A Cheap and Easy Path to Business Service Management

Remember those View-Master Stereoscopes when you were a kid?  You could see a three-dimensional view of the Grand Canyon or Mickey Mouse that gave you more information than either two-dimensional view.  Over the last two months we have laid out a path to IT performance management and made a case for two separate but equal views of performance: an infrastructure view (columns) and application view (rows).  To achieve a complete IT performance picture, you need to develop both views and then integrate them into a "stereoscopic view" that constitutes business service management (BSM). And getting that view does not have to be hard, or break the bank.

Because it enables business-IT alignment, BSM is a sought after IT service Holy Grail.  But you can't buy or legislate BSM - it is the outcome of assembling the essential pieces of IT management and using them effectively.

The IT management industry purports to deliver BSM in software which they say links business and technical information into a logical whole.  These vendors - IBM, HP, CA, and BMC - sprinkle technical management functions with a few business logic rules and claim victory.  But like the Holy Grail, BSM is elusive to them. Different views of IT remain largely separate, failing to provide a holistic view of actual business effectiveness.  Furthermore, the added cost of these solutions starts at about $200,000! 

We propose a simpler, less expensive road to BSM.  First, focus on operational performance.  You're probably saying, but there are many other aspects of IT like defining the correct project, writing proper software, staying on schedule, delivering within budget, defining an outsourcing strategy, etc.  True, but all of these aspects are just preparations for the main event: ongoing operations.  Management software vendors cannot help you build up operations - they apply BSM as an overlay after operational cutover.  You build up your own operations.

Once the system is operating, the infrastructure and application performance management (IPM and APM) views are the aspects of BSM that really matter.  Your infrastructure view tells you if things are working, and your application view tells you if users are getting their work done.  By adding business objectives to the two views you can reach your BSM destination.  It should not require a Herculean effort and it should not cost $200,000.  We suggest building your own with BSM view with process rather than software.

In a nutshell, BSM is the integrated view of IPM and APM that provides the stereoscopic picture of how IT is supporting the business.  Integrated IPM and APM sure looks like BSM without the complications and baggage accompanying what many vendors are selling.  Of course there are products that focus on this key intersection of IT and make a bundle of money, but if you're smart, you don't have to go there - at least not right away.

• Network Management
• Application Performance Management
• BMC
• BSM
• CA
• HP
• IBM