Do you still have questions on what Business Service Management (BSM) actually is? Many IT professionals do, and I promise, we’re not going to give you the elevator pitch here – as there are a lot of companies with different flavors of those – but we thought it might be worth taking another perspective to help you understand BSM from a business perspective so you can apply it to your organization more effectively. We believe analogies are very useful for explaining tricky concepts, so here are two:

1. There is a large shipping company and its primary function is to ship thousands of packages around the world every day. One of its critical operations is in a large hanger at an airport. Planes and trucks are constantly unloading packages, which need to be sorted and loaded back onto different planes and trucks. There is significant computer automation to move these packages and in turn, these systems need monitoring – because if the IT systems fall over, this shipping company would experience chaos. Therefore, having an end-to-end view of the unloading, sorting and reloading of packages with real-time updates on volume, outages and other metrics, is vital to this business. Some might say an end-to-end view is a very technical view and not BSM, however to this shipping company, shipping packages IS its business. Thus being able to see this piece of the Service is important
2. A large financial organization has hundreds of traders, based in all of the major markets around the world, and it is important all of the trading systems are up and running 24×7, or whenever these traders are online. Network links to the outside world are required for trades to take place, and the traders’ workstations, and how well they are performing, is an important piece in the puzzle. As a result, having an end-to-end view of the complete trading application with up-to-date availability, trading volumes and other metrics, is important so they can see if they are making or losing money

The typical BSM for a company is to set up end-to-end views of the important corporate applications – like email or CRM – but that is not the only example of BSM. Shipping, trading, manufacturing, banking, and more, are endless examples of managing the environment in a manner which aligns IT to the business it is in. When IT leverages the BSM approach, it is ensuring IT professionals are positioned to look at the business critical functions vital to success, and in turn, puts them in a position to provide strategic value to the business and their “customers” – the end-users of IT.

Does your company manage the environment which aligns IT to the business it is in?

Cheers

The NetGain Team