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Overview as an IT Management Method
Business service management (BSM) is a methodology for monitoring and measuring IT services from a business perspective. BSM consists of both structured process and enabling software.
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.
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.
Compared to traditional network monitoring
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. If a router and a server fail at the same time, these systems offer no way for the NOC 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.
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.
Overview as a Business Management Method
Whilst BSM has been established as an IT Management Methodology to align IT Services and the IT Infrastructure supporting those services to Business Processes, it is also a Business Management Methodology to help Businesses think of everything they do as Services that are provided to External and Internal Customers.
The purpose of Business Service Management; Business Management Methodology (BSM - BMM) is to help organisations and their Teams understand what they do is to provide Services, many internally to other Teams, with the end result of some Teams providing services to the external customers of the organisation and so achieve the organisation's customer service mission.
Once all Teams in an organisation start to think about what they do as services, then they can start to improve what they do by talking to the internal customers of their services the other Teams in the organisation regarding their service needs.
The vast majority of an Organistion's Teams are internal working Teams providing Internal Services. These Teams do not directly serve or get involved in serving the organisation's External Customers.
BSM provides the critical framework for organisations to make sure that the work of customer facing and internal working Teams is defined and so transparent to the customers who can then influence to functionality and quality of the services they receive.
BSM supports Business Process Management by helping all the Teams involved in performing a Business Process to think of their part of the process as Team Service Activities. The Team's Service Activities need to be defined with the quality criteria including those quality dimensions that are important to the end customer or the process and the Process Owner.
BSM goes beyond BPM by helping Teams look at all their other Team Service Activities and making sure that the customer Teams of those Service Activities are able to influence the functionality and quality of their Teams Service Activities.
BSM is Team focused and can be used by any Team in an Organisation to improve their performance. It is the foundation of IT Service Management (ITSM) where IT functions adopting ITSM have become Service Centric getting IT Teams to think of what they do as Services, be they automated Services provided by the technology, or manual operational and support services provided by the IT people.
The BSM methodology enables Teams to look at each other to get the Services they need from each other and to formalise those services as internal SLAs or OLAs. It helps Teams look at their 'People, Procss and Technology' capabilities and limitations to see how they can improve them and consequently improve the Services they provide.
See also
External References
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