How to get IT right

 

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Business service management has become a much-talked-about enterprise management scheme. BSM is meant to prove IT's value by linking business and technical information in a logical whole - one of the goals of the new data center. Mark Stabler, vice president of corporate strategy for BMC Software, says that BSM best practices could make the difference in whether a company succeeds or fails with the next generation of IT. Stabler shared his views in this recent interview with Signature Series Editor Beth Schultz.

What makes adoption of IT best practices more of an imperative today than in the past?

The best practices from even 20-plus years ago really haven't changed. What has changed is the complexity of the infrastructure and how you go about managing what needs to be cobbled together to deliver high-level applications.

The vast majority of companies have not kept pace with all the IT assets they have because purchasing has been decentralized. They've maintained asset data in different stores, in different spreadsheets, in SQL servers, in Visio files - they've had it inside of Bob's head. So IT is playing catch-up so it can implement the best practice of maintaining an asset store or a configuration management database - a CMDB. That is going to be difficult for companies to achieve, which is why they have to start thinking about business service management. Best practices are only so good. If you don't have the tools, technologies and the solutions in place, then a best practice is just a piece of paper with a set of recommendations written on it.

How is the BSM approach different from what enterprises are doing now?

What's critical is figuring out how to implement and maintain that one place, where everything is orchestrated from that CMDB. Companies shouldn't have multiple repositories, or 15 databases to maintain. They shouldn't have siloed areas of management - here's my network manager, here's my application manager, here's the person who manages security, storage, databases. This model has to be thrown out and instead management should be looked at from a business perspective - 'If I do not have this application available to the business, or I'm unable to transact X amount of transactions per minute and therefore drive home some margin or revenue, what is the impact on the business?'

I harp on building a CMDB and on asset management because those are core. Industry analysts say that 80% of the problems that happen inside the infrastructure occur because of inadequate or improperly managed change. Somebody changed something without understanding how it was going to impact the business - 'But it was the fifth router I changed. I didn't realize the fifth router would ....' 'Yes, but it's the 14th of the month and quarter to 5 in the afternoon; didn't you realize the impact on the business?'