Business Service Management Articles

ITIL Goes to Harvard
by Bob Multhaup and Ken Turbitt

Is your Workload Automation Broker an overlooked gold mine of BSM data? by Gwyn Clay

Capacity Planning: Critical for Business and IT Success by Richard L. Ptak

Business Service Management: Developing a Business Impact Statement - How and Why
by Bob Multhaup & Ken Turbitt

Resolution Ownership - It Matters for BSM!
by Peter J. McGarahan

IBM’s Strategy for Business-Oriented Service Management
by Richard L. Ptak, Bill Keyworth and Audrey Rasmussen

Book Review: The Concise Executive Guide to Agile
by Bill Keyworth

Business Service Manangement: Operating IT from a Business Perspective
by Peter Armstrong
How can IT determine business impact unless the business tells them which systems are vital, the relative priorities of these systems, and the cost of their being offline? »

Business Service Manangement Enhancements within ITIL v3
by Ken Turbitt and Sharon Taylor
With the release of IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) version 3 (ITIL V3), it’s clear that your goal as an IT professional has changed. You’re no longer tasked with aligning IT with the business. Now your goal is to integrate IT with the business. »

Getting Started With Business Service Manangement: An IT Operations Centric Approach by Doug McClure
IBM's Doug McClure explains how he views Business Service Management and how to get started from an operational perspective. »

The IT Value Hierarchy: A framework for articulating IT Value using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as a metaphor by Robert Urwiler
The IT Value Hierarchy is a simple model for articulating the progressive desire for increasingly sophisticated applications of information technology within competitive organizations using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as a contextual reference. »

IT as a Service Provider: Strategies for Building Trust
by Steve Lesem
IT teams that adopt a service provider mindset and who dedicate themselves to closing service gaps will succeed in the new world. Here's how »

Increasing IT Agility by Integrating SOA with BSM
by Annie Shum and Avtar Dhillon
Business Service Management (BSM), rooted in ITIL, helps organizations manage IT from a business perspective. By identifying and mapping business-critical processes to the underlying IT infrastructure and services, BSM connects key business services to the IT services that manage them, such as routers, servers, and applications. While BSM does the mapping, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) serves as the framework that connects the infrastructure. Hence, the BSM methodology and SOA are synergistic and the integration of BSM into SOA is pivotal to IT agility. »

Business Service Leadership: The Time is Now! [Part 2]
by Peter J. McGarahan
A mentor of mine reminded me that my audience would take us seriously if we had a track record of results. He called it credibility with the IT organization and stated factually, “they won’t listen to you strategically, unless you can deliver tactically.” That single piece of advice changed my day-day operational management focus. [See also: Part 1] »

Considerations for Migrating to the Cloud:
How Cloud Computing is Changing the Enterprise
by Martin Jones and Christian Sarkar
With the advent of cloud computing and the timing of the global recession, IT is being asked to "lead or get out of the way." IT's job is to manage this turbulence and find new ways to create business value through innovation and optimization. The cloud is just one of the challenges ahead. By facing these challenges, and leading the way, IT can and must become a proactive business value creator. »

Business Service Leadership: The Time is Now! [Part 1]
by Peter J. McGarahan
Business Service leadership is about doing the right thing for the right reasons and making fact-based decisions. It’s about challenging conventional wisdom and having the moral backbone to stand up for doing the right thing for your customers and the people that serve them. »

Business Service Management, Six Sigma and your IT Compliance Program
by Chrisan Herrod
Institutionalizing a culture of continuous monitoring as an essential part of IT compliance management can be achieved using the best practices of the Six Sigma methodology. IT compliance should be treated as a critical corporate program and to that end Six Sigma can be used to assist organizations in implementing a robust and effective information technology compliance program and culture. »

Security Management Survey: ISO, ITIL and COBIT Triple Play Fosters Optimal Security Management Execution
by Mary Johnston Turner, Jon Oltsik, and John McKnight
A security management survey provides compelling evidence that success strategies require the use of multiple best practice controls and processes in addition to state-of-the-art tools. Organizations that implement a mix of ITIL, ISO and COBIT best practices have achieved noticeably higher levels of workflow and organizational integration, thereby improving their ability to address internal and external business requirements across IT and the business. »

A Measured Approach To Cloud Computing:
Capacity Planning and Performance Assurance
by Annie Shum
IT professionals should underscore the critical roles played by integrated virtualized service oriented management, governance, performance assurance, and analytics-based feedback loops. Together, they can safeguard the successful adoption and, ultimately, the viability of Cloud Computing in enterprise IT. »

Path to Compliance as a Business Strategy
by Richard L. Ptak
Initially, compliance was an externally imposed distraction, representing just one more burden on an over-stretched enterprise and IT staff. But now, compliance activities not only provide data about current practices but also highlight areas where increasing the level of control could yield greater efficiencies in operation.»

The Case for Agile Business Service Management
by Israel Gat
When development, deployment and operations evolve in parallel from a business services perspective, we get Agile Business Service Management. »

Business Service Management: Driving Data Center Performance
by Richard L. Ptak
Enterprise demands on and expectations from IT and data center services continues to grow despite flat budgets and static levels of IT staffing. The result is a significant level of pain hitting hard in the operations center. Fortunately, this is now being addressed by vendors with a new generation of intelligent, automated system performance management tools. It’s known as Business Service Management or BSM. So what does Business Service Management mean?

How to Spell "BSM"
by Tom Bishop
Business Service Management, or BSM: there simply isn’t a more important aspect of an IT strategy than one built around the concepts of BSM. The reasons are as fundamental as they are essential. IT is no longer a support or back-office function… Most businesses today are so dependent on IT that, if an IT organization does not understand how the business depends on its services, or does not manage those services with that business perspective in mind, they are dooming the business to slow, steady death…. »

Recessionary Strategies: ITIL & Business Service Management
by Ken Turbitt
In today's recessionary climate, we need to be effective, to manage our capability, to remove excess costs out of the business, reduce expenditure on IT and the business, and provide clearer visibility into the business performance and outlook. Learn how ITIL and Business Service Management can help »

First Contact Resolution: The Performance Driver!
by Peter J. McGarahan
Today’s demanding service environment requires service leaders to deliver cost-effective, quality services that meet the dynamic needs of the business. Here's what must be done in a service organization to drive First Contact Resolution and reap the positive financial, customer satisfaction and productivity benefits »

Mitigating Risk for End-of-Life Technology
by Bill Keyworth
It’s hard to envision a normal, rational IT executive replacing their existing “end-of-life” technology without an examination of alternatives. Yet, too often we rely on the biased input of our legacy vendors in choosing replacement options. Based upon decades of exposure to the marketing prowess of IT service management vendors, the author submits recommendations for mitigating the risks associated with end-of-life technology. Specifically, we’ll outline a process to help turn the end-of-life problem into an opportunity to better serve the needs of your business constituents and IT staff …thereby moving to a desirable state of Business Service Management (BSM). We’ll also suggest how to analyze your options up front, prioritize and focus on critical evaluative criteria, validate findings and test conclusions. »

Business Service Management: The move to a new way of working
by Peter Armstrong
You really need to take an inventory of what you have in IT – not from the technical point of view, but from the viewpoint of what the business needs. Ask the business which systems are the most important, and how much they are worth. When they want something new, ask them what it is worth and how much they are prepared to pay for it. Ask them what service levels they truly require. Then ask the most important question in IT/business relationships – why? »

Agile Business Service Management: An Interview with Jim Highsmith
by Israel Gat
An interview with with Jim Highsmith, author of Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products, on why he wrote a new edition of the book, approaches to agile development, agile adoption, risk-mitigation strategies, and more.

ITIL Lite: Vital ITIL
Malcolm Fry
We get a sneak peek at Malcolm Fry's forthcoming book - ITIL Lite, and discover why he advocates a selective approach to implementing ITIL v3.

Register for our monthly newsletter, and download "Why Doesn't the Business Drive BSM? A Value-Driven Business Service Management Maturity Model"- by Bill Keyworth and Rick Berzle. » promotional sponsors: VENDOR ZONE ASG’s Delivery of BSM Maturity by Bill Keyworth IBM’s Strategy for Business-Oriented Service Management by Richard L. Ptak, Bill Keyworth & Audrey Rasmussen

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