The Insider's Guide to Next-Generation BPM
By Charles Rattray, Director of Professional Services, Tideway , 10/22/2008
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According to a recent Forrester Research market update, Business Service Management (BSM) initiatives are up by over one-third year-on-year, as more companies develop strategic BSM deployment plans. This upswing in adoption may be attributable to the fact that BSM provides benefits for both business users and IT teams. But what are the critical success (and failure) factors when it comes to BSM -- and how can we leverage these lessons learnt to ensure future success?
A successful BSM blueprint starts by defining the purpose behind the initiative and establishing how to measure success against that objective. Typically, adopters of BSM want to ensure quality of service (driven by IT) and the quality of end-user experience (driven from the business side). Yet the largest hurdle to getting started is not that organizations confuse quality of service and the end-user experience; it's that organizations often focus on the end result rather than the journey to success itself.
While it's important to understand the desired outcome, companies need to start with something achievable. As with most corporate-wide initiatives, it is the success achieved during the BSM journey which dictates the success and acceptance of the end results. That journey need not be a long or complex one, and making BSM a success needn't be confined to a purely BSM-focused IT initiative. While the most successful BSM projects leverage existing people, process, and technology and seek to change the mindset of IT throughout the organization, they do so in a way that is driven by support and sponsorship from the lines of business.
As a first step, it's important for companies to realize that quality of service (QoS) and end-user experience are not one and the same. Quality of service is focused on availability, while end-user experience centers on whether the available service is useable in the context of how the business actually operates. Getting these definitions wrong can lead to the wrong kind of monitoring -- and the wrong kind of monitoring sets up any BSM initiative to fail from the outset.
Monitoring everything is costly, time consuming and doesn't necessarily provide the right information to the business or IT. For example, recognizing that a hard-drive has failed in a disk-subsystem is good to know. But knowing that the disk-drive is part of the subsystem and your data is safe because it is part of a cluster is better; you can then prioritize the repair accordingly and congratulate yourself on knowing those systems are still available. Better still, knowing that the users' website transaction experience has slowed dramatically because the back-end credit card payment service underpinned by the problem hard-drive failed over to a server node with an incorrect software configuration, is really what allows IT to be responsive.
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