How can I leverage Business Service Management to maximize return on my ITSM investments?

Business Service Management is about managing business services such that IT performance can be measured not in IT terms but in terms of business value delivered. Business Services enable the core Business Process and, in most cases, are really what business customers can relate to. It will be critical to any organization embarking on ITSM journey to get a good understanding of this idea and design and execute the respective programs accordingly.

At a very high-level, implementing end-to-end Business Service Management will involve the following key activities:

·      Identifying and defining the Business Service in the Service Catalog

·      Defining the Service Level Requirements for the Business Service

·      Defining and agreeing on Service Level Agreement necessary to ensure that needs identified in Service Level Requirements are met.

·      All Technical Services that support the Business Services are identified and defined in the Service Catalog

·      All necessary Operational Level Agreements are identified, defined, and agreed upon for these Technical Services

·      End-to-end Request Fulfillment processes are defined and implemented for all appropriate requests that can be place on these services

·      Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is optimized to represent the relationships between all the Configuration Items that ensure successful delivery of the Business Service

·      All other ITILv3 processes are implemented to ensure that this Business Service is managed end-to-end.

Achieving Business Service Management will require IT organizations to bring alignment across different IT teams (infrastructure, application development, operations, and so on) and components in an effort to achieve the highly envisioned business-IT integration. The separation between application and infrastructure results in a disconnect between business needs and end-to-end management of those needs from the fulfillment perspectives – applications teams architect, design and develop applications to satisfy functional needs (termed as utility in ITILv3) and, in most cases, when these applications get deployed, there are mismatches in network and server capacity resulting in unforeseen outages (due to lack of, what ITILv3 terms as warranty). These outages cause disruptions not only for business customers but also for IT teams. Such events result in increasing costs of delivering IT services, reducing productivity, and greater customer dissatisfaction. Business service management aims to implement end-to-end management for IT services provided by the IT organization with the goal to address the challenges mentioned above.

Therefore, if managed appropriately, Business Service Management can bring pragmatism to the overall approach that you may want to take in order to implement service management. The approach will help realize returns that can be directly related to business value thereby ensuring continual sponsorship and support for such initiatives. 

What do we mean by enabling business processes?

In almost all cases, business expectations from IT can be categorized as follows:

·      Core Business Services: These are those services that most businesses use in order to keep running their operational businesses. These include services like Email, Telecommunication, Back-up and Recovery, Voice and / or Video Conferencing, and so on. These may not directly enable any specific core business processes but are definitely essential to keeping the businesses going. Almost all IT organizations are expected to provide these and probably other core IT services.

·      Business-specific Business Services: The second set of services are those that directly impact the ways business executes its core business processes and develop and / or deliver its products and / or services to its end customers. Discovering and aligning business services requires a clear identification and mapping of business processes. Higher maturity IT organizations are now aiming to build better appreciations of what their customers’ businesses really do. This business knowledge enables IT organizations to achieve the following:

o   Achieve comprehensive understanding of those business processes that truly enable business enterprises to generate revenue and be profitable. Without these business processes, these business enterprises would go out of businesses. For example, in retail banking today, online banking is a must, in manufacturing industry, supply chain management is at the core, and so on.

o   Identify areas for business process improvement to ensure that IT is enabling efficient business processes and not the broken ones. Enabling inefficient business processes is going to result in wasted investments. This is a sensitive area and needs to be carefully managed. Normally, business processes should be owned and, therefore, improved by the business units and not IT. However, if IT discovers that a certain business process is in-efficient or broken, it is critical to communicate this to the customers / businesses and share the resulting impact so that appropriate improvements can be made prior to automation.

o   If IT organization is able to clearly understand business processes, it will be in a position to propose to the businesses / customers innovative ways in which IT can enable these business processes. Accordingly, business services are designed and developed that enable achievement of business objectives.

Business Service Management ensures the enablement of business processes by effectively managing all enabling IT components end-to-end and measuring performance of these components in relation to business performance.