Business Service Management – The Next Step

In our journey to improve Service Delivery, when do we focus our energy to a Business Service Management (BSM) role within our organization? For some companies there may already be a role, while others perform these activities in a less formalized way or don’t perform them at all.

To get to this point we need to ensure that IT is a business partner and are aligned with the business in a way that allows for a collaborative partnership. Remember that IT is providing services, so in that spirit we should have a good understanding of what the business does and why particular functions within the services are important. There may also be agreements already made with the business with respect to operational or service requirements. If there are not, some will need to be drafted in order to identify a matrix of what services are supported, and when so we are on the same page for levels of support

Once IT is able to identify areas that are critical to the business from a service perspective we should be in a position to be able to make corrections before the business even notifies us that an issue exists, minimizing any potential impact. This can be accomplished through mapping of the service to show its components and relationships. A fundamental understanding of what makes the service “tick” enables us to best ensure a stable environment. Some of this mapping functionality can be handled through certain Service Management tools, while other functions such as monitoring of infrastructure may be handled through other tools altogether.

One of the benefits of having the service mapped to its components allows still other ITSM functions to ensure that they do not inadvertently impact service. A fairly accepted statistic is that a large majority of issues experienced by users is the result of a failed change. If the Change Management team would be able to graphically see all the pieces that might impact service “X” which positions them to make better decisions to perform changes in a way which until now may have had some adverse impact on the service.

In order to keep on target there needs to be repeatable processes in place. Since there are likely going to be many participants we need to ensure that the process is repeatable by all parties. Having this process in place and adhered to allows for a more consistent customer experience. Once the process has been optimized we can look to automate these to be more cost effective and streamline activities for both IT and Business stakeholders.

This is not where BSM ends however; the key to this is that the IT and Business engagement continues so that the silos between them are non-existent