If you are thinking about Business Service Management (BSM) as an opportunity to radically change the way your IT organization thinks, operates and responds to the constant pressures of supporting your demanding and dynamic business goals and objectives, then share your insight, thoughts and views in this EMA survey.

What? EMA? Survey? Sponsored by a vendor and an analyst? Yeah, so what. This is how things get done. This is how vendors test the waters, feel out market opportunities in broad or narrow segments. Nobody’s going to invest hard earned funding dollars into BSM unless they’ve got data from surveys like this to back it up, especially in tough times like this. I previewed the questions, they’re what you’d expect. I DO NOT KNOW WHO IS SPONSORING THIS SURVEY!

What’s going to happen? You’ll take this survey and share your thoughts and views. The data gets crunched, correlated and common themes are identified. Then a webinar is scheduled with EMA and the client who sponsored the study. The “highlights” of the study are discussed at a very high level with the pitch to purchase the full research report at the end (in most cases, not sure here). The client leverages the study results, webinar attendees, etc. to drive sales and marketing campaigns and product development activities.

What do you get? You’ll get your own copy of the study results. Maybe you’ll win an iPod Touch. While EMA isn’t a Redmonk (yet), Paul Burns has agreed to have a dialog here via the blog after the study and webinar is complete. Then you’ll really get to sock it to him if you don’t agree with the results or interpretation, share your view on where BSM is, how it needs to evolve, what BSM 2.0 means, whatever. He’s open for this experimentation “Redmonk style” if you will.

So here’s Paul’s blurb, read and participate if you’d like. If not, carry on troopers. We’re all on the way to re-defining BSM right here on the blog with your most excellent help and input!

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Participate in Industry Study on Business Service Management

IT analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is conducting a new study to explore the benefits of BSM and how real-world organizations are realizing them.

• Do you work for an enterprise or government organization that has 250+ employees?
• Do you have direct experience with (determining need, recommending or evaluating products, making purchase decisions, or using) BSM solutions for your organization?

If so, you are invited to share your thoughts by completing this online survey, which should take no more than 20 minutes of your time.

To thank you for your time, all qualified respondents will receive a complimentary summary of the study findings. In addition, the first 75 qualified respondents who complete the survey by February 13, 2009 will be entered into a drawing for an iPod Touch!

TAKE SURVEY HERE

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A side note, EMA does have quite a bit of good, free info in this site: http://itsolutions.enterprisemanagement.com/. Some of it’s quite outdated, but a good place to see who’s who in the industry and what they offer.

Why should I have a Business Service Management (BSM) Strategy?

Last week I talked about the first reason you need to have a BSM Strategy is that it is used to establish just what BSM means to your company. It’s establishing an intimate definition that supports your business goals, objectives and culture.

This is all well and good and will help you speak intelligently about just what BSM is across the company. It will help you focus the discussion on what matters most to the business and not some apparent gee-whiz thing the next BSM vendor touts in front of an executive. But unfortunately, that’s not enough.

The second reason you need to have a BSM Strategy is that it’s used to set YOUR vision, YOUR value statement, YOUR governing principles and how YOUR company will use BSM to achieve value and competitive differentiation.

The BSM Strategy includes YOUR own defined strategic goals and objectives specific to the business’s goals and objectives and how BSM will enable you to meet them. It’s how you’ll adopt BSM to enable the business to achieve things such as better cost controls, higher margins, increased availability, better performance or improved user experience.

At a high level, the BSM Strategy should introduce how your company will operationalize the value statement and governing principles within specific lines of business, business or IT initiatives, within IT, IT Operations or Application Support groups. If you’re adopting SoA, Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Green IT or whatever, capture how you’ll leverage YOUR BSM approach to increase the success and overall value of those initiatives. If you’re not aligning BSM’s value to these initiatives and key business services, applications, activities, processes or transactions, you are going to FAIL and not realize what true value oriented BSM can offer.

Yes, I do strongly believe that when BSM and the broader BSM Value Proposition is properly adopted and implemented that you can link these initiatives quite easily to significant value and competitive differentiation within your business.

For more in this BSM Strategy Tip of the Week series, please visit here and here.

Do you want help developing your own BSM Strategy? Contact me via any of these methods!