Wikipedia defines strategy as a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal, most often “winning”. Strategy is differentiated from tactics or immediate actions with resources at hand by its nature of being extensively premeditated, and often practically rehearsed. The key words here we want to focus in on for our Business Service Management strategy are “long term plan of action”, “extensively premeditated” and “practically rehearsed”.

Each year about this time, companies go through some sort of strategy and planning session for the new year. Businesses meet to talk about how they’ll spin up new or dust off existing marketing campaigns, product releases or how they’ll win more business in a certain market or geography. IT departments work on how they’ll align to the new business plans in addition to cleaning up their house through wide ranging technology initiatives, upgrades, outsourcing, etc.

This year will not be different. We’re going to see an increase in sexy sounding initiatives, programs, technology and products. We’re going to hear about doing more with less, wringing out costs in everything we do, greening, automating, virtualizing, moving to the cloud or some other dynamic infrastructure. All great and important things for companies to do to be successful and competitive in the new year and beyond.

What’s the tie in to Business Service Management (BSM) you ask? In order for Business Service Management to stick for the long haul within a company, it must be thought of as equally important within the company as other key business or IT initiatives. It must be elevated to these same levels within the company, with the same buy in, commitment and top down support within IT and within the business AND have the same types of tangible aligned value proposition and return on investment and effort.

If you’re considering a new strategy or initiative around dynamic infrastructure, infrastructure 2.0, datacenter 2.0, cloud computing, virtualization, green IT, etc. you’ve obviously had or will need to draft business cases, plans, capital funding requests and the like to be able to move forward. Did or will you incorporate how your service management strategy will evolve to adapt to these new initiatives? How about how IT operations and support organizations will need to mature? What investments or changes will be needed to really be able to achieve the expected value or return on investment these initiatives are expected to bring? Your cost savings may be washed out by the fact that your people, processes and procedures are still flying blind, using legacy products or inefficient workflow in disparate IT silos.

While each may require strategic and tactical investments in very domain specific areas, a business service management strategy is what ties all the pieces together and ensures that IT operations and support are both integrated and aligned with delivering the expected value to the business. It links the lowest level IT operations and support teams into the bigger value statement. It ensures that everyone thinks, operates and responds differently to the new initiative because they understand the expected business value and returns from the initiative investment rather than just treating it as a new server, router, device or toy to play with or support.

Stay tuned to these short weekly posts on the importance of establishing a business service management strategy.

Links that I have found interesting for January 14th:

• Nimsoft Blogs » The cloud – a real life example – Small example but impressive. As you know we did our field sales and technical training in New Orleans last week. This meant that we had 23 field technical resources that all needed to be trained on new products.
• What's After BSM? Understanding The Financials – ** This isn't after BSM – it's just part of a mature BSM strategy. **

  Enterprises with mature business service management (BSM) systems are able to measure and report quality of service at the business level; they can also assign sensible, business-centric prioritization to service performance events and other incidents. Their next requirement is to add financial analysis elements to the service management reports so that the business can understand the true cost of service operations and become involved in demand management decisions. This cost-of-service measurement requires a technical solution that maps business services to cost centers, such as operation infrastructure and resources. New chief information officers (CIO) and IT operations executives often target this phase, as they wish to understand where 60% to 80% of their IT budget is going and how they can rationalize those costs.

• Your new job: Cloud Computing Services Officer – The arrival of CCSOs (or whatever they end up being called) will be the ultimate recognition by business that IT is less and less about systems, software or even the information they support, and more about the services those tools bring to an organization.
• Don't Hoard Performance Data – We know many talented IT managers who never show their reports to anyone because they fear they may highlight a performance problem. Like Gollum, they hoard data for their own use and share it only to cover their backsides should a decision backfire. But hiding information out of fear is a lose/lose proposition. You don't get credit when an issue is brought to light so it can be solved. Others don't know there is an issue, or insufficient information leads them on wild goose chases. This bunker mentality is bad for business.
• ASG Software Solutions 2009: Business Service Management to Gain Standing in Hierarchy of Systems Management | SYS-CON AUSTRALIA – outlined a series of industry and market initiatives which will impact the way companies evaluate the business effectiveness of their IT organizations in 2009. ASG believes these trends and technologies will increasingly position business service management's (BSM) end-to-end performance and availability as the centerpiece of organizational execution and occupy the mindshare of senior executives addressing significant business challenges.
• EMA Outlines 12 Hot IT Management Trends to Watch for 2009 – Increased adoption of technologies that facilitate mgmt of IT as a business – IT organizations are moving beyond technology management and expanding into the business of IT, including strategy, marketing, staffing, suppliers, service portfolio and investment. EMA expects an increase in application of service catalog, service portfolio, business service management (BSM) and other technologies that help companies manage the business of IT to deliver greater value at lower cost.

  * Changing org roles will escalate demand for new mgmtt technologies – as IT silos become more integrated along a service management model, the need for new technologies to support cross-domain collaboration and more cohesive views of infrastructure-to-service interdependencies will become paramount. The politics of collaboration will reach well beyond finger pointing to higher levels of automated diagnostics, process automation and shared access to information that will in turn reduce IT operational costs.