Recently in Business Service Management (BSM) Category

In a recent BSMReview blog note I recommended listening to EMA's (Enterprise Management Associates) webinar discussing Business Service Management. They were in the process of publishing a new EMA Radar Report on the 'service impact" of implementing BSM technologies.

After watching the Webinar this week, I was disappointed with the incompleteness of the analysis.  My primary concern is how the analyst can you claim accuracy and objectivity  when vendors that have been long time advocates and thought leaders for BSM are excluded?   Even if a vendor doesn't respond to the analyst inquiries, it seems prudent to reference that fact and comment on information that is in the public domain. 

For example, I don't understand how you can have a Business Service Management vendor discussion without BMC being mentioned. I can kind of understand not mentioning Service-Now.com, but frankly I think most customers would be highly interested in one of the fastest growing SaaS vendors in the space and how they are positioning their solution in the context of BSM.  This begs the question, what other vendors are missing?

The Radar report positions 14 vendors (some which I am just now hearing about) and provides some insights, but I'm hesitant about buying into the outcome.  This makes me wonder if the report is highly influenced by EMA's vendor clients and, as such, is it biased?

Sorry, I have been very quiet on here for a while. Combination of a big birthday (numbers wise), and the fact that I am writing a book for BMC - more about that when it is ready to be published.

In preparation for the release of a new EMA Radar report that evaluates the BSM vendor community, Dennis Drogseth, a Vice President at Enterprise Management Associates, held a webinar this week entitled BSM Service Impact Radar Report: A Story of Market Transformation in 2010 that discussed the results of research based on interviews with 15 vendors and more than 25 customers at various stages of deployment. EMA will be publishing the Radar report next week.

A few research highlights really hit home with me and validated the BSM Maturity Model developed by the BSMReview community. These include:

1. BSM initiatives are transformative to managing services rather than just technology
2. BSM initiatives are value driven, not cost driven (i.e. Why doesn't the business drive BSM?)
   
3. BSM real and perceived/expected benefits are consistent with the view of our experts 
   

I would encourage you to watch this EMA webinar and the one next week.

Of course, I hope to hear your perspective.

Contrary To Popular Belief Semantics Do Matter! In this article I am going to explore three very different perceptions / definitions about the word "Implement" that are critical in regards to any IT related project but also have a great deal to do with the success of an ITSM program. The source of this article comes from a great book titled "Change & Effect" ISBN 978-87-993289-0-1 on Managing Organizational Change from our Partners in Denmark aptly called Implement Now before the ITIL/ITSM purists protest vehemently that you don't implement ITIL practices, preferring to use the word adopt or adapt let me but this in context. What we are discussing in this article is the fact that you are going to implement a change of some sort into your management system that will impact the processes, policies, ITSM tools, job descriptions, measurements, etc. of your current organization. Also by Implement I am assuming you hope the change to stick and benefits come of all the work and money your organization has invested in your project. The primary point of this article is to reflect on your personal or organizational understanding of this very important word! I may have already tipped my hand in the previous paragraph but consider that in the last decade or so I have seen many organizations fail at their ITSM projects due to the fact that they have greatly underestimated the work effort of their initiative. (Adopting, Adapting, Implementing) ITSM practices is not about simply documenting a process or purchasing and implementing and ITSM software solution. In fact these are only enabler's to the goal of achieving a change of behaviour. More on this subject in the Article. "Establishing Or Assessing An ITSM Program"

Reading through the articles on BSMReview.com, I started to wonder: "what is the problem?". Is IT really thàt disconnected from the business? Looking around in my living room and at the office, I can harldy imagine how life would be without any Information Technology to support me. And all of this is provided to me by companies in the form of products and/or services. Would I buy and/or use them if I didn't know what value they bring to me? No, of course not. Given that IT has penetrated already so much into my life, these "IT companies" must be connected to (or better say integrated within) "my business".

Interestingly some time ago I delivered an ITIL v3 based Service Portfolio Management workshop within a large Financial Institution. In preparing for this workshop we agreed to first focus on the question: "what is a service?". So I started by presenting the ITIL v3 definition of a service: "A means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks.". So far, so good. Then we looked at how to define a service and -more specifically- on how to define the business value of a service. Now when I asked the question "what is the busines value of your e-mail service?" the answer I got is "The e-mail service provides message traffic and storage of e-mail and e-calendaring". Does this describe a business value? Don't think so.

Looking at this sample, one might see it as a proof point that IT is really disconnected from the business and use it to justify a Business Service Management approach. Personally I wouldn't go that far. The only thing that it shows to me in this particular case is that IT is not able to articulate the business value of a service, but that doesn't mean the service doesn't have value or is not being used. On the contrary, the e-mail service sample above is one of the most used and appreciated service in the Financial Institute with an implicit value. Nevertheless and ultimately as one of the results of the workshop we came up with the following definition:

E-mail services provide value to the business when cooperative business communications are conducted without the constraints of location, device or time-zone. Value is created when IT operates for the business a store-and-forward messaging system, so that business employees can compose, send, store and receive e-mails with peers both inside as well as outside the business and in a manner that

• Is accessible 24 x 7 x 365 across the globe
• Allows only one outage of max. 5 min per 3 months
• Enables messages up to 45Mb and mailboxes up to 100Mb
• Supports protection of business confidential information
• Ensures data availability and archiving within business policies

Similarly and on a bigger scale, I recently met with another customer (read: a service catalog manager within IT) who asked me to review his service catalog and provide feedback. Of course I accepted this and then found myself reading through a 193 pages thick service catalog printed on paper. When the guy returned after a few days and asked me for my opinion, I said: "Imagine that you are entering a restaurant and ask for a menu card. And when the waiter returns he delivers to you the cookbook of the chef. How would you feel?". He immediately got the point that the service catalog contained way too much information for their business customers. In addition I showed him that there was also information missing in the service catalog. And you probably have guessed this one already: it contained no descriptions of business value whatsoever.

Again also in this situation the reality was that all services in the catalog already existed and were actively being used by the business customers. So why then create a service catalog? Good question. In this particular case the main driver for producing a service catalog was IT's desire to explain what they deliver, however the business didn't ask for a service catalog and also was not involved in the creation. And like Bill Keyworth rightfully stated in The Why & What of Business Service Management: "BSM success is entirely dependent upon the willingness and skill of both IT and business to have an effective two way conversation ...one party without the other is doomed to failure.".

Reading through my samples above and several articles on BSMReview.com, I see a number of very specific issues and symptoms, but am still not sure what the main problem or need is for which we are trying to find a solution under the name of Business Service Management. When we define BSM as "the discipline that aligns the deliverables of IT to the enterprise's business goals" then I wonder what's the value in doing this? And isn't this already happening implicitly ? Is it really possible to define the package of whatever it takes to deliver the expected service to the business community ...in a way that they can understand and appreciate that delivery? To me this sounds a little bit similar like designing the perfect organizational structure, while we all know that this does not exist (otherwise everybody would have it by now...).

I realize that my statements are provocative, however I believe that a good understanding of and interactive discussion around the fundamental problem we are trying to solve should be the starting point for (m)any article(s) on BSM(Review.com). So let's first address the question: "Business Service Management: what's the problem?".

Looking forward to your comments.

Richard L. Ptak, Bill Keyworth and Audrey Rasmussen believe that IBM's strategic focus on Integrated Service Management (ISM) and the application of IBM solutions under the Smarter Planet theme marks a milestone achievement in linking business and IT resources and assets for business success. Not the least because Integrated Service Management, in our opinion, leads directly to the broader message of how IT can effectively leverage and link together all enterprise assets and resources to achieve the goals of the business. ISM closely aligns with the Business Service Management (BSM) concepts that are being unnecessarily limited to discussions of just leveraging IT infrastructure. 

Learn how IBM illustrates and documents enterprise-wide benefits to be realized from BSM.  Read the article »

IT leaders must learn the necessity, value and process behind the development of a "Business Impact Statement" and the importance of crafting this statement in terms and metrics that are meaningful to the business community. Bob Multhaup & Ken Turbitt highlight its critical role in initiating business-oriented service management.

Read the article »

Why would a business executive be interested in Agile software development? 

Why is Agile a topic of interest to the Business-oriented Service Management community? The answer involves strengthening the connection between the developer (...who provides software capabilities for business use) and the business entity (...who uses software technology for critical business functions.)  These two groups are frequently bridged (...successfully or unsuccessfully) by IT operations, adding complexity and increased business frustration to the BSM process of aligning business with IT (...both operations and development or DevOps.)

Read Bill Keyworth's book review >>

I am always amazed by my customer's lack of willingness and acceptance to admit they have issues, problems or the fact that they are not fully realizing the benefits from a current process / tool or recent service / system implementation. I believe one of our industry's biggest maturity issues is the lack of desire to continually ask these questions:

1. "why are we doing it this way"
2. "what is the end-product / results / benefits realized by doing it this way"
3. "how do we translate / relate these end-products / results into business value"
   

Remembering that IT services are a "means to an end" and the end is the resulting business value created by implementing a technology-enabled business solution. BSM leaders should always challenge conventional wisdom and approach all situations with an assessing eye and a keen sense of inquiry delivered by asking the right questions. We should hone our question asking skills (much like Sherlock Holmes) so that they delivered in the most appropriate manner given any situation, personality or circumstance. Knowing when to ask open-ended vs. closed-ended questions or knowing when to ask a follow-up question vs. just writing it down for later review and approach are two examples of many when it comes to be a great questioner.

We should be sensitive and understanding to the people we are seeking answers from, but at the same time our questions should not be directed to make creators of the "sacred cows" feel like we are questioning their motives, work or decision. Questioning is a realization that everything eventually will change, especially the business and technology drivers. The faster our industry can 'get over' personalizing and emotionalizing questioning in the pursuit of continuous improvement - the better off every customer and employee will be!

Remember: Ask a question - Save a business!  

Well, here it is: "Why Doesn't the Business Drive BSM? A Value-Driven Business Service Management Maturity Model" >>

BSMReview's Bill Keyworth and Rick Berzle evaluate the management of IT services from the perspective of the business, a.k.a. "business service management."

The negative impact of IT organizations being culturally and functionally disconnected from their business community is escalating, explain the authors.  As evidenced by the push to bypass traditional IT options through Cloud and SaaS initiatives, IT must enhance how technology is provisioned for the business.

The BSM Maturity Model described in this ground-breaking paper covers 5 levels:

You can download it here for free (registration required) and let us know what you think >>

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!)

Imagine a company department that works the following way:

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. 

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.

(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/

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.

In Backing into the Future, Bernard Knox makes a fascinating observation:

"The early Greek imagination envisaged the past and the present as in front of us - we can see them. The future, invisible, is behind us... Paradoxical though it may sound to the modern ear, this image of our journey through time may be truer to reality than the medieval and modern feeling that we face the future as we make way forward into it."

How appropriate this mental model is in view of the recent and no so recent past. As pointed out by Perez, we should view the burst of the "dot-com bubble" in 2000 and the financial collapse in 2008 as a double bubble which is part of the fifth techno-economic cycle. Building on this premise. I made a bullish 2010 prediction for the Cutter Consortium. Here is the botton line from this prediction:

"I expect 2010 to be the first year of a prolonged golden age. Serious as the various problems we all are wrestling with after the 2008-2009 macro-economic crisis are, they should be viewed as systemic to the way a new generation of revolutionary infrastructure gets assimilated in economy and society." 

Likewise, my prediction for The Agile Executive is optimistic with respect to Agile Business Service Management:

"Agile breaks out of Development into IT (and beyond) in the form of Agile Infrastructure and Agile Business Service Management."

Click here for details of my techno-economic prediction for Cutter, here for my Agile-focused predictions for The Agile Executive. 

Is your company’s IT department passionate about their work?

If not, then perhaps you’re not letting them solve problems…  Passionate IT solves problems - not just for IT, but for the business.

More from John Hagel on pursuing passion »