User Defined BSM aka How Would You Like Your Eggs?

Few that would argue that rolling out a business service management approach to an organization is highly valuable and beneficial. One of the biggest challenges, however, continues to be what this BSM solution should look like to its consumers. Is it a dashboard with a stoplight like layout? Is it speedometer tracking how quickly things are moving along on a production line? Is it information laid out on a world map highlighting contributions from various regions to a global marketplace?

Consider this analogy to highlight just how important this look and feel really is – I like eggs and toast for breakfast, as do a lot of other people. The raw contents of this breakfast are the same for everyone but preparation and layout will absolutely determine how successful breakfast is on any given day. It will determine how likely I am to recommend the meal to other people, how much satisfaction I gain from eating it, and how much value I associate with it as an everyday exercise. For the record, I like mine prepared as two eggs over hard with wheat toast cut in half on either side of the eggs, almost like a face. How many possible permutations are there? A lot.

Building dashboards at the presentation layer of a BSM solution is arguably the most important and most difficult task during any deployment, akin to making breakfast for a group of people all of whom agree that they want eggs for breakfast but can’t always articulate how they want them prepared or presented. This is exactly why in selecting a BSM vendor, it is absolutely crucial to evaluate flexibility in presenting information and also being able to change it very quickly to look like something completely different. In addition, the ability to quickly add/modify/delete the data feeds allows for new ingredients to be added to the mix so that the presentation layer can truly take on the shape that the BSM user community needs.

All this flexibility comes with its own challenges, the most significant of which is soliciting user feedback and building in mechanisms for comments, suggestions and approval from the user base. It’s one that is certainly reflected in the feature development cycle of a lot of companies, in particular ones with varying types of users. MySpace’s SVP of Product Strategy described their approach of soliciting feedback using blogs along Tom Anderson’s profile. A similar approach was described on CIO.com's blog.

These approaches can be creatively applied to building and maintaining a relevant presentation layer for a BSM solution by allowing communities of interest to provide feedback and suggestions on what they would like to see. It is then up to the administrators of the system to extract themes and concrete ideas from the feedback stream and construct new views. These should then be promoted in Beta form to further distill them, and then brought to the full user community. Sound like a BSM group inside of a larger enterprise social network? You bet.