The APM Blog
EMA has been both predicting and advocating a more service-centric model for asset optimization and planning for nearly a decade. This is also, in itself, not a new idea with EMA either. The telecommunications industry and best practices such as the Telecommunication Management Forum’s eTOM guidelines support the logically obvious assumption that if a technology organization’s “products” are its “services,” then all assets (capex and opex) should ideally be planned and optimized to support the delivery of superior services.
Many people think BSM is a set of tools/applications provided by a number of software tools vendors. In many cases, people can be forgiven for taking this view because the tools vendors sometimes do make it sound like you will get great business benefits purely by buying their tools. If you look at the available definitions of BSM, you might also find this view further reinforced – which I think is misleading and a real shame as the tools are only a part of the solution.
In the research I mentioned in my earlier blog on “Operationalizing Cloud,” we looked at a lot more than technology adoption. We looked at organizational and process requirements as well.
And we also looked at change.
As it turned out, 70% percent of our respondents said the once begun, their cloud initiatives needed rethinking or redirection!!
To be honest, I wasn’t surprised.
EMA has just collected some new data regarding how IT organizations are seeking to assimilate cloud services from a top-down, service management perspective. The data gathered in December of 2010, spanned 155 global respondents with high percentages of executives (better than 50% director and above) – as the goal was to understand how senior management and cross-domain organizations that usually have senior executive leadership are leveraging cloud computing.
Call it the “tail wagging the dog” but as I already indicated in my previous blog, cloud computing seems to be surprisingly good for service management -- both in terms of technology adoption and in terms of political and process-related transformation. This includes technologies like CMDB/CMS, IT Process Automation, User Experience Management and SLM, as well as integrated service desk and chargeback accounting – among other “bellwether technologies” – or technologies that reflect more advanced organizational and process readiness.
Cloud is no longer just hype. It is real, and a main focus of many IT organizations for next year.
With 1500 CIOs in attendance, the Gartner Symposium was a major indicator about the adoption of cloud. One industry insider attending the conference told me, "Every company I've talked with is looking to at least put their non-essential apps with cloud providers asap. As time goes on they'll consider their more critical apps if possible."
Sometimes… OK most of the time … the terms and words we use for “things” in service management are in themselves landmines.
One of the worst culprits is of course the term “CMDB” which I like to compare to "The Holy Roman Empire" – which as H.G. Wells pointed out was neither "holy" nor "Roman" nor an "Empire". Well, the CMDB is not about anyone but ITIL’s definition of "configuration management" and in the end, it isn’t, or shouldn’t be, understood as a physical database, either.
I thought it might be nice to set the stage for what I mean by “MegaTrend” and more importantly, what this blog might be about ...
Just for starters let’s look at the three most immediately affiliated terms or acronyms: Business Service Management (BSM), automation and CMDB/CMS.
BSM is all about managing services. Services are made up of hardware and software. Let’s trace the service backward from the human.
Kathy is the human, she interacts with her computer and the software she is using. For this example, let us use a browser based application. Browser talks to the application server over a network and that server typically talks to a backend, like a database, over a network.
I was reading BSM versus Cloud – which is the larger idea?, a post by Dennis Drogseth, and it caused me to think of the relationship between the what’s behind BSM and how it relates to what SaaS offers. I know Dennis from my Network Management Center and Business Availability Center days as product manager and a product marketer – he’s a sharp guy.
This may sound like a biased opinion given that my area of focus is Business Service Management in multiple contexts, but I find all the attention to "cloud" as an ENDGAME in itself a little bit ridiculous.
BSMdigest is taking another key step in support of the BSM industry by launching The BSM Blog.
Our goal is to provide an objective and insightful industry blog where multiple experts in BSM can voice their opinions, discuss the latest happenings, offer strategic guidance, and even debate the issues. Topics will include a wide range of Business Service Management issues, with a focus on private and public cloud, virtualization, end-user monitoring, performance and capacity management - all the issues that impact your BSM initiatives. We aim to provide you with the definitive blog on BSM.
Julie Craig, Research Director at EMA, outlines the 5 factors of cloud that impact decision making on management tools ...
