One of the largest and most renowned market analysis team predicted: 3% of IT revenue for past fiscal year would be spent in BSM. Was this converted into reality? NO. Let us analyze why? Buzzwords like “8hours to BSM”, vague/wrong identification of stakeholders, false expectations have got most, if not all buyers rethinking the strategy to implement BSM. Aforementioned reasons and overpriced product/consulting costs for Business service management are responsible for what I call the existential identity crises for BSM.
These developments have urged me to ask the question, is this end of road for BSM? And the answer most certainly is: NO.
The concept of Business service management is one of the fundamental sustenance of any Business as it provides an insight into expenditures for expansion and retention of current and projected market capitalization. BSM is the only concept which enables us to measure accurate value of IT investments and it’s relation to business objectives and strategies. But unless the BSM community cuts through the bull and provides “contextual” BSM solution which is relevant, accurate, extensible and adaptable, the road ahead is going to be tough and poses a threat to the identity of BSM. The need of the hour is the practice of intellectual discipline by BSM community combined with an urgent need for forming ubiquitous language and guidelines for putting the solution into context for the line of business and stakeholders. That is where the true value of BSM is, has always been!!
Alignment of business to IT does not mean fancy dashboards, with drill down capabilities, which show the entire enterprise going red for a CXO’s dashboard, even for single processor utilization threshold violation; it means alignment to the overall business objectives, and its contextual correlation. For example: A telecom service provider, might not need one mobile subscriber to be the decisive factor to reflect the status of the Business and IT, but GSA customer contributing 100 million+ revenue (even though being a single entity) would definitely feature in the list of the decisive contributors to the overall health of business. It is this contextual discipline based on the line of business that BSM community (WE) need to understand, practice and implement.
Understanding the human capital requirements for BSM solution experts is another important aspect. Although I agree that ITIL/eTOM/TMN lays great foundational principles for BSM, they are simply not the final answer. BSM efforts need to be realized by a solution engineers with strong envisioning and correlation ability coupled with discipline of tying things together for business traceability. BSM is not to be implemented by systems engineers who specialize in tools/product implementation (they have a very important role, but not one of Solutions engineer because of the product bias).
To summarize, for solving the BSM identity crisis, the BSM community needs to come together and put forward a set of guidelines and litmus tests to ensure the meaning, value, and realization of BSM in its real sense!! Need for forming an identity and defining BSM guidelines alongwith a should be evaluated and understood by the industry in order to retain the very value and identity of this concept.
In my next post, i will give insights into the key implementation procedures for realizing a BSM solution.
