Misconceptions surrounding service management

This week, I want to diverge from the past few development-oriented articles to dispel what I feel are common misconceptions that I hear repeatedly from some IT professionals and software management vendors. These misconceptions center around business service management and service-level management – two completely different concepts. I submit that BSM is actually the byproduct of the natural evolution and acceptance of SLM concepts.

Before I explain, let me provide you with a brief history of SLM. The concept of guaranteeing levels of service has been around for a long time, beginning with the telecoms industry. Decades ago, telecom customers began demanding service providers (SP) guarantee voice and data connections to be available and perform adequately. These demands were not made because the SP’s customers were concerned whether the technologies being supplied were operating correctly; they were concerned that the services being provided – which were critical to the business – would have a large negative impact if they failed.

Over the past few years, the foci of service level guarantees have been progressively moving up the stack from elemental (such as ensuring the performance and availability of network links) to server, application, and business levels. This parallels the growth in the SP market, where they now provide (and are beginning to guarantee) the performance of critical business services.

These shifts were the genesis of the business service management (BSM) movement. The only way to guarantee service availability and performance within an accepted range is to combine the various components of the IT infrastructure that enables that business function (and associated elemental SLAs) into a business service agreement that guarantees business service levels (BSL). BSLs, viewed from an IT perspective, are really the combination and cascading of IT service level guarantees that, taken together, guarantee the level of business service.

Another major source of buzz in the industry is the alignment of IT and the business. Nearly every major management technology vendor that I have spoken with has incorporated this concept into its core message. My research, however, has shown that many people really do not know what this means, much less how to effect the changes required to make it happen. I believe that this alignment is a natural parallel to the shift from SLM to BSM, in which IT is now responsible for (and compensated on) business performance. For an enterprise IT department to survive (e.g. not become outsourced), it must make the transformation to that of an SP – an “insourcer” that guarantees business service performance levels.

This is not as hard as you might think – there are companies today that have demonstrated that IT and business alignment is possible, although the number of failures probably still outnumber the successes. The ability for an IT organization to become fully aligned with the business is a direct function of the relative maturity of that organization and the willingness of executive management to support such a change.

I welcome your feedback on the subjects of SLM, BSM, and IT/business alignment, not to mention outsourcing in general. Thanks for reading.