Business service management (BSM) is a methodology for monitoring and measuring information technology (IT) services from a business perspective; in other words, BSM is a set of management software tools, processes and methods to manage IT via a business-centered approach. BSM technology tools are designed to help IT organizations view and manage technology environments to better support and maintain the main services they provide to the business. BSM tools are critical enablers for the increasingly popular process that focuses on IT Service Management (ITSM) approach. BSM consists of both structured process and enabling software. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a set of IT management frameworks and concepts, has recently identified BSM as a best practice for IT infrastructure management and operations.
BSM allows IT departments to operate by service rather than by individual configuration items or technology silo, enabling prioritization of efforts, ultimately improving the service that is delivered to the business or organization. Major vendors who offer BSM software and services include Accelops, BMC Software, HP Business Service Management software, Oracle Enterprise Manager software, IBM Tivoli Software, Novell Business Service Management, Zyrion Traverse., CA Technologies Computer Associates, and Compuware.
Touching on all the lifecycle processes within the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, BSM is a way to bring together many disparate processes and tools, and creating quantifiable improvement in efficiency and the ability to view technology as it is germane to business process.
BSM software is an outgrowth of network management systems as the software tracks the performance and availability of the networks components across a data center. Traditional network management systems focus on measuring and monitoring the technical metrics and trends of IT applications and infrastructure. The primary users of these systems are technicians and systems administrators in the IT operations organization. Although these systems enable the IT operations team to identify problem areas from a technical point-of-view for a given piece of the infrastructure, significant gaps exist in determining the business impact of a specific problem. For example, if a router and a server fail at the same time, these systems offer no way for the network operations center operator to determine which of these is more critical or which business services have been impacted by the failure of these devices.
Additionally, newer technologies such as service-oriented architectures (SOA), virtualization, cloud computing, portal frameworks, grid architectures, and mashups within an organizations make troubleshooting and monitoring of business services very difficult. A single business process or service may be supported by a number of composite applications, all of which could be dependent on a diverse set of distributed computing and communications elements. An isolated issue anywhere in this complex web may impact one or more tasks in the business process. Traditional network management systems and technology-centric monitoring approaches are incapable of determining the business impact of an issue in such a complicated infrastructure environment.
Newer BSM systems provide a unified view of the data center, allowing data center administrators to view and manage applications, networks and events, usually from a common dashboard. This means data center managers can see and troubleshoot problems before business customers do.
Although BSM is known as a methodology for information technology management by aligning IT services and the IT infrastructure supporting those services with business processes, it is also a methodology for business management by helping businesses, including their IT departments, view their activities as services that are provided to external and internal customers.
BSM provides a critical framework to make sure that the work of customer-facing and internal teams within an organization is defined and transparent to their customers, who can then influence the functionality and quality of the services they receive. BSM complements business process management (BPM) by helping an organization deliver more effective services across business processes. Together, BSM and BPM form the basis for all-encompassing, full-stack process-optimization platforms. BSM adds a service-centered view across business processes and facilitates economies of scale for services that contribute to multiple processes.
BSM also goes beyond IT service management (ITSM). BSM helps organizations better understand the business services that operate on top of the IT infrastructure, combining IT and non-IT management tools into a cohesive system for service delivery.
BSM is team-focused and can be used by any team in an organisation to improve performance, based on ownership, pride, commitment and teamwork. Through BSM, teams can formalise the services they provide as internal service level agreements (SLAs) or operational level agreements (OLAs). BSM can also help teams review their “People, Process and Technology” capabilities and limitations to see how they can improve them and consequently improve the services they provide.
