Raising the Bar on IT Service Management

Not too many years ago, IT service management was about managing devices — computers, data storage devices, and other associated equipment — and these devices were typically confined within the walls of data centers. As devices were combined into distributed IT infrastructures that extended well beyond data center walls, IT professionals had to raise the bar. As a result, IT service management evolved from managing devices to managing the infrastructure based on the physical and logical interdependencies of the infrastructure components, including databases, application servers, Web servers, mail servers, gateways, applications, and hosting computers.

Now, many IT professionals have set their sights on Business Service Management (BSM) to ensure that IT goals are developed to support and activate the goals of the business. To progress toward BSM, IT organizations are again raising the bar, implementing solutions that enable the staff to visualize and understand the relationships of the IT infrastructure components to the business services they support. With this insight, IT can manage the infrastructure from a business service perspective, making decisions and prioritizing actions according to business impact.

The next logical step in this progression is to look beyond business services and begin thinking in terms of business processes. Ensuring that IT proactively drives strategic value — going beyond aligning with the business to truly activating business value — requires an understanding of the relationships of business services to the business processes they support — for example, that a credit card verification business service supports the order-entry business process.

From Managing Services to Managing Processes
The transition from managing business services to managing business processes isn’t an easy one. Large-scale business processes are made up of smaller components that are often distributed not only across the enterprise but also externally to business partners. Automobile manufacturers, for example, disassemble manufacturing processes and parcel out various components to suppliers. In this way, the automakers can focus on areas in which they add the most value, while leveraging the competencies of suppliers and partners to accomplish other key activities. Further complicating the transition is the fact that IT systems are developing into virtualized environments, enabled by the convergence of virtualization technologies with the Internet, wireless networking, service-oriented software architectures, and other leading-edge technologies. Business process distribution and virtualization promise to significantly increase business agility. However, they also complicate the management of IT resources.

To cope with the more complex environment, enterprises need new solutions that are business-process oriented to keep IT-dependent business processes up and running. These new solutions must provide a view of the business process topology that depicts the relationships among IT components, business services, and business processes. Such solutions will elevate and enhance the IT organization’s view of the business, providing visibility into the business health of key systems and allowing IT to manage change and capacity based on business process needs. They should also facilitate auditing to demonstrate compliance with legislation and standards, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

These new solutions require the integration of IT service management tools with important sources of business process information, which include enterprise application-integration technologies, such as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and Extended Markup Language (XML). Thus, the current set of IT service management tools need to adapt to the new focus on business processes. For example, service impact models need to evolve into business process impact models. What’s more, they should be updated continuously to reflect not only changes in the IT infrastructure, but also changes to business processes. That requires expansion of the scope of auto-discovery tools from asset discovery to process discovery. It also requires the availability of a single source of truth, such as a Configuration Management Database (CMDB), to record and maintain all this complex information and share it among the various IT service management processes.

Reaping the Rewards
BSM has been embraced as an essential step up in IT service management maturity. Today, many enterprises are well down the BSM path and are realizing substantial rewards, including faster, more consistent business services that drive greater revenue opportunities, cut costs, and reduce risk. For example, one bank that automated loan processing and had the consumer do the work online was able to reduce loan processing from 20 days down to about two. And by expediting this process and being more responsive to the needs of the customer, the bank was able to increase its competitive advantage and attract more business.

The next stage in IT service management maturity — in which the focus becomes not just services but also processes — increases these significant rewards with:

• Greater business agility that enables the enterprise to change business process behavior in near-real time for increased competitive advantage — without sacrificing manageability or control of IT resources
• Faster business problem resolution through a holistic view of business processes, permitting the IT staff to quickly uncover root causes, including those due to organizational/human issues, as well as those due to IT-related problems
• More effective business activity monitoring through business process dashboards that enable proactive problem resolution to minimize business impact
• Elevation of the role of IT to strategic participant in the business and a creator of business value

The dynamic nature of today’s business and IT environments are creating exciting opportunities for enterprises that want to build strong competitive differentiation. To seize these opportunities, IT professionals need to become strategic value contributors that drive business agility. The emergence of new IT management solutions that integrate IT service management with business process technologies are key to this transformation. These solutions will allow enterprises to manage the IT environment based on the processes that are critical to the business and ensure that those processes operate flawlessly. The result is increased business agility — and that translates into increased revenue and profit.

Mary Nugent
As Vice President of Worldwide Technical Services, Mary Nugent provides the technical expertise to enable customers to understand the value of Business Service Management (BSM). Additional responsibilities during her tenure at BMC Software have included corporate development, business development and software consulting.

For more information about BMC Software solutions that integrate service management with business process technologies, please visit the Service Impact and Event Management Route to Value™ page on the BMC Web site.

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