Opening up the Business Service Management Umbrella

One of the first phases in your Business Service Management (BSM) journey will probably be the discovery, mapping and alignment of the technical nuts and bolts of the infrastructure to the business services and applications they support. This phase is often accomplished by gaining an understanding how those business services and applications are built and then aligning the performance, availability and status of the IT infrastructure with those business services and applications. More often than not, this phase provides a simple green/yellow/red representation of business service health. Deriving the status indication is usually a simple evaluation of whether a server or network element is "up or down" and communicating this in context of the business service or application. This has tangible benefits within IT operations for sure, but is still very reactive in nature.

Maturing in this initial area may involve finding a deeper understanding of the specific relationships between performance, availability and status of those IT infrastructure components and the business services and applications they support. Understanding the "cause and effect" relationships is key. When server utilization reaches a certain point, business services may be impacted in certain ways. Transactions slowing down may cause a backlog in the order management system resulting in SLA violations and financial penalties. Getting to this point takes considerable work for today's complex business services and applications.

How to do this effectively will be the topic for future blog postings. Business Service Management maturity involves much more than this simple server --> service and "cause & effect" relationships. In reality, everything introduced in the IBM IT Service Management (ITSM) strategy (or other best practices frameworks) underpins the business in some way. Literally everything that IT does supports a business objective of some kind. With this in mind, the tenants of Business Service Management extend across everything introduced in IT Service Management.

Extending the alignment of ITSM activities, processes and functions with business services and applications is a logical next step for maturing in Business Service Management. These tasks will undoubtedly take a lot of effort. You're likely to be outside of your comfort zone and will have to work with many new groups of people who are more process oriented than they are technology oriented.

A logical way to begin this broader alignment is by having a well thought out master data management plan. This may take the shape of a configuration management database (CMDB), configuration database, uber-spreadsheet, or some other information repository. Establishing common metadata or shared business vocabulary (SBV) across the business and IT organizations may be benefit as well. Remember, a successful Business Service Management deployment must consider the context of both IT and the business.

Here are some ITSM areas that are ripe for alignment to the business services and applications they enable and support. Having a BSM platform and underlying ITSM architecture that is open, flexible and scalable across these areas such as the IBM Tivoli Netcool/RAD 3.0 solution will go a great distance to realizing success here. Incorporating this non-traditional data and information will require many levels of integration, consolidation, and processing. A loosely coupled environment where data and information can be exchanged and consumed easily will go a long ways here.

IT Processes and Workflow:

• Align every change request of any priority or degree of importance with the business services and applications it may directly or indirectly impact. Empower the change review board with this useful information in both IT and non-IT terms and adverse effects are likely to be at a minimum.
• Align every release, incident, known error, vulnerability, etc. with their associated business services and applications? Understand what the direct and indirect relationships are and what impact they have on the business services or applications.
• Are your IT processes and workflows instrumented? Do you have visibility into the current state of a change request? Release? Incident? The more real-time visibility you can get here the better. The impact on the business services and applications may be much worse if you wait until your customers tell you about the problems.

IT People:

• Do you know who the subject matter experts (SME's) are for each of your critical business services and applications? Do you have a formal support structure? Training and documentation program? Plan for the "hit by the bus" scenario?
• Do you have the right people controls in place and visibility into who's doing what, when, where, why and how within the technology environment? Do you have a "Murphy" plan?

IT Finance:

• Do you know how much it costs to operate and support a business service or application? Cost per transaction? Cost for a given performance, availability, architecture? What's the impact on the bottom line / top line? Could more clients be serviced or widgets produced by changing, upgrading, consolidating something? Is it / are you providing value? How do you know?
• Are configuration items (CIs) aligned to business service and application GL codes or cost centers? What's the real cost of ITSM processes, workflows and activities? Is there enough business value in doing a change or release? Dealing with a known error or problem?
• Do you have a chargeback strategy?

IT Vendors/Partners:

• How do your vendors or partners enable business service or application delivery? If your fulfillment or logistics company experiences an outage, how does this impact your business services or applications?
• Do you know when your vendors or partners are performing changes in their environment and if they'll impact your business services or applications? Can you integrate their ITSM processes and solutions with yours?
• Are you outsourcing parts of your business or operations? Are they dependent on your business services and applications? How are they impacted if problems arise and how is your business or customers impacted? Are your contact centers helping or hindering your business? Do call volume spikes impact the business? Are you overstaffing in slow periods?

Doug McClure
Consulting IT Architect
Business and IT Service Management (BSM/ITSM)
IBM Software Services for Tivoli (ISST) - Netcool
e: dmcclure@us.ibm.com
BSM/ITSM Blog: http://dougmcclure.net