If you are reading this, then there must still be some questions in your mind on what Business Service Management (BSM) is, I’m not going to give you the elevator pitch, there are lots of companies with different flavors of those, I’ll take another angle on it that might help.

There is this large shipping company, they ship thousands of packages a day.  One of their critical operations is in a large hanger at an airport.   Planes and trucks are unloading packages and they need to be sorted and loaded back onto different planes and trucks.   There is significant computer automation that moves these packages along their way and in turn, these systems need monitoring.  Having an end to end view of the unloading, sorting and reloading of packages with a realtime update on volume, outages and other metrics is important to them.  Some might say that this end to end view is a very technical view and not BSM, to this shipping company, shipping packages is their business and being able to see this piece of the Service is important.

A large financial firm has many traders, it is important to ensure that all of the trading systems are up and running, network links to the outside world are required for these trades as well as the traders workstations and how well they are performing.  Having an end to end view of the complete trading application with up to date availability, trading volumes and other metrics is important for them to understand if they are making or losing money.

The typical BSM for a company is to be able 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, there are endless examples of managing the environment in a manner that aligns IT with the business they are in.  By IT leveraging the BSM approach, they are ensuring that they are looking at the things that are important to the business, in turn they are providing value to the business.

Tobin