ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES®
Analyst Corner
January 2008 Analyst’s Corner:
BSM is Moving Front and Center
IT organizations are increasingly turning to Business Service Management (BSM) solutions in their quest to play a more critical business role. Technology silo-based management delivers concentrated expertise that is valuable, but not enough in a world where technology has moved into such a pivotal role. More than two decades ago, Service Level Management (SLM) came on the scene as a way to look differently at managing IT. SLM leverages this rich silo-based insight while moving upstream to look beyond a compartmentalized view of uptime and availability. BSM promises to again raise IT up another notch (or perhaps many notches) in a way that blends with top-of-mind business goals and measures.
Enterprise Management Associates’ most recent study shows that BSM vendor revenues grew 50 percent on average over the last two years, and user spending plans show the market for BSM beginning to surpass the market for SLM software and services. While service management has been high on the radar of CIOs for a number of years, SLM has more longevity and has dominated service management initiatives. The data indicates a shift to BSM in late 2008 and 2009.
BSM has been a confused concept which has slowed its growth. This has been a function of BSM meaning different things to different people. Even within EMA, BSM has required some rather heated debates – chiefly coming from two camps: those who view BSM as a discrete market segment that evolved from SLM, and those who view BSM as a model – virtually a level of maturity – for managing services in dynamic support of business requirements.
The truth is that BSM is best understood as a bit of both. There is clearly a market context for assessing BSM technologies with their own unique and distinctive features. But there is also a need to approach BSM as a state of organizational evolution and awareness. Moreover, this seemingly semantic debate about the meaning of the words “BSM” is also quite relevant to understanding how to succeed realistically with a BSM initiative in the real world. And so to cut to the chase, even before this column’s really begun – “no, you can’t buy BSM.” What you can do, though, is adopt appropriate BSM technology to support a broader initiative that can enable a far more dynamic alignment between your IT organization and the business it serves.
Both SLM and BSM support alignment with the business. SLM is moving into a role of supporting BSM by sitting above silos and offering a way to define and measure service quality across technology types. Historically, this may have been enough for IT to support business needs. But today, the interests and goals of business executives require measures reflecting business success rather than infrastructure success. This is where BSM comes into play. How can BSM help to drive business success? While this could be a very granular discussion, the areas of greatest importance include:
- Quality: Many in IT have begun to realize that the best possible quality – really means the most appropriate level of quality to support business objectives. And that level of quality may vary dynamically on an hour-by-hour or even minute-by-minute basis or even by user or client. The most obvious examples are response time as related to Web-based applications involving transactions or even just site access triggered by marketing initiatives (as in several infamous Super Bowl examples). The demand on IT resources and associated component-response and performance criteria were woefully under resource. But by contrast, I know of one IT executive who, when he heard that is data center was delivering sub-second response and his WAN was creating five-second delays complained that his data center was “overprovisioned.” In other words, appropriate means consistent but fluid, and not over invested.
- Cost: Understanding the costs of services means understanding all the associated infrastructure and operational costs affiliated with their delivery. This is no mean feat and management technologies are just now beginning to deliver some of the analytics and effective data collection to support these requirements.
- Relevance: If IT is a business, then like any other business it must understand, and understand in-depth, the relevance of its services to business value. Right now this is a Wild West world filled with lawlessness and little precedent. “Relevance” has been either ignored, or assumed, or discounted, but it is the ultimate frontier for BSM – especially as IT services are not only extending the reach of businesses to new consumers, new partners, and new markets – but actually enabling entirely new business models and new ways of working.
For IT to be focused along these lines, and hence for BSM to succeed, the collaborative, cross-domain processes recommended by best practices such as the IT Infrastructure Library need to be implemented, or BSM will remain a pie-in-the-sky dream. As a model, BSM is first and foremost not about technology, but about a cultural shift in how IT professionals collectively (and individually) think and work, both among themselves, and in support of their customers their customers’ businesses.
The market for BSM solutions is currently focused on a portion of the broader BSM vision. While BSM will grow over time with toolsets expanding to support that growth, today’s BSM market encompasses twenty plus vendors that offer products that enable IT organizations to connect with business line-needs and manage IT from a business service perspective. These toolsets include:
- The ability to define business services across technology silos
- The capability to display visually the services that are defined and how they interrelate with one another
- Dashboard views to demonstrate to IT and business executives the success of service delivery from a business impact perspective
- These dashboard views also provide drill-down capabilities for technologists across the IT organization.
- The gathering and presentation of metrics needed to support service quality measurement ? especially metrics that enable measurement of business metrics relevant to IT services
Over the past twenty-four months, the biggest news is consolidation in the market with many smaller solution providers being bought, and some moving in alternate, albeit related directions. This consolidation reflects a maturing in the service management marketplace. SLM remains strong and while BSM investment will surpass SLM. SLM is not going anywhere. In fact, it is necessary to support the broader vision of BSM. EMA’s research has shown that BSM has moved from a concept that was very unclear for enterprise IT just two years ago, to one that is now not only much clearer, but also a distinct priority.
