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As the first company to embrace the term, business service management (really, do a Lexis-Nexis search), we’ve observed market entrants are repositioning themselves in the BSM space at an increasing rate. As a competitive vendor, we find this trend has both benefits and drawbacks.

For example, we find a level of satisfaction in the validation of what we have long since envisioned to be a market for BSM, but as new vendors enter the space, they also tend to creatively redefine the market to better fit their solution. While this is a fact of life in a competitive and free market, we find sometimes our customers and prospects rightfully seek clarification.

Here are a few industry leading definitions of BSM:

Gartner: BSM is a category of IT operations management software products that dynamically links the availability and performance status of underlying IT infrastructure and application components to business-oriented IT services that enable business processes.

Forrester: Software that dynamically links business-focused IT services to the underlying IT infrastructure. A business-focused IT service may be a specific IT service or part of a business process, but it must support a significant, visible business metric for a business owner.

Enterprise Management Associates: BSM is a strategy to align IT and business goals by helping business managers to understand how the performance and availability of IT resources affect and power their business processes. BSM fuses the goals of IT and business, providing real-time monitoring of business service health and status, using a set of tools designed to help organizations meet their corporate objectives and business goals.

ITIL: An approach to the management of IT Services that considers the Business Processes supported and the Business value provided. This term also means the management of Business Services delivered to Business Customers. (ITIL v3, Service Operation).

CSC: BSM measures how a business’ IT services are performing and delivering business value. It is a model where IT services are fully aligned with business objectives, requirements, metrics and results.

Some of our own customers have characterized BSM as follows:

1.  Maps technology… to applications… to the business

2.  Creates a trusted source for IT and the business

3.  Turns data into powerful intelligence

4.  Makes visualization relevant to a diverse community

5.  Is a platform of information that illustrates the impact of IT with respect to the business -- it is the holy grail of IT

Several other blogs in the industry have also consolidated some meaningful definitions: For example, Adrian Bridgewater wrote on ZDNet that, "BSM translates event data - that is, data about the status of an individual component - into impact." Ryan Shop provided an excellent post summarizing some of his findings, and Doug McClure offers the BSM community this: BSM is the integration and consolidation of systems management with business management.

Though all of these definitions have similarities, we tend to favor those provided by our customers, which raises an important point: you should determine what definition of BSM best suits your purpose and compare the different vendors against your requirements.

- Jim

We’re thrilled to see the buzz gathering around our newest announcement - analysts and media alike seem to agree that we’ve added something new and noteworthy to the market. We think this kind of innovation is especially welcome in a market that has little confidence in those larger competitors.

With myCMDB, we’ve really unleashed the power of the CMDB by adding the community features that should logically be part of any project that requires the input from so many different people within an organization. Heck, using email and voicemail for CMDB communication is like using a rotary dial for a smartphone.

Instead, we’ve brought CMDB communications and process into the 21st century, by adding a combination of Facebook interactivity, Wikipedia information quality management, and Google’s searching model. Basically, these features make it easier to get more users involved in its creation and maintenance, which means the CMDB quickly becomes a more accurate representation of the infrastructure, relationships, and services. This allows organizations to use the CMDB to better control the impact of change and move it into a decision support role.

Stay tuned as the buzz continues to build!

Recently Edward Lorenz who popularized the concept of the "butterfly effect" passed away. The butterfly effect, according one article, is when "small differences in a dynamic system, like the weather, could trigger vast and often unsuspected results." In other words, Lorenz theorized a mere flap of a butterfly’s wings, while generally insignificant, could, given the right set of conditions, cause a subtle change that sets of a sequence of events that leads to a raging thunderstorm.

In the world of technology, those thunderstorms are often rendered in the form of an application slowdown, or worse, an IT outage. The butterfly that caused the outage can often be traced back to change, whether that change was planned (as in software upgrade) or unplanned (as in a fault failure). More often than not, someone pushed a button, turned a dial or pulled a lever that caused an IT outage. In fact, Gartner's research "consistently shows that 80% of mission-critical outages are caused by people and process issues, not by technology failures."

Yet process or best practices alone is not enough. Despite being an avid proponent of ITIL, one of our customers was challenged by the fact that 60% of incidents were caused by planned or approved changes. What’s the solution? Visually model the dependencies among dynamic IT infrastructure components to better understand the potential impact of planned change before they are made - even if that change seems insignificant, like the wing flap of a butterfly’s wing.

- Siki

Over the past couple of years I have grown to find that there is no other combination of 4 simple letters of the alphabet that can stir as much passionate debate as these do within the world of IT. We all know better than to speak about politics and religion in mixed crowds, I add CMDB right up there with those two topics in the world of IT technologists.

ITIL carried the promise of clear, concise and standard definition….right up until you get to the CMDB. All the topics of ITIL leave room for interpretation, however, the interpretation of just what is a CMDB and just how to implement it can become a powerful debate amongst IT professionals. So much so I consider it a 4 letter word when I speak to IT professionals, until I better understand their “religion” on the topic.

Never do I consider anyone’s view of their CMDB inaccurate, each environment carries with it varying objectives, technologies and processes by which the CMDB can be delivered. I recently had articles published in The Data Center Journal and ITSMWatch.com on CMDB and several key questions often arise when I am out in the real world talking to the folks in the day-to-day trenches:

Who owns and updates the CMDB?
Simply put, everyone does – that is everyone with a vested interest and use of the CMDB. It must be considered a corporate asset and source of “information” and “data”. The more that contribute to it, the more accurate and richer it becomes.

That said, yes, there must be an organizing and policy body that sets the rules for standards to insure consistency. However, it should not restrict the free flow of update, meaning it should not force a single person to perform all updates. Policies, standards and audit notifications should drive the enforcement of standards consistency without crippling the free flow of data.

Why consider implementing?
The 4 letter word often sends shivers down the project owner’s spine, “what did I do to get tasked with this beast?”. Fair sentiment with the crossing of so many organizational barriers this task brings with it. Technology projects are never difficult (work with me on this) until they cross organizational boundaries and then the organization behaviors tend to slow down forward progress of the project.

In this case, data is just that until it is correlated and related to other bits of data turning it into information by which to take action and perform analytics for the growth of the organization. Without a mechanism by which to bring this data together, track it and provide a vehicle by which to apply the intelligence, the sheer volume of data would never expose the actionable information that leads to an agile and growing organization.

So don’t fear the CMDB, embrace the opportunity to contribute to a network of information that begins to connect the whole of the organization over time with true actionable information.

-- Michele

Long time CMP writer and veteran technology watcher Penny Crosman recently blogged about a flood of new start-ups developing solutions aimed at reducing data latency for financial institutions. For example, one provider offers “software that sits on network switch mirror ports and monitors the traffic going by, combined with correlation algorithms that, the company says, can pinpoint latency to the box level.”

While such a tool may pinpoint latency to box level, component-based management only takes you so far. The next step absolutely must be to put this information in a business context - to understand the effect of any single box’s latency on IT’s ability to deliver business services. This is important because financial institutions often have tens of thousands of servers (among other components) in their enterprise, which means potentially tens of thousands of latency alerts. Without business context, the question becomes, ‘which latent box do you fix first?’

One way would be to incorporate Business Service Management (BSM) solutions to allow IT operations to make this determination quickly and easily. BSM manages IT from a holistic, service perspective, and dynamically links the underlying IT components according to the business service they provide – so, for example, IT operations can place the latency at a box level in the context of business impact. Since BSM platforms can integrate to a range of heterogeneous IT management tools from performance monitoring to service desks, it may prove more useful than trade data latency monitoring tools.

In many ways because of their reliance on technology, financial services institutions were among the early adopters of BSM technology in the late 1990s. Today, BSM has evolved to include a range of modular components to include discovery, service level management (SLM) and the configuration management database (CMDB) or as ITIL perhaps more aptly calls it a configuration management system.

-- Jim

Doug McClure’s at it again. The former Muse-man turned Tivoli guru has posted a thoughtful seven-step program to becoming a BSM Superhero on his blog. Doug’s blog is an excellent resource on the topic of BSM – be that ITIL, CMDB, or Discovery. Though he’s a true IBM-er, his vendor-neutral approach and efforts to stimulate public discourse is commendable.

It is in that spirit of dialogue that we offer an alterative 7 step program – the “just enough” approach - just-enough being a concept popularized by Forrester Research:

1) Identify the purpose of the project

2) Choose a one or two critical applications or services

3) Model the service or services

4) Integrate federated data from asset management, service desk and other tools

5) Define rules and analyses

6) Create analytics and reporting, and

7) Define role-based views.

When a BSM is carried out in a top-down manner with a just-enough orientation in mind, design and implementation can be easier – especially when approached with a service-oriented perspective. Need 10 Tips of a Successful CMDB? Click here.

-- Greg

In a recent article in CIO Magazine, “IT departments do not deliver ‘great’ IT, say CIOs”, a survey of CIOs and IT Directors revealed that almost half do not deliver “great” IT. “Great” IT is defined by 3/4ths as being able to to add real value to the organizations strategy and bottom line.

I am always amazed when I speak to leaders of IT organizations for enterprise organizations that may know what sector of the market their organization falls into, but cannot describe to me what the business units do day-to-day and how they determine success for the business unit. I find often times I may know more by reading annual reports and surfing the company websites prior to a meeting than the IT leaders I meet within the organization. So I ask how would an IT organization believe it should have a say in strategic decision making within the organization without basic knowledge of what drives and grows the business?

Alignment to the business has almost become a passé phrase due to the lack of meat behind the initiative and the continued siloed, technology focus of many IT organizations. True alignment will only be achieved when IT organizations immerse themselves into the business and become fully integrated. A recent Information Age article quotes: “There is no such thing as an IT project: all IT’s activity should be about business projects.” The only way an IT organization can better manage change and impact is for it to be immersed and integrated in the business. This is not to suggest that IT organizations become distributed by business units, rather there are emerging roles of service managers that work side by side with the business teams on projects leveraging technology to the success of the business.

I often work with organizations on “IT projects” and the business case for an “IT project”. These are always problematic because most are “soft” in their cases of cost management. Cost saving projects that reduce hardware and software licenses are easy cases with hard savings. It’s the CMDB, SLA, ITIL process improvement, etc. projects that are difficult and I would point the finger at the root of the problem, these are typically internally, IT focused projects without links back to the business they support. I’m often looked at like I turned green and grew horns if I ask questions like, “How does this improve performance of the business? What impact on the business will this project have?”

I find ITSM (IT Service Management) projects that have a focus on managing business impacting events and can be quantified as such for business driving applications are easy cases. BSM (Business Service Management) projects that also bring in business data providing analytics regarding the effectiveness of the business providing information during the quarter versus a financial report after the fact after the quarter also have greater success. My humble advice is to always error on the side of the business and find the high impact services and understand how the technology can be better applied or improved.

IT has a difficult job in managing two sides of a coin: efficiency internally managing costs and effectiveness externally improving the business. Often times IT organizations error on what we know best, IT, but by better understanding the impact to the business and integration to the business provides the greatest benefits all the way around the business speeding up projects and decision making of projects.

– Michele

This week is the 12th Annual Pink Elephant IT Service Management Conference where record numbers of IT professionals (~2000 +) have descended on the town that never sleeps with the theme of “Another Brick in the Wall”.  This year’s conference is one for the record books in more ways than one, but this one cannot stay in Vegas. The Pinkers pulled off a first ever and all I can say is “only in Vegas”. The President of Pink Elephant, David Ratcliffe, opened the conference by riding in on an elephant draped in a Pinker blanket. The questions that picture brings boggles my mind, but the biggest one is, “what will the Pinkers do next year to beat this one”? Only in Vegas will you find a full size elephant available to be ridden into a hotel ballroom dressed in his finest pink outfit! Who says IT guys/gals are just geeks with no sense of humor.

The overriding theme of the conference is the topic and training for ITIL v3, thus many organizations are growing in maturity and seeking to advance their ITSM (IT Service Management) and BSM (Business Service Management) initiatives in order to better integrate to their businesses. Just a year ago, I spent more time explaining what ITSM / BSM are and then how technology might support those initiatives. This year the awareness is there and organizations are seeking solutions that will assist them in reaching higher levels of business integration via BSM technologies.

On the same theme of IT maturity, CMDB (configuration management database) still continues to be a hot topic, but more so in terms of what it provides for initiatives that: better manage service availability/performance, change control and service impact knowledge. Early CMDB initiatives revolved around “finding” and “tracking” things. ITIL v3 brings the focus to the service and while understanding “things” in the environment, it’s the impact these “things” have on a service that is driving more mature CMDB initiatives.

Service catalogs are also another hot topic also brought on by the evolution of the ITIL v3 documentation with the focus on the service. Many organizations are working on initiatives to identify and track their services. The key to this will not only be the initial provisioning of these services, but the ability to track it in the CMDB with the supporting technology infrastructure with service rules enabling the proactive management of the services. This is interesting because it isn’t the service level that is holding the relevance any longer, but the ability to proactively manage risk and impact insuring quality service availability and performance.

ITIL v3 introduces the notion of the 4 P’s:  People, Process, Products and Providers. Managing services is no doubt a complex undertaking if products (technologies) are not leveraged to assist in process efficiency and providing information for analysis versus previous adventures in manual data manipulation.

In my humble observation, this is the year of integrated CMDB’s layered with service catalog definitions and proactive management in terms that the support the business more than ever before.

-- Michele Hudnall