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By Peter Goldin
September 2006
Getting the Most out of BSM Tools
The proliferation of business service management (BSM) technologies is an indication that companies are taking the move to IT service management seriously. This new approach for managing IT from the perspective of the business marks a significant culture change for both business and IT managers.
“You can spend time developing your processes and training the right people, but if you don’t have the enabling technology it just won’t work,” said Ken Wendle, the ITSM Solution Lead at BSM software vendor HP. “Without the right technology, you won’t be able to manage the ITSM processes. It requires a combination of people and processes, enabled by the right technology. People have just begun to realize how important the technology component is to ITSM.”
Understanding the Role of BSM Tools
BSM tools are designed to automate the linkage of IT performance with business objectives. They allow managers to understand how specific devices within the infrastructure impact the business goals and facilitate managing these devices specifically to support those goals.
Key BSM capabilities include performance monitoring, root cause analysis of performance problems, service level management, and trending. BSM tools not only collect performance data from across the enterprise but also analyze the data to enable problem solving, predict needs and help users optimize the use of resources, and ultimately ensure that business services are being delivered as promised.
“There is increasing understanding in the US of the value of implementing one or more best practice frameworks, like ITIL, and when you do that you need a tool set that supports it,” added Brian Childers, an itSMF USA board member. “In my experience, the BSM tool set must be flexible enough to change to fit your business model, without having to employ a cadre of developers every time you want to change something.”
Adopting a Business-Focused View
Traditional IT management dashboards are usually relevant to business managers. The monitoring of network components and applications tracked within their technology silos does not provide adequate context for business managers. By tying infrastructure to business metrics, however, the health of services and components becomes much more relevant view.
“BSM capabilities allow IT organizations to report to business managers on the quality, availability and performance of business-oriented services,” explained Debra Curtis, Research Vice President for Gartner IT Operations Management Group. “This helps improve credibility of IT and helps assure business unit customers that IT services are performing in support of business processes.”
Making Better Decisions Quickly
BSM tools empower IT organizations to make better IT management decisions quickly by providing in-depth visibility into both the performance of IT components and the business services they support.
“BSM tools help the IT group identify what IT services are impacted by component problems in the IT infrastructure,” noted Debra Curtis. “This knowledge helps IT organizations make much better decisions relative to assigning priority to a problem. Instead of assigning resources based on whether a device is down, they are making those decisions based on what business-oriented service is down.”
“BSM technology can also help an IT organization narrow down the root cause of service-impacting problems,” Curtis continued. “The visualization of the hierarchical tree structure of the infrastructure can help IT staff zero in on the cause of a performance problem and help shorten the mean time to repair.”
Although this requires a radical change in how IT personnel perceive their available resources, adopting BSM can provide a substantial advantage in terms of meeting customer needs.
“With BSM tools, a company can solve the right business-impacting problems faster, and without expanding the IT staff,” Curtis added. “If you are making better support decisions, you will get better results. That means downtime will be shortened and availability will be improved, because you are using the resources you have more wisely, assigning priorities correctly based on the business impact of the problems at hand.”
Peter Goldin is a BSM Digest contributing writer specializing in the technology and electronics markets. During 17 years of marketing and PR writing, Goldin has covered performance monitoring and management, storage, networking, security, e-commerce, and a range of other technologies for respected corporations and innovative startups, as well as a variety of publications.
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