Business Service Management

Business Service Management to me is the glue that holds all other processes together.  To harmonize the functions of the IT back-office with the business processes they serve.

It is no longer enough to know about the capacity management and CPU performance and monitoring of the resources.  The ability to perform effectively is linked directly to the reliable delivery of IT services.  A whole host of tools have emerged to relate to how well systems, networks and applications are doing as per Operational/Service Level Agreements.

The demand for IT services to be closely aligned with business processes has produced a whole new segment of the systems and applications management software sector called: Business Service Management (BSM).

The term BSM encompasses a whole range of technologies and functions. It involves many of the skills used in service level management, but the way service level metrics are related to business processes is quite different across vendors. This means BSM is perhaps is best defined by the operational objectives it pursues to achieve, rather than the technology it employs.

BSM has been described as: “Visual representation of the dependencies between business processes, business applications and the IT infrastructure (servers, storage, networks, middleware and databases).”  Aside from which it reduces down time and shortens problem resolution and operational efficiency.

Most are familiar with the term: Service level management (SLM).  This is certainly a predecessor to any concept of business service management (BSM).  In Service level management, IT services are measured and managed to meet prearranged service level agreements, and is in extensive use today. Of course its popularity shows the recognition of the impact IT can have on the business - both negative and positive.

While SLM implementation is the foundation of many BSM services, the ability to capture a description of a business process which is a major requirement of BSM products are different in terms of complexity, cost, and ease of implementation.

The successful implementation of BSM needs a detailed map of the enterprise's relevant business processes, and the IT resources they depend on. The accuracy of this map will determine the efficacy of the BSM success. In short, you can’t do BSM if you don’t understand business service flow.  BSM plays an important role is relaying the significance of IT Operations to business executives.