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A combination of best IT processes and effective technology management.
Pankaj Dhume,
President & CEO,
BMC Software India
In the frontier days of technology, businesses purchased new technologies at the same rate as IT companies were producing them. IT organizations ran their systems without understanding how the disparate pieces worked together to deliver a business service. The standard IT department was separated into silos according to specialization — a network group, DB group, desktop applications group, and a separate mainframe. And each made decisions only considering what was best for their specific silo. The end goal was that each group ensured that its part ran efficiently, and could report on any technical metric imaginable, regardless of whether or not that metric was pertinent to the business. It was a time when managing IT from a business perspective, which is known as Business Service Management (BSM), was unheard of.
BSM is a combination of best-practice IT processes, automated technology management, and a shared view of how IT resources directly support the business. It is the most effective way to ensure IT is pulling its weight when it comes to keeping customers happy. For example, when you purchase an airline ticket online, do you care about how many components are involved in the transaction? Do you care if the front-end switch is working, or what database management system is used on the back end? No, you just want to purchase your seat on the plane without an “error” message, but to make this happen, IT needs to be connected with the business.
Historically, IT was disconnected from the businesses it was employed to support. IT staff did not understand the business priorities behind the systems they had to maintain, and likewise, the “business” thought IT existed purely to fix their PC. There was no common understanding and as a result, IT resources were often allocated to unproductive tasks. When things went wrong with an IT system, there was no way to know who was affected — or if it really affected the performance of systems critical to the business.
BSM has evolved to address this issue. The basis for BSM is that all IT activities — incident management, problem management, capacity planning, monitoring, change, and so on — are done from a business perspective.
From IT Service Management to change and configuration management to incident and problem management, with BSM, all of these processes are interwoven to ensure that IT is supporting the business as effectively as possible.
As another example, most errors in IT are caused by humans and unplanned change. If IT was planning to do maintenance on the server that supports payroll, in the past, they may not have given it a second thought. But with IT supporting the business and planning with the business, IT would know that maintenance to that server should be put off until the next week, after monthly pay checks have been distributed.
Understanding all sides of the business makes it makes it easier not just to avoid an onslaught of angry, unpaid employees, but also to meet regulatory requirements, reduce conflicts over how a process is done, accelerate training, and easily re-allocate staff to move from one department to another without extensive cross training. The business expects rapid results from IT, and BSM has a proven track record in delivering these results.
Effectively managing IT from a business perspective means that IT groups must understand how all systems work collectively to deliver services to end users and how much these services are worth to the business. The entire IT staff must have a clear understanding of priorities relative to this information.
To do this, it requires IT and business management person to engage in ongoing two-way conversation about the importance of direct involvement from IT in strategic planning for the business. Building an architecture accessible by others helps you move toward a BSM approach. The ability for users to implement a self-service request mechanism for IT services, for instance, saves IT time and effort. Self service is a key part of a successful BSM integration and something consumers are demanding.
It’s also important to use service automation to streamline processes, and techniques — like intelligent thresholding, event filtering and impact analysis — to ensure that IT is working on productive and appropriate tasks.
Your architecture should contain information about each system and how all systems work together. It’s like designing a house. You ensure that the foundations and basic services (gas, water, electricity, and so forth) are in place before you start building the structure. Unless the foundation is in place, you may have to go back halfway through the project and rip down the walls to put in something you forgot at the beginning.
Today, successful IT organizations are aligned with the business and measuring their success as it relates to the business strategy and goals. They are using their knowledge of the business to understand which systems are critical to business operations, keeping those critical systems up and running, and ensuring that all systems meet end-user and customer expectations for performance.
BSM is proven to be central in the effective management IT. Integrating IT with the business, ensures that every IT manoeuvre is done so with the result being focused on the business. IT has gone from the backroom to the boardroom. This impact approach goes straight to the bottom line by increasing business efficiency and competitiveness and keeping IT costs under control.
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