Managing IT from a services perspective is clearly on the rise. In a recent newsletter, I wrote a summary of the results of EMA's service-level management acceptance survey of 46 IT professionals, which was completed late in 2005. One of the statistics that I did not quote in that column was the indication of the importance of SLM to executives and business line managers. This is a key data element to consider and the results were very high: 94% feel that SLM is either important or critical to their business (61% responded that SLM is important and 33% feel that SLM is critical). Interest in IT services management (ITSM) is certainly not waning at all. In fact, interest is growing with the very population that needs to champion the effort in the enterprise.

Demand is high and yet the market is a confusing place for IT and business professionals to navigate. It boils down to a lack of common terminology and understanding around what service management means. There are general terms and acronyms that are used to define the market space ranging from the general to the specific. SLM and business services management (BSM) are the two that are the most troublesome. During the summer of 2005, EMA conducted a study interviewing 100 enterprises that are using ITSM. The research, called "BSM and SLM: Concepts in Transition", found that enterprises generally do not distinguish clearly between the two terms. Many of the respondents would place the same functionality in both categories. Vendors in this market also have varying definitions of this space causing additional confusion.

Both SLM and BSM are used to create a process for defining service quality in terms of metrics (supported in some way by IT), measuring the quality of those services, and reporting on them in a way that is meaningful to the audience. Functionality to accomplish this often overlaps. In EMA's opinion, the dividing line is the context of the service and reporting requirements. SLM measures a technically-oriented service whereas BSM measures a service more meaningful to business managers. For example, SLM might measure the responsiveness of a group of application or network services or perhaps even e-mail services. BSM, on the other hand would be used to measure success factors for key business services such as the number of successful online transactions, insurance claims, or customer billing.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.