Business Service Management Hub

Tonight we’re gonna manage like it’s 1999. I was introduced to a prospect today that made me feel like I was in a timewarp. I was given of of those old school 400 question RFPs which called for in-depth answers about Event Management – and I mean everything about it, correlation, rules, weighting, etc. Do you know the difference between monitoring and business service management?

What is a simple explanation of what Business Service Management (BSM) is, does – let’s take the BS out of the speak. I simply describe it as the ability for IT to communicate service performance (value) aligned with business objectives, while maintaining control over the infrastructure.

This is not the first article about Business Service Management and cloud computing, and it will certainly not be the last. The one thing I’ve learned about the cloud, both private and public, is that this is new technology, and it is constantly changing.

As an end user within an organization, I require a dashboard that I can log into from time to time to see the Services that are offered to me and the health of the services that I currently am using.

Business Service Management can provide a single pane of glass across any environment: public/private cloud, virtual and physical – How important will this be as we move to the cloud?

The concept of Business Service Management and why it is good for IT (and the business) is reasonably understood by most people.   The reality is that people tend to buy BSM solutions for the features it provides not just on the definition of BSM.   For some organizations, a BSM product is purchased within […]

Earlier this year I suggested a prediction regarding the waning discussion of ITIL and this week I expanded upon that prediction in a post, “ITIL will be the end of ITIL”. The same day I posted my discussion, I received my brochure for the HDI Conference where Malcolm Fry is set to speak on “What’s up with ITIL?”. The description starts with questions regarding the dying of ITIL, what’s going on, etc. Defense – first indication that a wave is starting to swell in the market.

In order to understand the overall health of a service, it requires several management tools such as network monitoring (device up/down, switches, etc), device (CPU, Memory, disk) monitoring, application (logs, SNMP, etc) monitoring, etc.  The common approach is to use more than one tool such as EMC SMARTS, IBM Netcool, BMC Patrol, home grown monitoring […]

The conversation IT has with the business must change this year and this is the year of transformation predicted back in 2003 by Nicholas Carr in his Harvard Business Review article, “IT Doesn’t Matter”.  The cloud, virtualization and the growing number of service providers with as-a-Service options are the catalyst that will force this transformation […]

I ran across this article the other day by Doug Mueller and it reminded me of the multi-layer Service Catalog.  I’m not sure if this is an actual term or not, but it’s a good description of what it is.  If you take a very large organization that is broken up into distinct areas such as the teams […]

So you have a console that has your Business Service Management views.   You set up the views to show the key Services you are providing to your end customer(s) (EMail, Databases,  CRM, etc).  You somehow are bringing in monitoring data in order to light up the service views in order to show some type […]

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 […]

A true story, names not revealed to protect the innocent and a Dilbert in the making.  An illustration of Business Service Management, rather than a Wiki like definition, of technology impact and calculating costs and value. Early in my career, green and wet behind the ears, about 8 months into the job working the 4:00 […]

Managing the enterprise from a Service perspective, understanding the individuals parts that make up the entire service is a fundamental requirement.

Setting up a tool that performs some type of end user performance testing is not enough, it is a type of testing that provides a view of the end user experience of using a part of a specific service. Adding Service Level Management on top of the testing is still not enough.

I like to do searches on the internet from time to time to see the type of hits produced around specific terms such as Business Service Management and Cloud Computing.

Are you leading your organizations cloud roll-out or are you reacting to it? It is happening, better to lead than follow!

I was thinking the about computer system recovery, mostly because I was/am trying to fix a computer at home.   It started me thinking about the companies I have seen over the years with the blank check approach to DR and the ones I have seen with the piggy bank approach.  It’s interesting, I’ve seen […]

Business going to the Cloud can be the Catalyst for IT to Measure and Communicate Value! How many of us have heard what a road block IT is, how costly / what a mystery IT is and IT cannot communicate value to the business leaving frustration in the organization. It’s sort of like the Mars […]

Tale of Customer Service, Cost of Service Impact, Mitigation of Risk and the CMDB Heart! This is a story about a manufacturer, a retail buyer and the consumer and how IT management touches them all. This is the first in a series of Business Service Management (BSM) Stories from the Trenches that I’ll post describing […]