BSM...Innovation? Luxury? Must Have?

I recently posted an entry about Good to Great IT organizations and I had the opportunity to speak to a strategic thinker in the industry regarding innovative organizations and those that stay a step ahead of their competition. So in my travels this leads to the question of whether or not BSM is a “nice to have” or a “must have".

First, let’s take a quick look at the difference between innovative organizations and leading organizations. “Innovative organization” is a term that is used far too often and rarely true. Innovation occurs when an organization changes the way an industry transacts business (e.g. Amazon changed retail, eBay changed the yard sale, e*Trade changed financial services). In each of these examples, the company has leveraged a new technology, time to market was critical, cost was no object and quality can be so-so.

These points in time occur far and few between yet when they do occur, and become mainstream, then leading organizations emerge because they offer the services with their customers in mind managing cost, quality and features better than their competitors. There is far more opportunity to lead an industry by understanding keys to the business driven by your customers.

As I previously posted, IT organizations that are integrated and act in lock-step with their businesses understand what drives the business, how to apply technology to create value for the business and understand the impact technology has on the business are those that lead their competition in their industry. So to answer the title question we only have to look towards this week’s headlines of the Netflix outage, last year’s Turbo Tax eFiling outage on 4/15, this year’s repeated Blackberry outages, etc.

In the mainstream where leading businesses are delineated by narrow margins of competitive advantage through the way they conduct business and customer satisfaction, the answer is simple: BSM is MUST HAVE! These leaders know the impact (good and bad) that technology brings to the business, how to use it to advance the goals of the business and how to deliver customer satisfaction when customers interact with their organization.  BSM technology is key to proactively monitoring and managing “the business”, not technology in a silo.

To answer the question for your organization, it’s simple, what did the last technology impacting event cost your organization? Revenue, customer satisfaction, stock price, brand image? How many hits can your organization afford to take? Leading organization’s can not only answer these questions, but manage to intelligently build the equity of their organizations.

What do you think?

-- Michele