Business Service Management Hub

It’s that time of year when the press is filled with the latest IT predictions for the coming year. A couple of articles and surveys caught my attention as they relate to the unspoken imperative of connecting to the business to drive the business for competitive advantage versus just operate the business. This practice, while not called out, is Business Service Management and is the heart and soul of success for many of these initiatives.

“Data, Data Everywhere — Not a BIT of Intelligence Anywhere”

What is Business Service Management simply and why does it appear to have waned in discussion and answer the question has it failed, is the concept required, what’s new? Yes, the number one complaint in the market is still that IT does not understand the business, the level of frustration is rising and fuels the fire driving cloud computing and hosted services.

A friend of mine, Richard Whitehead, recently posted two blogs (Two Lawyers and Shakin Up) on the topic of service level agreements, contracts and lawyers for cloud based services. My favorite quote in these posts, “Send lawyers, guns and money”. All I can say is, if it comes to lawyers, guns and money, it just ain’t worth it. Far too much time is spent on the negotiation and perceived service missteps than is put into the quality of service and driving revenue.

For several years, analyst told us that you must have Discovery in order to do a CMDB project. Sure… I’ll buy that concept, but it doesn’t mean I have to start with it…

There is no doubt the cloud and outsourcing options are here to stay and will continue to eat away at the data center. Those that deploy, monitor, manage, and measure their services in mixed environments taking advantage of the best options will lead their industry with technology in the coming year.

Ok, so we aren’t there yet. The first part of getting over a problem is admitting that you have one. How can we resolve the issues I brought up in my previous post? Let’s talk about that now – Service Level Nirvana and Business Service Management

Business Service Management practices have the greatest chance of success when: The solution provides several different views of the same data. The technical team needs a few different views (top down, bottom up, inside out), the end users of the systems (internal or external customers) want to see the services they are using along with […]

Why aren’t we at Service Level Agreement (SLA) nirvana? I mean really, we have had SLA tools for 10, 15 years or more. You probably have 1 or 10 or more tools that measure SLAs, of which most probably aren’t used. Why aren’t all of our data centers, applications, servers and everything else just numbers on some dashboard that we just glance at to make sure everything is good to go and that we are open for business?

Rather than fighting the growing trends of mobile, social and the cloud; find a way to make it work for you using systems you already have in place whenever possible.

I have worked with many customers to track service level agreements in their Business Service Management (BSM) implementation. I can honestly say that there is only one thing that all of the projects had in common: they were extremely difficult.

I have been asked over the years “what is the return of a business service management practice”. The answer is “it depends” on your environment, how much efficiency can be driven into it, how much consolidation, the list goes on. However, I know that is absolutely the answer everyone despises and I see the eyes roll.

Starting any project is daunting and Business Service Management as an initiative is often thought of as big, hard and complicated. My personal opinion is that stems from the fact that it cuts horizontally across the data center and does not reside in one sphere of influence. However, as a long time product marketing / product manager I find it can be quite simple. One service at a time, one service team at a time approach rather than boiling the ocean all at once. Let’s start at the top, the service, and work our way down and back up again in a series of posts.

I can already hear you asking and scratching your heads, “Michele, what do those 3 things have in common – cmon, get real”. Yes, I’m a long term IT nerd and tremendous football fan that remembers everything. Heck, I fessed up to crashing a data center for 7 hours in an earlier post. My motto: go large or stay home or as we say in the south: ” if you can’t run with the big dawgs, stay off the porch”!

Today I’m writing an article instead of just sharing the news having spent a little time consulting and reviewing major sourcing contracts for customers and being trained in the Ross Perot bootcamp of outsourcing early in my career. What I always find amazing is how much trust a subscriber puts in the provider during the contract negotiation. On one hand there is trust (I call it naivety) and the provider was successful in creating a relationship, playing on emotion and expertise in the market. On the other hand it is a recipe for disaster, a lose – win situation for you the subscriber. Know your rights and deploy business service management practices.

We had a snow storm the other day, during the night we lost power and by morning, the house was cold.   I was able to get on the internet with my laptop which has a cellular wireless connection as well as my cell phone.   I checked some emails for work purposes and then […]

Time for ITIL. Year-end is always a good time to watch the predictions fly and I too had to add 4 to my friend Richard Whitehead’s post with his top 10. In my post I made a prediction that this would be the year that ITIL begins to wane as a topic of conversation for a couple of reasons.

Below are some of the common reasons that CMDB implementations fail.   They are in no particular order. Lack of Management Buy-in Face it, one group is going to be the buyer and installer of the CMDB, there are many other groups/departments that will be needed to help maintain the data as well as use […]

Free Summary – EMA Radar for Business Service Management: Service Impact Q3 2010 – Enterprise Management Associates

In BSMdigest’s exclusive interview, Michele Hudnall, Novell Solution Marketing Manager – BSM discusses the move from IT performance management to Business Service Management, and where integration fits in.

Private cloud might be one of the best things to ever happen to Business Service Management. Private cloud inherently requires the company to be more focused on the needs of the business side of the organization, which leads directly to aligning IT performance with the business needs. Because of this, the move to private cloud is driving Business Service Management in many organizations.