With all the hype lately around business services management, last month I asked readers if they thought BSM tools were more important than technologies to optimize performance of networks, servers and applications.

Recently I found a Yankee Group survey that semi-answered this question for me.

It showed that optimizing the business value of IT is a priority among the 175 IT executives from mid-size to large companies surveyed. The reasons business technology optimization (or BTO, as Yankee Group refers to it) projects should be a priority include: aligning IT with business strategy; IT governance issues; optimizing application quality, performance and business availability; and reducing IT costs.

Yankee Group's definition of BTO encompasses people, process and technology means to "take over spiraling complexity and rising IT costs by taking a more coordinated approach to testing, deploying and managing enterprise applications" to ensure peak performance and return on investment. Yankee Group says tools to better organize inter-related projects and to manage people overseeing IT systems are also important, as well as getting visibility into long-term performance and remediation processes.

In fact, interest in BTO is so high, Yankee Group forecasts the market will grow at 21% annually until 2007 and reach $3.3 billion worldwide in 2004, up 18% from $2.8 billion in 2003. Yankee Group projects growth will continue to $6 billion by the end of 2007.

The survey showed that 60% to 70% of current IT budgets goes toward maintaining systems, and less than 30% of the budget goes to new application development. With BTO processes and tools in place respondents say they expect the costs associated with applications could be reduced by 15% to 20%.

Respondents also agreed that IT departments will have to lead the push for BTO, the Yankee Group found. Survey respondents said the top membership on a BTO panel should be as follows: IT management (96%), business unit leaders (76%), CFO (52%), security management (35%), COO (34%) and CEO (28%).

According to Yankee Group, "The high involvement of line-of-business leaders bodes well for BTO, but the relatively low attendance of CEOs means BTO issues remain the bailiwick of the IT and operations staff, at least from their perspective."

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.