Virtually every customer that I have studied has a critical moment in their BSM evolution where they realize the need for viewing, measuring and reporting business service performance in a business-relevant way. We could discuss the technical complexities of integrating service model discovery, end-user experience, transaction management, performance and event data to develop this business service view, but in this post I’m going to examine the most common key personas, core motivations, and organizational impact.
In the previous post, BSM Evolution Paths: Auto Industry Sample we saw how the core motivation came tops-down from senior IT management. Let’s compare three different models.
Line of Business / Application Driven
Key Personas: Application owner, Business Relationship Manager, Business Unit CIO
Core Motivations: These personas are typically closest to how business utilizes IT to execute a business process or function. They usually report into the business unit itself, rather than into IT Operations. They have responsibility for the application, but the business perceives them as owning the end-to-end service performance, even though they often have little control of the underlying IT infrastructure and service delivery processes.
At some point, a business critical service melts-down, or endures a never-ending spree of performance degradations where Global IT Operations says, “All the systems and network are green”. This is the point where many business unit managers take matters into their own hands and fund a significant investment in End-to-End business service visibility tools.
Software: Since they do not control the infrastructure, the application owners often look for tools that require minimal agentry and do not require a lot of feeds from the individual domain management tools. They gravitate towards sophisticated end-user experience tools, probes, application diagnostics, and the ability to traverse composite application middleware.
Organization: They use these tools to prove accountability to the business units, but they also use the tools -not always politely- to hold infrastructure operations accountable. The animosity usually wanes, and the separate IT groups work out the process integration… but often not the tool integration. This leaves the end-to-end group outside of IT Operations. We also see this model where the infrastructure operations are outsourced, and the service provider is held accountable to specific Service Level Agreements.
Infrastructure Operations Hero
Key Personas: Infrastructure Operations Manager, Data Center Manager, NOC manager
Core Motivations: These personas traditionally have the responsibility for care and feeding of the vast shared-service IT infrastructure environment. They have likely done a reasonable job of consolidated event management, and domain-level configuration, performance and capacity management. But, they have a vision of elevating IT to demonstrate the value delivered to the business, and proactively solve issues before end users report them. This effort can be either in conjunction or parallel to an ITIL-driven service management initiative.
Software: Often very budget constrained, they don’t always have the funding that the application owners do. They look first toward leveraging investment of their existing tool set, gathering agent-based data from their infrastructure and augmenting with lighter-weight end-user experience tools. Converting this data to business-relevant information is difficult, as they often don’t have the deep business process or application knowledge, but it is much better than the previous IT element statistic data.
Organizational: The Hero Operations manager then faces the daunting task of taking the new service oriented visibility and reporting capability to upper management and business unit managers. Sometimes they yawn. Sometimes the strategy is embraced, and the operations manager is elevated to strategic status. The Operations manager keeps both tools and processes very integrated. New end-to-end skill sets are developed, but usually not new organizational groups.
Tops-down Service Management
Key Personas: CIO, CTO, VP IT Operations
Core Motivations: These personas have the luxury of controlling the organization, budget and overall priority of IT, yet their job is likely on the line. Pressure from the business units, a personal drive to elevate IT to a strategic partner and sometimes fear of being outsourced are the powerful drivers.
Business service visibility and accountability is usually part of a larger, multi-project, multi-step roadmap that includes a hefty process component. Since these initiatives tend to be “horizontal” in nature across all IT, many companies fall into the trap of trying to institute end-to-end business service performance tools too broadly. The successful organizations focus on a discrete business service and satisfy key metrics that are specific to the particular business and application.
Software: These personas tend to focus on service level management, and the ability to demonstrate the value IT is delivering to business. Typically requires a substantial investment in tools that can abstract the business services into something meaningful to business, looks hot to business stakeholders, yet also improves service delivery time to diagnose and repair. This ends up requiring a rationalization of the service discovery model, CMDB, and the enterprise operational tools.
Organization: I’ve seen some CIO’s form executive business relationship management functions, keeping the team independent from both business and IT Operations. Other CIO’s formally extend the VP of IT operations charter to include this new end-to-end function that bridges the infrastructure operations teams and the helpdesk/service desk teams.
Conclusion?
Here’s a news flash…there is a wide variety of organizational models. But there are some definite patterns, and in my next post, I will offer some evidence that the model will be more predictable in the future.Bryan Dean, BSM Research
Posted
03-04-2009 12:25 PM
by
adsey007