We recently caught up with BSM blogger, guru, and evangelist Doug McClure for his thoughts on our blog last week about the need for BSM "Lite". He wholeheartedly agrees with us that the world needs a simpler, less expensive, more responsive way of achieving BSM. Here's what he told us about how to implement BSM Lite.
"Like ITIL, BSM is about process not products. Nearly every client around the world gets enamored by dashboards to bring order to the chaos of IT alignment, but they leave the most important legs of the three-legged stool aside--the people and the process." McClure says that individual IT team members usually focus on narrow world views, and virtually no one in US-based enterprises has end-to-end service ownership.
What's needed he told us, is for enterprises to create a new job called service manager. According to McClure this is already happening in Europe. "Europe is a few years ahead of us. They have service managers with organizations behind them. The service manager serves as the single point of contact for end-to-end service. But I haven't come across anyone who has adopted that idea here in the States."
To embark on what McClure calls a "BSM journey", enterprises need to add the organizational and process legs to the product leg of the stool, or they will fail. He told us: "I left Earthlink and came to IBM/Micromuse because I was frustrated with organization and process problems. So I'm here on "the dark side" working for a vendor to bring the [BSM] vision to life using a methodology. The vision is that a lowly sys admin can leave his comfort zone and discover what's important to the business. I'm trying to equip people with what they need to be successful above and beyond the product. The product gets lots of money thrown at it, and the software takes care of itself, but the rest does not."
McClure went on to say that BSM needs to be approached as a corporate initiative. "IT managers need to think about organizational change to be successful. Everyone who starts on the journey has to understand what they're getting into. The [BSM initiative] needs to be given equal importance to other initiatives like SOA, and everyone needs to have an equal seat at the table."
Finally, McClure suggests that BSM Lite needs to be supported by a subset of just four product capabilities: resource monitoring, event collection, event management, and presentation. He recommends a top-down approach which streamlines the understanding of dependencies and enables enterprises to manage from the end points in not from the infrastructure out. In his view a BSM journey is best embarked upon without unwieldy databases of information and layers and layers of software.
Our hats are off to IBM for listening to Doug and providing a formal process offering to augment their traditional software sale. Doug prepares the IBM customers who are about to embark on the BSM journey. The offering has an in-depth workshop which includes a BSM readiness assessment. Further support is offered to the enterprise though a mentoring relationship. The enlightened goal is not only to get the software to work but to make the results valuable.
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