Recently in Service Impact Category

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!

For contemporary computer usage, the SaaS model has many attractive advantages that account for its growing popularity. For instance SaaS avoids the initial up front cost of purchasing software and the associated hardware; the ongoing maintenance, and salary costs for employees to maintain a new systems are all avoided.

At the expense of IT as competitive differentiation, these cost advantages are coupled with the fact that many types of software applications have been commoditized: networking speed and availability are trusted, centralised resources are shared across many users and afford higher levels of security, fault tolerance, disaster recovery and access greater expertise. Plus, SaaS examples like Salesforce.com demonstrate the credibility of the concept. So potentially you end up with less cost, less worries and higher quality of service – sounds good eh?

As the business model has matured the SaaS vendors are using increasingly sophisticated techniques to optimise their business, optimise client usage of resources, and deploy up selling techniques. All of this demonstrates the early maturity of a successful business concept.

Users have the right to expect SaaS providers will deploy best practices and the best technology in order to ensure security, high availability, good performance and continual improvement to ensure the quality of service (QoS) they require. Business Service Management (BSM) has an important role to play because of its unprecedented ability to provide service management the proven best practice way of managing IT systems.

SaaS systems, like all IT systems, will be subject to change, for example, upgrades, system expansion and maintenance – and incidents will also occur causing user-impacting problems. To ensure the viability of SaaS is maintained as these systems grow in size and complexity with their increasing popularity then SaaS providers need automated management solutions that can scale to cope with demand, size and complexity.

BSM components like Service Level Management (SLM) and Service Contract Management provide automated and proactive ability to ensure the QoS consumers expect. Since they provide automated root cause analysis of QoS threatening issues. Whereas, BSM’s Configuration Management System (CMS) ensures the risk of change is minimised by making change management aware of the potential impact of a proposed change.

We anticipate as SaaS becomes more popular, more complex and more competitive between SaaS providers. As such we predict that we will see the same rapid adoption of BSM as we have seen by service provision vendors.

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

The recent outage in Florida is reminiscent of the blackout that crippled the Northeast in August 2003. What’s more the effect is the same, cascading events. Ability to correlate early indicators in both cases could be considered root cause in each case in containing the events.

A NERC investigation of the 2003 blackout found that failure of the system monitoring and control functions over the electricity grid were contributing factors to the blackout. Such failures caused operators to either delay or altogether miss corrective measures for which the company managing that portion of the grid was responsible. The consequence? Events cascaded and rapidly spread across the region.

According to Reuters, reactors in Florida shut down following “an under-voltage event caused when two power lines between Miami and Daytona tripped following an equipment malfunction in a Miami substation.” In other words, as the Tampa Bay Tribune wrote “a malfunction at a single electrical substation caused a cascading blackout that shut down a nuclear plant” and “briefly cut power to about 3 million people in Florida."

Though not directly affected by the outage, one electrical provider saw the blackout in 2003 as a good reason to proactively upgrade its alarm management system. Control room operators teamed up with the IT department at Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) and tapped technology vendor Managed Objects to consolidate both IT and grid management system resulting with a flexible and integrated central alarm system correlating information and pointing operators to corrective procedures. The IESO’s project is profiled in the March/April 2008 issue of Electric Energy T&D magazine – it both makes a good business case for BSM and makes for an interesting use-case Intelligent Energy System.

- Michele

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