It is important to note that using web services and other technologies can enhance the ability for users to define the KPIs that important to them and then to visualize it on a single dashboard.  While not a trivial process it is definitely possible today by FireScope and others.  Improvements are definitely possible but the underpinnings and framework are available today.  Try it….you will like it!

1.  Strategy – Frameworks can assist in deploying the strategy, but the IT management must come to grips with ensuring that a cohesive strategy that incorporates input and feedback from the functional areas and their leaders within the organization are incorporated into the strategy.  So many IT teams choose to move forward without doing this and the results suffer greatly from it.  Yet those IT organizations that work hand in hand with the business disciplines within their organizations continue to help their companies perform better and build momentum in the marketplace….repeat after me “IT can be strategic and profitable”.   Sorry….couldn’t resist. 

2.  Commitment – From the Executive Suite through the Support function all employees, stake-holders and leaders must come to a consensus and then support the  rollout of the strategy, otherwise as many organizations have found out…the results will be mixed at best and mor elikely disastorous.  Remeber it has been reported that more than 60% of all IT projects have sub-par results or completely fail.   Usually you will find a lack of commitment  is one of the reasons for this.

These two items when done correctly can have a profound effect of the strategic results of the organization.  Hope this helps….

Network monitoring has become a commodity that you can get for little or nothing.  Most of the products available today are read-only views of limited portions of your networked environment. Network management is known for its complexity…primarily as being too expensive, too long to implement, never fully implemented and requiring tremendous maintenance and support fees  on an ongoing basis.   This has created a backlash in the marketplace.   BSM strives to fill the huge gap that now exists for emerging and progressive organizations worldwide.   The BSM market is enormous and fragmented as the big players from the old network management space are attempting to move into BSM through acquisitions.  It is yet to be seen how successful they will be as the past tells us that making multiple software acquisitions and “duct taping” them into a package to meet the demanding needs of IT has been mixed at best.

The underpinnings of Business Service Management (BSM) were born out of ITSM and can be traced back to the early 1980s.  The British government determined that the level of IT service quality provided to them did not meet their needs. The Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), now called the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), was tasked with developing a framework for efficient and financially responsible use of IT resources within the British government and the private sector.  This framework later evolved into ITIL.  Most BSM solutions use ITIL and their configuration management database (CMDB) as the core of their offering…  therefore, looking back at the history of ITIL and touching on some of the other frameworks such as BS 15000 and Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) is in order.

ITSM (IT Service Management) and ITIL

ITSM’s objective of improving business functions was not a new concept. The idea of ITSM has been around for years. However, the concept of collecting all service management best practices together within one body of knowledge was new.

The recommendations of ITIL were developed in the late 1980’s by the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), which later merged into the OGC.  The goal was to develop an approach that would be vendor-independent and applicable to organizations with differing technical and business needs. This resulted in the creation of the ITIL framework.

ITIL has been readily adopted and accepted as a global standard for IT Service Management since the mid 1990s.  ITIL is now the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. Several other frameworks have been arisen since ITIL and are largely based on ITIL and it’s concepts, some of which are listed below.

ITIL

ITIL provides a systematic and professional approach to the management of IT service provisioning and deployment. When effectively implemented, ITIL can provide a series of benefits that can include:

* Reduced costs
* Best practice based IT services
* Improved customer satisfaction
* Use of standards and guidance;
* Increased productivity;
* Better use of skills and intuitive information

ITIL has swept throughout Europe and is now making large inroads into North America and Asia.  It is a very important framework for IT operations staff providing improved quality of services to their enterprise and it’s customers.

BS 15000

BS 15000 is a worldwide standard for IT service management.
It is an integrated set of management processes for the professional delivery of services to an enterprise and its customers. BS 15000 is a derivative of, and complementary to ITIL.  BS 15000 consists primarily of two elements:

BS 15000-1 is the formal specification and provides the requirements for an enterprise as it provide and supports the services it provides internally and externally.

BS 15000-2 describes the best practices for Service Management processes within the scope of BS 15000-1. It includes the code of practice in its scope.   This code is important to enterprises on an ongoing basis that can be audited and are striving to increase the availability and support of their services.

Microsoft Operations Framework

Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) provides operational guidance for IT Operations staff that assists organizations as they strive to achieve mission-critical system reliability, availability, supportability, and manageability of Microsoft’s many products and technologies. MOF is based on the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)

MOF is provided and deployed as white papers, operations guides, assessment tools, best practices, case studies, templates, support tools, courseware, and services. MOF’s guidance pertains to the people, process, technology, and management issues found in complex, distributed, and heterogeneous technology environments.

MOF has yet to be widely supported and deployed in heterogeneous environments found in many organizations worldwide.

BSM and ITIL Today

In today’s increasingly complex business environment, it is very important that IT leaders determine and deploy an ITSM framework in support of their services.   It is well documented that this can be the difference between a world-class enterprise and chaotic and unsuccessful business.

BSM is the primary instrument for enterprises to deploy and use to implement ITIL and these other frameworks successfully.   Most BSM solutions focus on and are based on IT services and their successful use.  The CMDB introduced by ITIL is included in most BSM solutions and can be the core element in a professional and best practice deployment of a BSM solution.   In Parts 4, 5 and 6, we will be describing the following:

Part 4:  BSM blueprint and concepts for improving IT operations
Part 5:  Key factors when choosing a BSM solution
Part 6:  BSM best practices and innovations

These next couple of entries will help you discover how BSM uses ITIL to ensure that IT services are deployed professionally and successfully in world-class organizations worldwide.   So read on and enjoy!

The goal of BSM is easy to state and understand: To manage IT investments in alignment with business priorities in order to create competitive advantage.

Notice something different about this statement, compared to traditional IT management practices? To begin with, there are no technology buzzwords, nor any acronyms describing some new technology that’s going to replace everything you’re currently running. In fact, this doesn’t even look like it was written by a technologist. Instead, this represents what line of business leaders want to achieve with technology in a way that enables organizations to communicate and measure IT just like every other department of the business.

In order to accomplish this, the following must happen:

1. Identify business objectives.
While this may seem to just follow common sense, the number of IT leaders who are fully aware of the objectives of the business they support is small. Critical to achieving this is good communication between Line of Business and IT leaders. Let’s take an example. Company XYZ Inc is a wireless phone company with store fronts in 15 states. Over the course of the next two quarters, one of the primary objectives of the business is to streamline the sales process to reduce the time to complete a transaction by at least 20 minutes.

2. Align IT with business objectives and processes
The concept that a single server delivers a complete user experience is past. Instead, multiple servers, applications, point solutions and networked assets all come together to deliver the services users consume. With this in mind, our objective here is to logically group each networked asset (e.g. servers, applications, network equipment, etc.) into the services delivered to the client. In our example, we’re going to create an Account Processing service that includes the backend database servers, application-tier servers, core network equipment and any other networked asset that contributes to the account processing application used by the sales consultants at each storefront.

3. Meaningfully measure IT in relation to these objectives
While still useful, SLA’s, incident response times and other traditional metrics used to measure the effectiveness of IT can be meaningless to non-technical people. In order to prove the value of IT, BSM requires a new set of metrics that prove the business impact of IT in a way that’s meaningful to line of business leaders. Monetary metrics tend to communicate the best. In our example, we’re going to calculate average revenue generated per hour by our Account Processing service to develop a dollar figure for down time. However, we don’t just want to focus on mitigating the negative, so we’re also going to calculate the average time to complete a transaction and average revenue per transaction. These will be used to measure the positive impact to the business if we can significantly reduce transaction times, more transactions during business hours and therefore increased revenue resulting from managed change within IT.

4. Manage the business impact, not the technology
Using the new grouping and metrics developed in the previous steps, BSM enables organizations to prioritize response and monitor their assets from the perspective of what impacts the business the most. While the underlying technology is important from an operator’s perspective, being able to see the big picture in regards to how the technology is impacting the user and the bottom line of the business enable improved prioritization of work and improved visibility into how each of these disparate assets affect each other.

5. Adapt to change in the business and technology
Armed with meaningful metrics that prove IT’s value to the business, communication between line of business and IT leaders should become significantly better, but cannot end with that first meeting. As the business changes direction, IT must have the ability to change with it and shift its focus accordingly. Additionally, as new technology purchases are considered, the decision is made in light of where IT wants to be in order to support these larger business objectives and when alignment is identified between a new technology and business plans, gaining buy in from the organization as a whole becomes simpler as well.

This gives you a high-level overview of what is required to achieve effective Business Service Management. Over the coming weeks, we’ll dive deeper into each of these key elements and include some guidance into how to fit these into your unique business and IT environment. One key to keep in mind is that unlike traditional IT management practices, BSM is not a one-size-fits-all model, but must be tailored for each organization to achieve full effectiveness.