Today, according to research by Forrester, business service management (BSM) and service level management (SLM) technologies represent one of the two fastest growing submarkets of the infrastructure management space.
Indeed, Forrester states that this marketplace is set to continue its growth well into 2006. This growth also goes hand-in-hand with ITIL`s success in becoming the de facto standard for enterprise service management processes.
However, it is particularly the BSM side of the market that is becoming more innovative - mapping business needs to IT services in a more dynamic and automated way; enabling that true end-to-end service delivery chain.
So, what makes these technologies, particularly BSM, so important in today`s IT-enabled business world?
Firstly, the quest for end-to-end service levels continues to drive even higher levels of automation. The goal is ultimately to reduce the downtime of business or technology services by reducing the time it takes to repair complex technology environments and the amount of human resources needed to support and deliver a given service.
Secondly, IT managers, particularly those that work for multimillion-rand companies, are now expected to deliver consistent service levels across the entire organisation.
This increased demand to compare external versus internal services delivery versus cost ratio has led to a renewed focus on internal services delivery capability and has led to more outsourcing agreements in our marketplace. Internal IT departments can no longer hide behind their internal status, but have to face the external competition head-on.
It is because of these pressures that companies continue to deploy more sophisticated BSM tools where the ultimate goal is to automate the delivery of complete IT business services, even across the extended enterprise.
In this light it is important to remember that both SLM and BSM should form essential, integrated parts of a company`s infrastructure management architecture. IT operations should, therefore, keep in mind that all management components should work together in a seamless fashion for any given service to be delivered end-to-end.
Another critical element that IT departments should consider as part of their SLM and ultimately BSM deployments is cost management. These solutions should enable the financial administration of IT that includes processes such as identifying the costs of the services delivered to business units and end-users, measuring the services delivered and billing for the services used.
Aligning IT with business requires a complete approach to service management. This includes a strong operations management base, complemented by SLM and then delivered to end-users and customers through a complete service delivery strategy including sound financial management. Indeed, greater insight into the costs of maintaining services leads to accurate budgeting and forecasting, which is necessary to drive credibility with business units, partners and senior management.
BSM cannot be approached with a quick-fix perspective. Vendors now market BSM solutions on the basis of consolidating diverse management technologies into "nice" interfaces, but still leave you with the complexity (multiple vendors) that did not deliver the intended results for the enterprise in the first place.
True BSM vendors will address the issue of multiple level integration of enterprise management data, which includes a common management database for all the relevant enterprise management technologies, which includes asset management, software delivery, remote control, availability and performance management of the system, database, network and application layers to name but a few.
Without dealing with issues of integration and data management we cannot deliver on SLM and therefore true BSM.
Share
