I usually do not like making public predictions because I hate being wrong. But I was discussing my last blog post (Business Service Visibility & Accountability: Where is it Homed?) with a colleague and he pressed me for my prediction of where I thought this function will eventually live in the organization. Maybe more of you have the same question, so in this post I will lay out what I believe is the compelling evidence… and I might even make a prediction.

Let’s take a quick look some of the key evidence or clues:

CIO role continues to shift

This has been researched to death, but is still true. CIO’s are spending more time on business innovation and less time on production IT operations. The range of issues that CIO’s drive and influence is staggering. Does this mean they don’t care about production operations and business service accountability? No, they care greatly; it is just that most CIO’s have learned that having a top-notch, empowered VP of IT Operations is the only way to be a proactive CIO.

Application owners want to focus on development

My previous post looked historically at application owners and line of business CIO’s buying their own business service visibility and accountability tools because the pressure they felt from the business. This did happened and continues to happen in many organizations, but research shows that after a couple years of owning, architecting and maintaining these tools the application owners realize that production management tools takes valuable time away from their primary goals.

They are primarily goaled to get new functionality out the door that meets business requirements for function, quality, performance and security. It is still vitally important to the Application Owners to maintain visibility and accountability once their applications are in production. They will continue to be a catalyst in purchasing performance tools, and providing the intellectual property for rules, thresholds and reporting metrics. But ownership of the tools, configuration, vendor management and ongoing maintenance of the tools is clearly shifting to the production operations teams.

Line of Business CIO’s don’t own enough

Line of business CIO’s love to have business visibility and accountability tools in their hot hands, but they also recognize the issues of owning tools without owning the IT infrastructure. Security access and rights is a constant issue for them. Management process and tool architecture is also becoming a more standardized, centralized function that the line of business IT participates strongly in, but really is not in a position to own.

Successful customers adding problem resolution

Something I have observed in customers, who have successfully implemented a business service visibility and accountability solution, is that the next step in their evolution is to tie issue visibility to issue diagnostics and resolution. They find it is wonderful that they now have a business relevant way to measure IT service performance, but their constituents quickly move to, “Ok, now fix it when it breaks”.

Nobody in IT will be shocked to hear business takes a, “what have you done for me lately”, stance. So, the tool owners now find themselves sorting through how to integrate into the established event, incident and problem management processes. Depending on where they sit organizationally, this can be a painful yet necessary adjustment when trying to improve efficiency and time to diagnose/repair.

VP of IT Operations taking on end-to-end responsibilities

Seven years ago we conducted an extensive ITSM customer research project. At that time, there were a large number of CIO’s and industry pundits who had taken on the mantra, “Run IT like a business”. IT consolidation, adoption of ITIL process standards, organization alignment and tool deployment were all solid benefits from this era (and continue as we speak), but did not solve the issue of managing end-to-end business services.

At the time, too many IT Operations managers became “infrastructure service providers”, and when polled did not feel responsibility for the application, the end user experience, or the final business service. The CIO, and many of the application owners ended up shouldering the business service responsibility. Today, this is radically changing and ITIL V3 clearly reflects this evolution.

Application development teams continue to be organizationally aligned to the line of business more often than not, but research is showing a dramatic shift in mindset as to whom is responsible for the end-to-end application performance. The majority of IT Operations organizations today own Level 1 application monitoring and often own level 2 application support. level 3 application support typically remains aligned with the development teams, but there is no doubt that the VP of IT operations is taking on end-to-end responsibility.

Tools vendors are getting their act together

Alas, I must at least touch on technology… but only briefly! The major tools vendors have done a commendable job putting together portfolios of solutions that span the BSM/ITSM lifecycle. Plenty of improvement can still be made on integration, interoperability and ease of use; but I think it is fair to say IT finally has access to a management technology architecture that can be leveraged and multi-purposed to serve a wide range of persona needs and management disciplines.

The Prediction

You have probably guessed my prediction by now based on my biased presentation of the six clues above. I believe the ownership of the business service visibility and accountability solution will be homed under the VP of IT Operations, and purpose-specific instances will be customized for the application owners, business relationship managers, line of business CIO’s and executive IT management.

The VP of IT Operations – empowered by the CIO - will continue to drive compliance to a single, standardized IT process and software management architecture (not “single vendor”, but “limited vendors”). This will irritate many ‘best-of-breed’ fans, but in the end it will pay off.

The business service visibility and accountability function will be a module of a more comprehensive fault, performance and availability solution set that effectively ties together discovery, visibility, accountability, issue detection, isolation, diagnosis, business impact analysis and direct connection to the enterprise service model.

Implementing this cross-IT management solution will not be easy. Organizationally, the VP of IT Operations will have to empower an independent executive-level manager to drive, similar to an ERP Application owner. This will fail if owned by an “ivory tower” type, but must be practically driven by trading off the lobbying of existing IT domain and function specialists with the need to consolidate, standardize and implement a modular, multi-purposed solution.

Ok, maybe I got a little carried away at the end there, but one cannot ignore the demonstrable evidence of business, organization and persona driver dynamics. I would be surprised if we do not see a pragmatic, yet steady evolution toward this ultimate model.