Combine the service center (aka, the help desk or service desk) with a command center and condense operational tool ownership within this structure. Approximately 80% of the IT budget is spent on operations, and a frightening proportion of this 80% is wasted by inefficiency. A properly unified operations center will prove to be the single most powerful weapon against operational waste in IT.