It came when I was reading an Art Wittman’s “buzz” on the wire. He wrote” .. IT pros don't think they have the guidance or support from business leaders to effectively do their jobs. And yet despite not having that guidance, on we plod, making a valiant attempt to run systems we hope serve the needs of businesses” . [Ed. You’ll find his article here ]
Wooosh, I felt like Scottie had beamed me back 5 years. But you know I didn’t have a feeling 5 years ago that we were boldly going where no man had been before. Seemed a lot like common sense, yet Wittman is clearly indicating that in IT many still have not reached that final frontier.
Sure, the road to BSM is probably longer than we initially thought, and now many BSM unknowns are discovered. Sure many are turning back to the requirement to get the basic foundation of BSM right. But Wittman’s indication (which he is poised to talk more about at a Microsoft Tech Ed in May), echoes earlier rendering of the BSM value proposition, you know the bit that says “run systems we hope serve the needs of businesses”.
So as the déjà vu faded, I asked myself, has so little happened then since we started our starry trekking on the BSM back in 2004?
To take an example, one trek I remember was actually with a partner back in 2005. He used a HP BSM solution based on a combination of OVO and BPI to manage his sales pipeline. Yep, it started on the back of a beer mat (not sure if I can remember much – ahem), of the sales VP indicating that he had too many lost projects, stale projects or whatever, and he’d really love to have an end to end view of them, and in particular be able to focus in on why certain projects where stuck for weeks. Even better see how much each was worth and focus resources on them. In a jiff we had beamed a BSM solution, which had the VP goggle eyed as if we were talking Klingon to him.
Another starry trek started when an architect at a semi-conductor manufacturing company told us of the shop floor production staff’s woes with a quick view of the status at each stage, and in particular, zoom key information to the operators eyes in a whisk. Previously this was something that otherwise could only be easily gathered by interrogating numerous logfiles and surmising the problem. Given the $thousands implied in the case of stoppages or critical errors, every second lost is expensive. The final BSM solution not only brought information on the production steps at the hover of a mouse, but also surveyed the setup of the next production shift .
Similar treks followed including solutions for stock and shares tradings, payments, customer service management. Those treks took us to each industry “planet”.
But the best of our treks concerned a Telco. In this case, we worked with an IT Service Manager. He built views using OVSN, and modeled an activation process that allowed his IT service staff to determine why some brokers sometimes had very long activations of customer cellphones. I mean, if it took an hour to activate a cellphone at the shop, would you stay or walk out and buy from somewhere else?
The BSM solution he built, not only alerts when the contract activation is too long, but also allowed the business steam to optimize the resources required to handle abnormally high numbers of exceptions. This service manager was a BSM evangelist, a true “BSM star trekker”. He travelled though the BU units in his country and brown bagged them with his story. Months later a BU business team remembered his presentation and came running to his team for help with a totally different BU solution they’d deployed which had issues. That’s what makes this one, the best of in my view, and brings me back to Wittman’s buzz. These stories are describing a similar theme, visibility is power.
A well built BSM solution provides broad and deep visibility that empowers IT to communicate with the business. As I carry on trekking, I hear about customers who don’t have such visibility all the time. Wittman is right, IT shouldn’t lament, if they were to implement BSM solutions like this IT service manager, they’d stand a good a chance of becoming a star in the businesses eyes.
Wittman says “If you're not getting enough input from business leaders, it could be because you've convinced them that it's not a priority”. I think he’s spot on.
If IT can’t and/or doesn’t communicate in terms the business can understand, showing IT value that helps the business to understand what can be done, how would the business ever know if IT truly is serving the business and how? Why, and why, would they prioritise IT?In fact our star treks are full of an essential ultimate BSM best practice, that of providing the visibility into IT’s value to positively impact the business outcome. It sounds like a marketing phrase, I know, but that’s what the service manager, the partner sales VP and the production staff in these few examples would agree with. The BSM solutions they built using HP Software, gave them all the visibility to make the right decision faster, with the right priority and demonstrate IT’s value to boot.Wittman’s article also says “we asked a more general IT audience what's expected of them. The vast majority--89%--said job one is keeping the network and servers running. Increasing revenue and finding new business opportunities were dead last on that list, 37% and 32%, respectively.There's nothing mystical about the solution to this dilemma. IT leaders hungry to be involved in the success of the business have to believe in the role they can play and demonstrate the contributions they can make.”
You know in those déjà-vu flashbacks, our HP BSM value proposition was pinned to end user/service monitoring (with HP OpenView Internet Services today delivered through BAC-End User Monitoring), business process to IT service mapping (with Business Process Insight and Service Navigator, today delivered with BAC-BPI and uCMDB), business and IT KPI measurement (delivered today with the SLM and myBSM dashboards). The integrations between our key software components have a brought our technologies a long way from the déjà vu-ed days I was beamed back to through his article.
Isn’t it interesting that today’s HP BSM solution actually delivers both the things he says IT thinks it is expected to do, as well as the solution Wittman outlines. Back to the future!