The Hub Commentary_

I respect my friend JP, however, on this post I might have to push back a bit.  Business service management isn’t really a single tool, nor is it ITIL, but the practice of aligning infrastructure as services to facilitate the cost and value discussion.  That takes bringing many data points together to understand the infrastructure in a logical manner.

Discovery is a nice automation for input into knowing what you have and relationships, however, I have found there are many types of discovery.  Some are good at physical devices and configurations, others read network topology maps, some sniff network traffic and others listen to ports and communication between devices.  All add relevant pieces to the puzzle, but none are BSM or the CMDB.

It takes an integration platform to bring it all together, make sense of it and provide the best early warning view possible to mitigate risk prior to changes and in live environments.  It also could include business data and volume of transactions or value of those transactions to illustrate value of business impact at a point in time raising or lowering risk based upon true business impact.

Many tools have something to contribute to the practice of Business Service Management and it is the organization that can piece them together in the manner that best meets the needs of their business that becomes successful.

How do you define Business Service Management?

Michele

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I have in the past lamented the evolution of BSM into more of an ITIL support solution than the pure IT management project that we embarked on seven years ago. In the early years of BSM, we all were convinced of the importance of application dependency discovery: It was the bridge between the user, who sees an application, and IT, which sees infrastructures.   (Read Full Article…)