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!

Links that I have found interesting for April 1st:

• Secrets to Successful Service Level Management – ** MUST READ ** Who's offers capabilities closest to this? DF, Oblicore, Big4?

  Manually creating after-the-fact monthly reports is not performing Service Level Management (SLM). SLM must show both current and past status as well as predict future problems, and this requires automation and daily or even real-time analysis of data.

• Aberdeen Group: Application Performance Management: Getting IT on the C-Level's Agenda – Aberdeen's November 2008 report, The Performance of Web Applications: Customers are Won or Lost in One Second revealed that business performance starts to decline when mission-critical applications reach the baseline of 5.1 seconds of response time delay. Additionally, Aberdeen's June 2008 report, Application Performance Management: The Lifecycle Approach Brings IT and Business Together showed that issues with application performance could impact corporate revenues by up to 9%. The research also showed that only 42% of organizations were satisfied with the performance of business-critical applications.

  Aberdeen surveyed 158 organizations to examine best practices for managing application performance. The research revealed that nearly half of all respondents surveyed do not have the ability to measure the business impact of issues with application performance. This report serves as a guide to organizations looking to improve the performance of their business-critical applications.

• Central Station: the rise of the CMDB – ITIL-driven CMDB projects tend to be ‘bottom-up’ – they start out as incident management or change management automation projects. But ultimately, CMDBs tend to add a new service layer, which needs its own visualisation and analytic capabilities for it to add real value.

  Of course there is nothing new about auto discovery tools generating visual maps of the IT infrastructure, but BSM vendors are now able to provide tools that not only identify software applications and their interdependencies, but integrate well with change management. Together, the CMDB and related visualisation and analytic technologies have the potential to bring much-needed business meaning to business service management (BSM) practices.

• Tivoli Business Service Manager 4.2 Performance Tuning Recommendations – This paper includes performance and tuning recommendations for IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) version 4.2.
• Correlsense attempts to simplify your application management – BTM tools help in reducing the incident isolation time for faster service restoration and faster resolution in combination with deep dive tools. BTM tools have ability to monitor transactions across tiers or application silos and provide comprehensive visibility into an application on a single pane.

  Sharepath is a BTM solution that attempts to make the process of incident and problem management simple, efficient and reducing the time in problem isolation. Oren Elias, CEO of Correlsense mentions BTM is about monitoring across tiers with probably less deep dive than the APM tools that are good in managing single tiers.

  Sharepath arguably supports the largest application technology stacks (i.e. PHP, JEE, .Net among others) in the BTM market. The value add by providing support for a large variety of application technology stack or packaged software is to reduce the overall problem identification and resolution time thereby reducing the cost and business impact associated with an incident