IT takes on BSM

The South African ICT industry is facing various challenges when it comes to business service management (BSM), says Arjen Wiersma, country manager for BMC Software SA.

In almost all industries, IT departments are shifting focus from merely maintaining and managing hardware, systems and software, to delivering strategic value.

Many companies are looking to cut the costs and time required for systems maintenance and management, so they can free resources for higher-level initiatives that better align technology with organisational goals, he adds.

ICT companies should realise their role is to provide a support function, and should link proposed solutions to the company's goals, and how best to achieve them, Wiersma says.

Businesses must articulate their needs, and the ICT companies should respond with their solutions and the costs involved. "If this is done properly, companies will have clarity on what is achievable and how this aligns to the business goals."

Wiersma says this is especially true in the new stricter compliance environment. "Most IT departments would put compliance, security, and business continuity in their top 10 priorities list. At BMC, the IT department keeps these priorities in mind as they manage mission-critical databases every day."

Since the BMC IT department has achieved compliance, it has set controls to maintain it, he says. These controls are intended to secure both databases and users.

While compliance was at the top of their priorities list, companies need to know that broader gains can be made by extending compliance processes to achieve multiple benefits beyond compliance, such as security, risk minimisation, and business continuity.

Wiersma says this is particularly important in terms of the new privacy laws, in which companies will have to be ready and answerable by 1 July 2008. "The bottom line is companies can no longer afford to be lax around privacy and compliance issues, because if something is missing, they can be taken to court, which is happening in the US already, and starting to happen in Europe."

Wiersma says the alignment of goals also includes the management of the customer's expectations. ICT companies must remember their ICT infrastructure and support is a cost centre and does not show profits, he says. As such, they must demonstrate the value they are delivering in other ways, and ultimately make sure businesses deliver on the promises they make to the customer.

He cites virtualisation as another driver in SA, and says the frequent power outages are driving this in a big way. "Companies are condensing 100 physical servers into maybe 10. Companies do not trust Eskom in South Africa to deliver the power, so the less power needed the better."

However, he says, hand-in-hand with virtualisation come the questions of how much companies can really condense, and how many applications can realistically be bundled together. More importantly, he says, is how local businesses retain business and service levels, as customer loyalty is a thing of the past.

He cites number portability as a prime example of this, and says this is even truer when you consider how companies are moving away from their core business, creating unexpected competition in the marketplace.

"Look at the shake-up when Virgin opened its credit card offering. This competition came out of the blue, from a completely unknown competitor, as banks have their historical applications, almost like a dinosaur environment, and suddenly a new kid on the block appears who can start everything from scratch."

He says customers are looking for benefits these days, forcing companies to look at their core business, where their competition is coming from, and how they can improve their end-user experience. "This is the business cycle, improving businesses, knowing what resources are in place, and what systems are needed to better manage them.

"There is a lot of innovation in SA, where people come up with really clever and innovative solutions. What we've done is move away from products towards service; how we monitor that service, and if something goes wrong, being able to establish exactly where the fault is or where our systems are letting us down.

"In this way, BSM can truly assist a business to maximise its customer service."

BSM allows businesses to see where the problems are in the processes, so if anything happens, companies can identify what the impact will be to the service. "This can also be taken one step further, by allowing companies to notify users of a problem before it impacts on them, and perhaps offer them an alternative.

"It's not always about preventing, it's about informing."

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