The Forum - 05/08/2008  (Plain Text Version)

Return to Graphical Version

In this issue:
Lead
•  President’s Corner – An Industry, A Profession and a Responsibility
Featured Columns
•  From the Editor’s Desk….
•  For Our Members
•  Focus on Three
•  Organizational Gatekeeping: itSMF USA Governance
•  Interest Group (IG) Services Update
•  San Francisco, Here We Come!
ITIL®/ITSM Related Articles
•  Service Strategy – The Intended Outcome
•  How to Justify Getting Started with ITIL® by Thinking Outside of the IT Box
•  Thinking Strategically about Services
•  IT Service Management: Where do we begin?
•  An old friend called Project Management: Bringing Project Management into ITIL® v3
•  ITIL® Strategy Needs to be Strategically Planned
•  Do’s and Don’ts - Business Service Management
•  Six Sigma and IT Service Management: Don’t recreate the wheel…just spin it a little faster and better!
LIG News
•  Practitioner Discussions Bring Wisconsin LIG Interests Into Focus
•  Speakers Needed for Ohio Valley LIG Professional Day on June 5
•  Growing Strong: National Capital LIG and ITIL®
•  itSMF New England LIG and Harvard University Host "Improving Process in Higher Education"

Do’s and Don’ts - Business Service Management

By Linh C. Ho, co-author and reviewer of several itSMF books and Compuware Sr. Product Marketing Manager
Business Service Management (BSM) is still not mainstream, but it has certainly caught on over the last few years as questions have been asked and answered about its value and viability.  The author provides the lessons learned from customers and pioneering service management professionals about BSM. 

Business Service Management (BSM) is still not mainsteam, but it has certainly caught on over the last few years, as questions have been asked and answered about its value and viability. BSM is a category of IT operations management that enables IT to move up the business and management stack by mapping those IT services that are supporting critical business processes (hence BSM), and sharing meaningful information with various layers of management staff. This article provides critical Do’s and Don’ts for BSM—addressing some of the fear, uncertainty and doubt in the market place. Early adopters of BSM have already achieved significant benefits that are encouraging for the early-majority pragmatists and late-majority conservatives.

Having been in this business since BSM’s conceptualization and part of a pure play BSM technology vendor, I’ve gathered these Do’s and Don’ts from talking to enterprise customers and service management practitioners around the world over the years.

If you do nothing else, my one key word of advice is to seek out those established BSM references!

	Do's	Don'ts
1	Top-down approach When implementing BSM, it is important to consider critical business needs. Identify one or two critical business process(es) or one that causes current pain with your business counterparts, understand the performance needs of these processes and of the underlying services and technologies supporting these processes. Capture those requirements and map them into your BSM solution.	Get confused There are many definitions for BSM in the market place. Some include Configuration Management Data Bases (CMDBs) in BSM; others include service catalogs and some everything under the sun in their BSM definition. Don’t get confused. Many enterprises, from the early adopters to existing practitioners of BSM, have achieved economic success without a commercial CMDB or a service catalog. Homegrown or commercial CMDBs add value to a BSM solution, but are not a prerequisite. Some enterprises have used BSM to create a type of CMDB that only holds critical, business-relevant Configuration Items (CIs), instead of canvassing the enterprise with all types of CIs that may or may not add value to the business.
	Why: Using a top-down approach gets IT to engage with the business from the beginning. This helps everyone involved to be on the same page. During this strategic planning phase, it is critical for IT to balance business needs vs. client demand and understand the impact any new services introduced may have on IT as well as on the business.	Why: It is too easy to get confused with a market segment crowded with players from service catalog vendors to automated discovery to self-learning technologies, all touting a BSM message. The key is the ability to map critical business processes to the supporting services and technology components, to understand the relationships and business impact of various components. Add to this the ability to tailor dashboards/reports that are fit for purpose and useful to the targeted business and IT users. Lastly, you must be able to display meaningful, business-relevant metrics. In short, BSM is the business layer that should sit on top of an IT service management environment.
2	Measure and report Ongoing measurement and reporting are critical in any service management activity to capture performance metrics. However, measuring and reporting on relevant metrics targeted at the recipient is also key.	Replace existing systems monitoring products Business service management does not replace infrastructure products. BSM is a complement to these solutions by correlating these data feeds and others such as service desk data and business data to make sense out of them for the users.
	Why: measurement and reporting provides a mechanism to: baseline quality levels  capture historical data for trend analysis gain visibility into performance at any given moment and where it impacts the business  communicate (via reports) with the business to prove IT’s value	Why: BSM is a way to help IT move up the maturity and management stack—towards the business and executive level. Traditional network and server monitoring products are no longer adequate for multi-million/billion dollar companies. The need for IT to be aligned with the business is ever more important now, IT enables critical business processes and for some IT is the business and business is IT.
3	Prioritize and focus It is too easy to lose focus in any strategic IT project. BSM is no exception. Keep focus and prioritize on the criticality of the business. For every activity of the plan, ask “why” and ensure it relates back to the objectives of your BSM project.	Keep saying “we’re not there yet” BSM is not a one-off project; it is a continual process of managing services that support critical business processes. Certainly there is a tendency from IT to be over conservative in “showing off” their metrics to the business. Often time, IT says “we’re not there yet.” The obvious question is when is a good time? It is OK to show progress.
	Why: With emphasis on priority and focus, this helps ensure activities are in line with the project goals, within budget and resource allocation plan.	Why: The more time passes without visible progress, the more likely the business will think that IT is struggling and as a result will lose faith in the BSM project. Communication and feedback loops are key to getting established with the business. This is a joint venture with the business. Don’t wait for the business to say “show me the metrics!” Be proactive and a good ambassador for IT.
4	Consider end-user experience as part of BSM End-user experience is an often neglected yet a critical measure of the quality of IT’s service delivery to the business. Consider your end-user experience metrics in your BSM solution, since that’s where your staff first feels the pain. Whether it’s grief from the customer for not completing a business transaction or unhappiness with their own productivity. Either way, IT is to blame and the business’ bottom line is impacted.	Ignore executive management BSM is a strategic project that requires management buy-in and commitment. It is a mistake to believe that BSM can be done without management or business buy-in.
	Why: Considering end-user experience provides IT with a way to baseline service levels to set more realistic quality performance targets, and, provides IT immediate insight into the true delivery performance straight from the end users perspective. All in all, this helps bridge the gap between perception of quality by the users/customers and the actual service being delivered to the business.	Why: Without upper management support, it makes it more difficult to build the necessary teams from other business unit areas to participate in critical conversations around strategic plans, approach, key business-relevant metrics to include in the BSM solution and so on.
5	Start small BSM is indeed a strategic and complex project. Start small and avoid disappointment. Begin with a critical business process or one that is currently causing pain, and map the process to its underlying services and technologies supporting it. Once one is successful and offers value to the targeted users, map a second process and so on. The more value IT achieves from BSM, the more the business will want their processes or unit mapped into the overall BSM solution.	Over promise benefits to the business Managing customer expectations is key in any business, IT is no exception. Over promising value or benefits to the business can be detrimental to the relationship and trust in IT. Seek out proven success stories and references from those that have already achieved value. More importantly, learn from their struggles and approach to their BSM implementation. Be realistic with your timeframes and ROI justifications. Base them on facts from your early-adopter-industry-peers that have been there & done that and create a compelling yet realistic case.
	Why: A big bang approach will only delay meeting project deadlines, increase costs and decrease confidence in IT and project success.	Why: Over promising not only disappoints your customers, it decreases the level of confidence in IT and impacts future investment opportunities for IT projects.

BSM is indeed a strategic project for IT, when accomplished effectively; this provides an opportunity for IT to show the business its value and provides more reasons for future investments in IT instead of cost-cutting IT budgets. In the end, it is a joint venture with the business, so partner up and help make it a competitive advantage for your business bottom line.

About the Author:
Linh C. Ho has 10 years in the IT Service Management market. She is a co-author of two itSMF books: Global Best Practices for IT Management and Six Sigma for IT Management. Linh also served on the review team for several itSMF books/pocket guides including ITIL® v3 Foundations. She has written articles and spoken at conferences on the topics of Six Sigma, ITIL® and Business Service Management. Linh is Compuware’s product marketing manager for its IT Service Management solution, Vantage. Prior to that, she led marketing at Proxima Technology, a business service management and service level management vendor. She is ITIL® v3 Foundation Certified, a Six Sigma Champion and Pragmatic Marketing Certified.