The BSM Review Blog

Every once in awhile, something nice happens.  I was referred to Jeff Cerny of TechRepublic for an interview re: my passion and background for business service management.  Jeff did a great job of capturing the core of why I believe the time for BSM has arrived, and why it is a critical consideration in moving IT out of the geek house and into the business partner role.  He's added a few things associated with high tech marketing and presentation skills, but the essence of this interview deals with the importance of BSM moving forward.

For those of you who live on another planet, e.g. Venus, or in another country, which has no interest in what goes on here in the UK, e.g. most of you, we are going to have a General Election soon. This means we get to choose who is going to make a complete hash of running the place for the next five years, whilst they line their pockets with our hard-earned cash. (If you think that's cynical, you should have seen my initial version!)

Three years ago I had the privilege and honor to recommend to Inovis executives to implement Scrum as their core software method. The “All In!” implementation style was chosen and successfully implemented by colleague and friend Erik Huddleston. To quote Erik:

The results speak for themselves.  In addition to compelling productivity and quality improvements, we also had profound unanticipated benefits.  Within a few sprints, we were using development as a competitive weapon, bringing development to bear to influence the outcome of individual (strategic) sales cycles.  We dramatically increased our innovation through market dialog.  With almost 25000 customers, Inovis struck up quite a market conversation!  Finally, we found that Agile started driving alignment between teams and sites, facilitating tremendous cross product synergy and value.

In a recent post entitled The Agile Flywheel, Inovis’ Ray Riescher describes the effect of the Agile implementation on IT Operations. Here is an excerpt from his post:

Scrum set the flywheel in motion and caused the rest of the IT process life cycle to respond. ITIL’s processes still form the solid core of service support and we’ve improved the processes’ capability to handle intense work velocity. The organization adapted by developing unprecedented speed in the ability to deliver production fixes and solve root cause problems with Agility.

What I think we are witnessing is a manifestation of Agile Business Service Management: a holistic agile methodology running across the IT process spectrum that’s delivering eye popping change and tremendous results.

Imagine a company department that works the following way:

The title of this blog will bring back memories to some older readers - it was the name used for a cleaner you could buy years ago. The reason for my twisted pun will become clear soon.

Another area that is gaining more and more attention these days is "Cloud computing" and I guess the largest issue I have is around its scope and definition. Many appear to offer hosted services and this is now renamed as Cloud computing, even outsourcing, managed services, Software as a service (SAAS) fall under this new branding. Is that all it is, a simple rebranding to allow all remotely hosted services to have a new home?

As with all new paradigm shifts the best evidence that it'll be widely adopted and accepted is by looking at the user community for this.  At this week's Westminster eForum one of the speakers, Rik Ferguson, senior security adviser at security firm Trend Micro told us that the criminal fraternity are the largest group of adopters. Well I guess if we look back to look forward, we'll see that this was the case for the early adopters of the internet (pornography being the biggest financial winner). Well Rik also highlighted that "We already see customers of Google, customers of Amazon, who are criminals and who use those services, among others, to run command-and-control services for botnets, to launch spam campaigns and to host phishing websites. They see the power, the scalability, the availability and, for them, the anonymity that is possible through cloud services and they are using it to its fullest extent."

Well the good news is that both large and small organisations will benefit from the Cloud, enabling smaller companies to automate, scale up and down depending on the market conditions whilst keeping overheads well managed. Large organisations can also reduce overheads, move into new or changing business areas quickly without being held back by in-house technology restraints. However I think that now, more than ever, process becomes king. Knowing your business services processes and IT services processes are in place, ownerships of responsibilities are understood become the key to success when the ownership of the infrastructure (including operating systems, software and applications) are left to someone who is not a part of your business. It appears to me that we are entering into the realms of treating IT as a utility, just like Electricity, gas etc. We need it to be there, we need to know the costs of utilisation, but the providers do not need to know what we run on it. This makes me think about the capacity planning and availability issues. We in the UK certainly know that the Electric providers monitor the utilisation and have to prepare for odd events like the ½ time during a football and rugby match as viewers go and put the kettle on for tea. The utility suppliers need to understand their market, its dynamics and influences, however odd, to ensure all the customers get the resources they need, when they need it without interruption. Can "the cloud" handle this now or in the future?

Who's working on the cloud right now? Well Amazon, Google, Sun, IBM etc, but some surprising companies are entering the market utilising spare capacity from their traditional business. Salesforce.com now offers Force.com to other business to host applications on. BMC software being a recent case in point. So keep your head in the cloud and watch how things develop, in particular the process issues of dual ownership and the end to end automation, but keep your feet on the ground to ensure you protect your business and understanding the current and potential risks.

The space between the cloud (hosted infrastructure (including apps)) and the end users would be the area that needs focus. Can that be called "fresh air"?

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Robert Urwiler, the SVP and CIO at Vail Resorts Inc.  Yes, this is the Vail ski resport in Colorado. They also own and manage 5 other mountains, resort hotels and more. It is rougly a $1 billion business. As a side note, I would highly recommend visiting a few of their websites for the experience alone -- I wouldn't be surprised if they win a few design awards. In particular, drop by the Keystone Resort site and check out the immersive video of Prospector run.

I wanted to share a project that was driven by IT initially which resulted in a BSM initiative that has become a significant differentiator for their highly competitive business. The approach landed Vail Reports on the list of CIO's 22nd annual CIO Awards and resulted with Robert on the cover of CIO Magazine.

Tactically Vail Inc. needed to replace an old fleet of bar code scanners that are used to validate guests at lift gates on the mountain. RFID was the natural replacement technology for bar codes and had been used successfully in Europe. It would have been easy to just use what others had already done. But the leadership at Vail wanted to differentiate the guest experience and learn more about guest patterns on the mountain.

The CIO made the case for investing in UHF RFID, which was higher risk and more costly, but met the requirements of the business. What looked like a tactical move to replace older technology resulted in a strategic decision for the business. This is a great example of how BSM principles lead to strategic business advantage. 

Utilizing UHF RFID and Wi-Fi infrastructure, Vail has been able to deliver a unique guest experience at the lift gate and can track guest patterns across the mountain which was not possible before. Knowing where the guests are skiing allows them to execute highly targeted marketing programs to promote offers on and off the mountain. 

For the details on the story see the article in the RFID Journal. 

I have been toying with buying a new camera. I have a very nice SLR, but am thinking about buying a new compact camera to slip into my pocket to replace my old Sony Cybershot. My 'phone takes pictures, but the lack of control means it's just a toy.

So I started looking at the descriptions. Number of Megapixels - fair enough, although no-one actually points out that squeezing millions more on to a little sensor is not necessarily a good idea. DIGIC 4 processor - what the hell is that when it's at home? Face detection AF/AE/FE/WB - I can guess some of those but don't really know if I need them.

Why do all marketing people think that meaningless acronyms are a good idea? Perhaps it's because they are bored with telling us that the product is new, improved, faster and sexier - amazing, as you're hardly likely to bring out a product that is old, worse, slower and boring are you? (As it happens I would probably be interested in a mobile 'phone that had less functions, as all I want it do is make calls and send texts, but that's another story).

My requirements are actually very simple. I want an optical viewfinder as the screen on the back is totally useless when you're outside, and I want it take a picture when I click the shutter - not seconds later when you have missed the action. I would also like it to take RAW rather than JPEG, as I can't see the point of processing the photo in the camera and losing half the info, when I have a very good powerful PC with Adobe CS4, which does the job much better. (Sorry about all the acronyms in that paragraph!) 

Unfortunately, as usual, the technicians want to show off all their features rather than asking the user what they actually want. Sound familiar? I'll stick to my old Cybershot thanks; it has an optical viewfinder and an excellent lens, it's just a bit slow on shutter release  - a problem of many compact cameras and that's actually the main reason I bought the SLR.

By the way, TOSH is an English slang term for nonsense.

A February 2nd 8-K filing by BMC http://tinyurl.com/yax23u3 indicates the Dev Ittycheria is out. Bob Beauchamp will again take up the task of leading the Enterprise Service Management (ESM) side of the business, i.e. all non-mainframe-focused products. We're assuming Dev will return to the entrepreneurial roots where he performed so well.

There are a number of conclusions that could be drawn from this change ranging from the fate of the Cisco partnership to, well, just think of the rumors that have swirled around BMC over the last 2 years. Speculation on internal politics is risky and ultimately pointless. We'll stick to conclusions based on our own experiences with and knowledge of the company.

For our part, we anticipate a return to aggressive support and advancement of BSM. We think that BMC will move away from concentrating on BSM as strictly a marketing concept. It presages a return to the aggressive thought and product leadership in defining and implementing BSM that has been historically demonstrated by BMC. The result will be increased competition that will benefit both customers and IT.

Personally, we're happy to see this change. We think the coming year will prove to be much more interesting and action filled as a result. 

The focus of IT infrastructure management has never been static for very long. Very early on, for the very expensive mainframe systems, the focus was exclusively on job management and control to assure the absolute highest utilization rates. The 'glass house' was surrounded by technicians, operations managers, JCL specialists, etc., whose time was counted as relatively cheap when compared to the investment in hardware. This continues to be true as Business Service Management - the ability of IT to understand and adapt its operations to meet and support business operations - expands its presence in the market.

Over time, styles of computing changed,  the cost of  processor time dropped as available capacities grew exponentially - to the extent that in many instances applications were designed to run on its own server.  Keeping abreast of shifting cost equations,  management attention moved from the hardware to software to applications performance.

For an extended period of time, server utilization in the neighborhood of 10% was considered quite acceptable.  It became an accepted standard practice to over-provision infrastructure rather than risk running out of capacity when it mattered. Not surprisingly, capacity management and planning moved way down the scale of management focus.

Times changed.  Rising prices, escalating demand for power and energy raised their cost along with increasingly global competition combined to apply enormous downward pressure on the cost of computing.  Suddenly,  cost sensitivity  and infrastructure utilization levels became the new obsession.

Successful capacity management and forecasting resource utilization has moved to the forefront of operations management concerns.   New architectures, the capability to virtualize every aspect of the IT infrastructure from platforms to services combine with complexity in implementation have resulted in an operations infrastructure that is a capacity management nightmare. Existing planning and forecasting methodologies and tools designed for much less complex and dynamic operations are inadequate to cope with the new operations environment.

New capacity management and forecasting solutions are needed which are easier to install, deploy and use.  They must be automated to transparently scale and handle the complexity of dynamic operating environments that can expand to very large numbers. They must be flexible to respond and adapt to the infrastructure changes needed to support  evolving business needs. They must be able to handle both virtual and physical infrastructure as well as both mainframe and distributed platforms.

Really powerful tools will include the capability to integrate input and learned data to forecast potential capacity problems sufficiently in advance to take action to avoid the problem. They will allow 'what if' modeling and evaluation of alternative scenarios to find the best way to resolve or avoid a problem.  The solution will not require  capacity management specialists to provide useful information but will have the flexibility to allow specialists to perform more accurate and precise analysis.

This only scratches the surface of some of the characteristics required for capacity management. The point here is that capacity management provides a key element to the implementation of BSM in today's enterprise. Planning, forecasting and management links directly to business needs. Properly done, benefits can be realized in cost reduction, improved margins, better and more effective utilization of assets, resources and capital. Both IT and business managers should be looking into this important management function.

Register for our monthly newsletter, and download "Creating Strategic Differentiation with Information Technology" - a diagnostic for IT executives - by John Hagel III.

Here's what John says to frame the discussion:

IT alone cannot create strategic differentiation - it is only an enabler. IT creates options that must be effectively exploited through focused business initiatives.

Nick Carr is right: competitors can copy virtually any individual business initiative leveraging information technology. This has three implications:

1. Companies must aggressively measure return on IT investment - companies often over-estimate the differentiation available from IT investment and under-estimate the investment
required

2. Building institutional capability for continued initiatives is the only real source of sustainable advantage

3. Since individual initiatives provide only fleeting advantage at best, it is helpful to define a longer-term strategic direction that can provide a context for waves of initiatives that reinforce each other and accelerate movement towards longer-term areas of opportunity

The document is made up of diagnostic questions in four key sections, to help you think through how to create strategic differentiation with IT:

I. Do you know where you are going?

II. Are you achieving as much impact as possible?

III. How do you define success?

IV. What is required to move even faster?

Don't just sit there - sign up for our newsletter, and download your copy now. >>

There has been a fuss here in the UK over a new TV advert from McDonalds, where they quite incorrectly claim that a "bob" is a pound. Now, I have never understood why foreigners had a problem with our previous monetary system -

• A farthing was a 1/4d
• A ha'penny was 1/2d
• A penny was a penny = 1d
• A thrupenny bit was three pence = 3d
• A tanner was sixpence = 6d
  
• A bob was a shilling, which = 12d
• Two bob was called a florin
• Half a crown was 2/6 = 2 shillings and six pence
• A crown was 5 shillings
• A ten bob note was ten shillings = half a pound
• A quid was, and still is a pound
• A fiver was/is five pounds
• A tenner was/is ten pounds
• A pony is £25
• A monkey is £500

Now, where's the problem in all of that?

Of course, we then succumbed to International pressure and the fact that people find counting to ten easier (no wonder the youth of today need calculators to do any maths), and introduced decimal (boring) currency.

Which all leads me to Internationalisation - and please note that I spell it the International way. If you think it is spelt with a "Z", you are probably American, and hence for us International folk, wrong!!! The number of presentations I have been to where the presenter proudly put up a slide saying "Internationalization" and wondered why the International part of the audience immediately stopped listening / threw rotten tomatoes is way more than ten (or even twelve).

The serious point of this artice is that if you are going to do business in another country, then get an expert to check your spelling / grammar / advertising / messages because otherwise you will simply cause offence. Similarly if you are supplying computer services to different departments / areas of the business, wouldn't it be sensible to have some understanding of those areas in the IT department, or if you can't stretch that far then access to some people you can call on for advice / input / testing / review etc. ? BSM is about understanding and communication flowing both ways between IT and the business, and not being dictated to (either way) by people who don't understand the local patois. 

 

By Bill Keyworth and Annie Shum

A fantastic BSM article appeared last week (1/18) in InfoWorld entitled "Run IT As a Business - Why That's a Train Wreck Waiting to Happen."  The author, Bob Lewis, identified the futility of IT organizations continuing down the same broken path that is not connecting IT with their business counterparts ...yet he sees too few IT executives who are willing to initiate the necessary BSM changes.  One of Bob's central messages to IT is that "no one inside your company is your customer."  Fairly basic principle ...but highly compelling to initiate change in the way IT performs their labors.

Bob provides some outstanding examples of IT executives that struggle with providing the "same old ...same old" IT services to business people who can't see the benefit of paying what they perceive as premium prices for products and services that they see advertised elsewhere for a fraction of the cost; or who fixate on short term deliverables that are "good enough" but don't address the company's strategic business opportunity for the longer term; or who won't document requirements in a way that ensures IT can deliver on expectations.   In these cases, IT consistently finds itself in a defeatist catch-up mode.

The article provides some common-sense advocacy that running "IT as a business" ensures that IT doesn't satisfy corporate business needs.  It's an interesting twist to the dichotomy of how BSM is perceived by IT versus how BSM should be positioned and executed by IT.  Bob concludes with a vision on what an IT organization actually does and looks like when it is integral to the business community, and not an add-on cost center that depletes profits.  Again... great BSM article!

The recent Dilbert strip might be too close to reality for many IT shops that have difficulty in justifying their IT management initiatives in a way that has any meaning or relevance to their business counterparts.   Given the highly reactive nature of many IT organizations, the tendency to put "lipstick on the pig" is pervasive and unfortunate.  Moving to more predictive and proactive BSM activites would be a worthwhile alternative ...to say the least. 

The idea that IT operates on behalf of the business has been around since the time the first international business machines appeared on the horizon. In the early days, it was simply using machine speed and power to complete data acquisition and analysis tasks that much more efficiently or effectively than could be done manually. The concept hasn't changed all that much. But, the technology and potential for contribution has grown as mechanical technologies gave way to the 'smart' and integrated technologies of today.

In the 21st century, business was awash with data ...data that is collected, sliced, diced and presented in a multiplicity of ways. But, somehow the really big payoff remained just out of reach. Clearly, the problem isn't the amount of or access to data. The problem was in the lack of timely, cost effective aggregation and analysis presented as business consumable information.

The first decade of the 21st century, we experienced a beneficial convergence of infrastructure capabilities, architectural implementation and a new understanding between IT and business. Changes in technology, data architectures, maturity in use of the technology combined with a drop in the cost of computing and its support infrastructure to provide the capability to collect, correlate and analyze massive amounts of data from sources and in ways that were previously inconceivable.

The fulfillment of BSM lies in its ability to bridge the communications gap between business and IT operations. That gap has consistently hindered the transformation of IT's data collection and processing powers to services that will seamlessly operate to support and enable successful enterprise operations. It isn't simply a matter of mindlessly adding instrumentation to collect more and more data. It's about improving data quality by identifying and eliminating irrelevancies. It's about improving the quality of communication and cooperation to effectively leverage existing resources. And, it's about focusing on representing the beneficial impact of technology on the measures of business success.

Check out Partners in Health >>

I want to share this blog  from Audrey Rasmussen of Ptak, Noel & Associates originally posted at http://ptaknoel.com/blog/

Today, HP and Microsoft announced a major expansion of their Global Strategic Alliance, which appears to go well beyond the casual indstry partnerships that sometimes arise between IT vendors. This is both an offensive and defensive move for HP and Microsoft, as they prepare to battle for their share of the future BSM market and emerging initiatives like cloud computing. As BSM continues to evolve upwards toward the "business" with increasing focus and interest in business services, and with cloud computing looming on the horizon, vendors are positioning themselves for the major changes that are coming in the future. This expanded HP-Microsoft alliance reveals these vendors' serious intention to compete in the evolving BSM and cloud computing markets. This alliance involves joint investment, development and collaboration in several areas:

• Citing easy deployment of infrastructure technology solutions with built-in management, HP and Microsoft announced turnkey integrated technology stack solutions that are delivered on HP hardware with pre-configured and integrated software, including Windows server software with Hyper-V, HP and Microsoft systems management software, and selected applications. Initially, HP and Microsoft announced technology stack solutions for Microsoft SQL, Microsoft Exchange applications, and Virtualization.

• Joint development efforts to integrate HP and Microsoft System Management solutions, including HP Business Technology Optimization, HP Insight Manager, Microsoft System Center and Microsoft Hyper-V Server software.

• Joint unified communications and collaboration solutions.        

• Joint marketing and sales efforts to sell these HP-Microsoft solutions. The sales effort includes both HP and Microsoft direct sales, as well as HP and Microsoft channel partners. 

• HP and Microsoft Services provide customers with additional help through their service offerings.  Leveraging HP and Microsoft's infrastructure-oriented services, up through HP's strategic consulting. 

The HP-Microsoft alliance makes sense for both companies on several fronts. The integrated technology stacks will essentially deliver pre-loaded and pre-configured hardware and software for server, storage, networking and application packages.  The alliance also enables both companies to compete with broader solutions that they wouldn't be able to deliver on their own.

• Anticipating the changes that the emerging cloud computing paradigm will bring about, if and when IT organizations begin adopting it, HP and Microsoft are positioning their integrated stack solutions for the short term and long term. Easy to deploy solutions that users can implement now, as well as easily adding more as their needs grow, could become their customers' "standards" which bodes well for both vendors. If they are convenient, easy to deploy, and save a lot of IT time and headache, the commoditization of the technology stack may move further up the stack, and customers may not care as much about what individual components are in the stack if they work well together.
  
  The initial solutions announced by HP-Microsoft can easily be deployed in data centers today, as well as for private or public clouds when companies begin to implement them.       

• Preparing for the coming battle for mind share and wallet share of the BSM and cloud computing market, each of these vendors face formidable competitors (i.e. IBM and Oracle) with war chests full of hardware, software, and services assets that could outmaneuver HP or Microsoft individually, but the combined solutions and efforts of HP and Microsoft could compete more effectively. For example, HP's server and storage hardware will enable the HP/Microsoft solution to compete with IBM and Oracle/Sun bundled hardware solutions. On the other hand, Microsoft's web server software enables HP/Microsoft to compete with bundled solutions that include IBM's WebSphere and Oracle's WebLogic .

Although there are good reasons for the HP and Microsoft alliance, there are many questions that arise from such an alliance. How they navigate these issues could spell success or failure for this alliance.  Remember, these two companies have been partners but they have also been competitors in systems management. How will they handle and rationalize the functional overlaps of the two companies' system management solutions? And how does that play out for their system management solutions that have competed with each other in the past?

HP and Microsoft also have existing partnerships with each other's competitors. How will this affect HP's partnership with VMware? And how will this affect Microsoft's relationships with other hardware vendors?

With this move, HP and Microsoft are positioning themselves as competitors for the BSM and cloud computing showdown. It's shaping up to be a battle of the titans. Although predicting who the winner will be is premature, this will definitely be an interesting space to watch. So tighten your seatbelts and prepare for an interesting ride.   

(Co-authored with Jasmine Noel) Cloud computing makes CA's acquisition of Oblicore interesting because cloud services without serious level contracts (....or a BSM orientation) are an enterprise disaster waiting to happen. Cloud Service providers (be they public, private or hybrid) will need business service management solutions capable of delivering against business-oriented SLAs. Cloud service users will need such solutions to help them make a wise choices from a confusing array of options.

The problem is two-fold, first Cloud implementations transform monolithic IT service delivery into a dynamic supply-chain with volatile interdependencies, interactions and impacts between each link. SLAs will be required that can identify, track, measure and report on each segment of the chain. CA has been working on this aspect of the problem under the Spectrum Service Assurance moniker.

Second, there is the translation of business oriented contract terms and requirements into a meaningful and measurable metrics that apply in a Cloud-environment. It will require a combination of creative modeling, impact analysis and metric identification and definition that relate business needs to infrastructure implementation...or a BSM type bridge between the business and IT gap. Oblicore focused its efforts on this aspect of the problem.

If CA can integrate Oblicore's technology with its Service Assurance efforts with minimal fuss then the results should be a very interesting BSM solution to these Cloud services problems.

Read the full commentary at http://ptaknoel.com/research-analysis/commentaries/ca-acquires-oblicore/

Since 1994 the Standish Group “Chaos” reports have been regularly mentioned in various posts in software and IT blogs. The following figure from the 2002 study is quite representative of the data provided in the Standish annual surveys of the state of software projects:



The January/February 2010 issue of IEEE Software features an article entitled The Rise and Fall of the Chaos Report Figures. The authors - J. Laurenz Eveleens and Chris Verhoef of the VU University, Amsterdam - give the following summary of their findings:

In 1994, Standish published the Chaos report that showed a shocking 16 percent project success. This and renewed figures by Standish are often used to indicate that project management of application software development is in trouble. However, Standish’s definitions have four major problems. First, they’re misleading because they’re based solely on estimation accuracy of cost, time, and functionality. Second, their estimation accuracy measure is one-sided, leading to unrealistic success rates. Third, steering on their definitions perverts good estimation practice. Fourth, the resulting figures are meaningless because they average numbers with an unknown bias, numbers that are introduced by different underlying estimation processes. The authors of this article applied Standish’s definitions to their own extensive data consisting of 5,457 forecasts of 1,211 real-world projects, totaling hundreds of millions of Euros. The Standish figures didn’t reflect the reality of the case studies at all.

I will leave it to the reader to draw his/her conclusion with respect to the differences between the Standish Group and the authors. I would, however, quote Jim Highsmith’s deep insight on the value system within its context we measure performance. The following excerpt is from Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products:

It we are ultimately to gain the full range of benefits of agile methods, if we are ultimately to grow truly agile, innovative organizations, then, as these stories show, we will have to alter our performance management systems…. We have to be as innovative with our measurement systems as we are with our development methodology.

See pp. 335-358 of Jim’s book for details on transforming performance management systems. His bottom line is elusively simple:

The Standish data are NOT a good indicator of poor software development performance. However, they ARE an indicator of systemic failure of our planning and measurement processes.

Jim refers to the standard definition of  project “success” - one time, on budget, all specified features. His focus is usually on software development. I would contend, however, that his good counsel is much broader. IMHO it applies to any IT project.

 

See the press release for details on the acquisition of Phurnace by BMC. This acquisition is in perfect accord with the vision articulated in BSM Review on the subject Agile Business Service Management.

Eric Ries has just published a post entitled Continuous deployment for mission-critical applications. In this post he takes a very clear stand on the suitability of continuous deployment to mission-critical applications, as follows:

 

"I want to directly challenge the belief that continuous deployment leads to lower quality software. I just don't believe it. Continuous deployment offers three significant advantages over large batch development systems. Some of these benefits are shared by agile systems which have continuous integration but large batch releases, but others are unique to continuous deployment.

1. Faster (and better) feedback... Engineers working in a continuous deployment environment are much more likely to get individually tailored feedback about their work.
2. More automation... Continuous deployment requires living the mantra: 'have every problem only once.'
3.  Monitoring of real-world metrics... There are huge classes of bugs that "work as designed" but cause catastrophic changes in customer behavior. My favorite: changing the checkout button in an e-commerce flow to appear white on a white background. No automated test is going to catch that, but it still will drive revenue to zero. Continuous deployment teams will get burned by that class of bug only once. 
4. Better handling of intermittent bugs... For example, consider a bug that happens only one-time-in-a-million uses. Traditional QA teams are never going to find a reproduction path for that bug. It will never show up in the lab. But for a product with millions of customers, it's happening (and being reported to customer service) multiple times a day! Continuous deployment teams are much better able to find and fix these bugs.
5. Smaller batches... Continuous deployment tends to drive the batch size of work down to an optimal level, whereas traditional deployment systems tend to drive it up."

I could not agree more - continuous deployment is very effective as a software quality improvement strategy. Whether you do BSM, ERP, transaction management or any other mission-critical application, thoughtful continuous deployment is an excellent way to go. The laws of software engineering apply to any kind of application you might be developing and deploying.

I believe, however, we might have a metrics problem on our hands. What often happens is that continuous deployment flies at the teeth of the 'Man in the Dock' theory. When a major disruption happens, we look for a single point of accountability instead of deciphering the complex pathways to the disruption. Such a theory in use, of course, leads to less frequent deployments which in the long run adversely affect software quality.

A major task for Agile Business Service Management is the development of metrics that take us away from 'The man in the Dock' mindset. These metrics need to satisfy two criteria:

1. Map software quality to customer value.
2. Help us realize that service disruptions are systemic. They are a matter of complicated pathways, not of the incompetence of one individual or another.