Welcome to the BSM BLOG.

I was on the phone last night talking to a two Gartner consultants about a couple of announcements we'll be making soon. Every time I mentioned a new feature, they said, "how does this improve IT operations' efficiency?" And of course they were right to ask - in these hard times, everyone's boss is asking the same thing.

So .. how can BSM help improve IT operations' efficiency?

BSM is all about managing the health of services in a way such that IT's priorities are aligned with the business's priorities - it might almost be better if we called it "Business Service Health Management".

The best thing we can do is ensure that all the key business services are always healthy - ensure that they never have a problem. This may seem like a statement of the obvious, but I think it's an important goal for us BSM vendors to bear in mind. If we can do anything to help pro actively avoid service health problems ever occurring, then that's best. We've started down this path with the proactive anomaly detection technology we introduced in our Problem Isolation product - but we want to take it further in the future.

However - let's imagine we didn't prevent the problem with the health of a service, how can BSM help improve efficiency now? There are a number of problems with solving health problems:

• Allocation churn: we find out the on line check-in business service for which we are responsible is not performing well. Where does the problem lie? Such a complex business service can rest on 20 or 30 IT artifacts. Which one is the cause? Which team shall we give the problem to? Tell you what - "it looks like a network problem" (i.e. "I've not really got any idea, but my intuition tells me it's the network guys"), let's give it to them. We all know that such complex performance problems "bounce around support" because we don't have the tools to let us analyze exactly where the problem really is. In fact, Forrester estimates that 80% of the solution time for a performance problem is spent figuring out where the problem lies, and only 20% is spent fixing the problem once we know where it lies. So - if BSM can give us the tools to figure out where the problem lies, this will help "cut the 80%".
  
  
• "Domain expert inefficiency": In IT support, we typically have our first line support, and behind them, second and third level support. We often refer to the 2nd and 3nd level support groups as "domain experts". And when domain experts are not fixing support problems, they can be "moving the business forward" - merging duplicate IT systems resulting from an acquisition, moving more infrastructure to virtualized systems, etc. In fact, IDC estimates that 73% of IT budgets are spent "keeping the lights on". If we could be more efficient in our use of domain experts, we could shift some of this 73% towards things that give us consolidated billing systems, consolidated ordering systems, consolidated HR systems, etc. So, how do we make our domain experts more efficient?
  
  Let's imagine all events, from everything from business transactions, thru user experience problems, applications, middleware down to infrastructure and networks all come to one place. And let's imagine that the first level support is actually empowered to understand each one of these event types - they have tools that clean out irrelevant events, understand the business priority of each event, execute automated run-books to fix simple problems, and figure out who to give complex problems to without causing churn. We could then use our domain experts more effectively.  The experts wouldn't get events that hadn't been pre-processed by 1st level support. They would get incidents that were caused by their domain - no allocation churn. And all "trivial stuff" would have been filtered out allowing them to focus on just those incidents which 1st line really couldn't fix.

For the BSM BLOG team - Mike Shaw.