Part 4 – BSM Series - A Blueprint for Implementing Business Service Management

As we’ve described over the previous few articles in this series, Business Service Management (“BSM”) represents a radical departure from traditional methods of managing IT operations.  This is primarily because the focus is shifting from measuring and managing IT from a purely technical standpoint, to a financial and business impact perspective.  As a result, implementing BSM requires a change in the mindset of IT operators, as well as new processes and solutions to support the realization of BSM.  This may seem daunting, but don’t let it scare you away just yet, the value this brings to the business is far too important.  Please note: this post is not to be all-inclusive but a high-level primer.

Creating the Mindset for BSM from C-level to System Administrators

The first step to a successful BSM strategy should be building consensus from the Executive suite down to the Network Operations Center (“NOC”), this consensus will help get everyone thinking and positively contributing to the project.   This positive momentum is crucial as you will be asking many of these people to change the way they manage the IT operations from a reactive, siloed nature to a proactive real-time environment.  This change is not trivial and should be addressed from the start.  As the old adage goes “We built a paperless environment and made it mandatory, yet most everyone is back using their old paper-based processes.”  This is true for many technologies…so be pro-active…because if you get buy-in and implement correctly you environment will be.

A key ingredient to this mindset is to start considering everything from the perspective of the business.  At the onset of every IT project, every IT incident, every change plan, the first question that should be answered is “How will this impact the business?”  This isn’t just for the CIO to answer; every member of IT needs to understand their role in supporting the business as a whole.

Planning your IT/Business Strategy

When planning your strategy be sure to define the Key Performance Indicators (“KPIs”), so that you can gauge the results and value of the project on an on-going basis.  This will allow you to measure and address any shortcomings or capitalize on any potentials opportunities.   One thing about BSM; if it is implemented effectively…more people and business areas will want inclusion as it should deliver highly visible results that are clear to members outside of IT.  So, including capacity planning is another important component during your planning stage.    Additionally, it is important to change the way you talk and describe your service management capabilities, as it is a different paradigm…it is important to describe the benefits and evangelize them to your organization.

Traditional IT metrics have focused on the negative: number of outages, incident response times, policy violations.  With BSM, the focus needs to change to how IT is driving the business and enhancing revenue.  This will create a positive image of you and your IT Operations team as you begin to see the positive results and report using the KPIs on the positive benefits being derived through your correctly deployed BSM solution.

If you are using a Configuration Management Database (“CMDB”) for the storage of your Assets/Configuration Items (“CIs”), it would be advantageous to integrate and pull the CI information describing the assets connected to your network from the CMDB and integrate into your BSM product, thereby ensuring the latest information and any changes to those assets are reflected in your KPI(s).   BSM rules the day!

Model Your Services

This is one of the most important steps in a successful implementation as it provides the baseline for success.   By modeling and logically grouping services, you can have all of your assets grouped geographically because each location is managed by a different group of people. Or, you may combine disparate systems that interoperate to provide a single business service.  There are numerous ways to logically group assets or CIs, so they can reflect dependencies and/or have SLA(s), as well as, other guidelines associated with the logically grouped service thereby reducing complexity and ensuring expanded availability, performance and security.  Be sure that you model each service as completely as possible so no unexpected issues arise.   An ideal starting point for modeling your services is ask members outside of IT to describe how they consume IT and identify what IT assets are required to deliver these services.  Strong modeling = Great results!

Implement tracking and reporting

It is important that whatever BSM solution you go with delivers full tracking and auditing, so any changes that might affect or may have impacted a given service can be reviewed or captured accordingly.  The importance of this capability cannot be overstated…don’t buy a BSM solution without it.  Buyer’s remorse is the worse sort of Scorn! ☹

In today’s world anything other than AJAX-enabled real-time reporting is just not acceptable.  Having reports that continually update themselves so the latest information is available to augment your decisions or enhance your reporting needs is the key to making you’re the king of your domain.  There is nothing worse...than going to a meeting and having your peer or boss legitimately question the integrity and validity of your data.  May times it is due to expired or outdated information based on report creation or inability to retrieve the latest updates prior to going to a meeting or presentation.   Be a star…go real-time!

Btw…our head of marketing co-authored this post…as he needed to contribute on feels strongly about this subject.   It is greatly appreciated…enjoy!

Part 3 - History of BSM - Evolution from ITIL and Network Management

In Part 3 of our tour of Business Service Management, let’s talk a little about the history of BSM and it’s importance in IT today. Today’s BSM has risen from the network monitoring, network management and help desk chaos of the last 20 years.

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!

Part 2 - Intro to BSM Fundamentals

As the next stop in our tour of Business Service Management, let’s talk a little about the fundamentals. To make this as accessible as possible, we’re going to strip away the technologies and processes and start with a high level statement of what Business Service Management strives to achieve. According to Wikipedia :

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.

The Evolution of Business Service Management - Part 1: Defining BSM

Welcome to the first posting in the “The Evolution of Business Service Management” blog series. So, we will begin with a definition of Business Service Management (“BSM”) and then cover the fundamentals of BSM in my next posting. My definition of BSM is derived from my recent experience as the Global CTO for one of the largest private equity companies. In this role, I continually saw that each of our seven + data centers, as well as, in the IT operations of most of our portfolio companies the proliferation of siloed point solutions each covering two or less of the elements of a critical service. For example: In one of our Asian data centers we had three network management products, eleven host or device-oriented point tools, five network monitoring products and at least five security products. Most of these were either not being actively monitored or they were not adequately performing the function in which they were purchased for. For that matter, three of these items were not even installed (“shelfware”). Needless to say this seems to be common amongst medium and large businesses, since most IT organizations do not have a cohesive strategy around monitoring and managing their critical services nor do they fully understand the business impact of the loss or degradation of these service(s) to the organization. BSM is both a strategy as well as, a framework within several service management strategies like ITILfor linking business processes and data with the critical IT services, so their true business impact both good and bad may be determined. This helps management understand the strategic value of their investments in technology and plan for its impact on the organization.  For more on BSM

Please note that even the analysts are having a hard time determining  a single concise definition of BSM.  This is because th idea of strategically aligning your IT organizations operational goals with the Company strategic goals in an actionable way has been a trial of errors till recently.   There are numerous vendors out there now trying to come up with a definition of BSM that closely relates to their current management or monitoring products versus producing a solution that aligns itself with the idea of true BSM.  So when selecting a BSM product be careful and do your homework. 

So, after reading this post and my definition of BSM…it is easy to understand how important BSM is becoming for IT organizations around the globe. The linking of corporate strategic goals and objectives with the IT operations in a measurable and actionable way is quickly becoming another major step in maturization process for world-class organizations.

The Evolution of Business Service Management - The Blog Series

For the past couple of years…I've been getting a lot of questions about business service management (“BSM”), and a lot of these questions seem to have common points of confusion.  Well…let me tell you I have been doing this for a while and I am the creator of the technology for the FireScope solution and I completely understand.  With so much information and disorder out there, it’s sometimes hard to see the big picture amidst the chaos.  Determining how things go together, why they are important and their value to IT organizations is puzzling at best.  Even the analysts have a hard time defining and determining what is and makes up a BSM solution.

So, I've put together with any luck, a more cohesive guide of key concepts, best practices, and innovations around BSM and converted it to a blog series that will seek to organize and point out things that are important when considering BSM for your IT organization.

Over the next couple of weeks, I will be posting thoughts, ideas and concepts to make it more this series more useful.  I will kick the series off with some definitions ( areal source of confusion for many); fundamentals and early history regarding BSM’s evolution out of monitoring and network management, then go over the blueprint and concepts for improving IT operations using BSM, covering frequently asked questions and discussing ways to limit the areas of confusion, and noting best practices, innovations, and helpful tips for success along the way. Discovering the power and value of BSM through this series should arm you with the appropriate knowledge to ensure your IT organization realizes value from any proposed BSM deployment.

Here's a summary preview of what we will cover in this series:

• The definition of BSM; Intro to BSM fundamentals
• Early history regarding BSM’s evolution out of monitoring and network management
• BSM blueprint and concepts for improving IT operations
• Key factors when choosing a BSM solution
• BSM best practices and innovations
• Frequently asked questions about BSM
• Final Thoughts about BSM

Hopefully, this series will help you and your organization down the BSM path. So let’s get to it.