IT MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS AND CONSULTING
Executive Summary
So, “What is Business Service Management?” The question has come up with increasing frequency over
the last five-to-six years, with differing answers depending upon who you ask. While Business Service
Management (BSM) has been somewhere in the IT management vernacular for at least five or six years,
its ascendance as a distinct and significant term in its own right has come about much more recently.
By obvious word association, BSM combines “business” and “service” – and so most literally suggests some measure of alignment between business requirements and the Information Technology
Organization. But is BSM the management of business services strictly speaking or the management of IT
services as they enable business priorities? The overall consensus would skew towards the latter meaning, and ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) research data and industry dialog support this. Still, it should be stressed that IT and business services are converging. Moreover, the
notion of business alignment, already perhaps a cliché, can in itself have many meanings and nuances
from financial optimization, to optimizing the direct business impact of service performance, to living
up to SLA commitments; and the truth is, the term BSM contains all three of the above ideas.
One might argue that BSM’s roots go back to Service Level Management (SLM). EMA research data
(BSM and SLM: Concepts in Transition, EMA, September 2005), confirms that for most IT managers
and professionals at that time, SLM and BSM were easily confused terms, and there was no clear
separation of the two. What has happened since is that the term SLM has become more specific in
meaning with its core in the management and optimization of services based on prior Service Level
Agreements (SLAs) and/or other less formal commitments. Whereas BSM has grown in meaning to
suggest a model for managing IT services and IT performance overall – including related processes
– for optimized business impact.
The BSM Model
This report will look at these relationships and EMA research data, as they have contributed to the
EMA BSM Model. The goal is to establish an industry-relevant basis for evaluating core capabilities,
architectural and functional, relevant to actualizing successful BSM implementations. This model can
help IT to evaluate solutions that typically span more than one conventional market, and it will also
be used by EMA in later reports, such as the BSM Radar Reports that will help IT adopters rank and
weigh the best solution set to fit their needs. The two BSM Radar Reports due out in 2010 are BSM:
Service Impact, looking at the service-management center of the BSM constellation, and BSM: Financial
Optimization, which will examine the intersection of business-aligned service management with financial and asset optimization.
ITIL v3 and BSM
In version three of the IT Infrastructure Library, specific attention is given to “Business Service
Management” in “Service Design.” ITIL’s focus is very much around metrics and mindset. As per
ITIL: “Business Service Management (BSM) is a strategy and an approach to enable IT components
to be linked to the goals of the business. This way the impact of technology on the business and how
business change may impact technology can both be predicted.” To do this ITIL stresses the value
of a “totally integrated service catalogue – including business units, processes and services, and their
relationships, and dependencies on IT services, technology and components…”
Business Service Management: A Model for Business-Aligned Service Management in the 21st Century
©2009 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDUSTRY ANALYSIS AND CONSULTING
For ITIL, BSM enables an organization to:
• Align IT service provisioning with business goals and objectives
• Prioritize all IT activities on business impact and urgency, ensuring critical business processes and
services receive the most attention
• Increase business productivity and profitability through the increased efficiency and effectiveness
of IT
• Support the requirements for corporate governance…
• Create competitive advantage…
• Improve service quality, customer satisfaction and end usr perception
• Ensure regulatory and legislative compliance
• Ensure appropriate levels of protection for all IT and information assets
• Ensure that IT services are aligned and continue to be aligned with changing business needs…
This is an excellent departure point for looking at BSM in market context, but, as is classic with ITIL,
it is of course a “departure point.” ITIL is fundamentally not about architecture, software or markets
– but about process and cultural readiness. To even have a detailed discussion about software re BSM
would be un-ITIL-like. But the fact is that many vendors and IT adopters have made linkages that predate ITIL v3 and will continue to do so. Moreover, ITIL’s roots are still weak in the area of operations,
and in particular in areas of automation. For example, real-world business and IT interdependencies
are becoming so complex and dynamic that adjustments to support all of the above bullets could be
viewed in terms of real-time automated actions just as they could be viewed in terms of carefully
planned strategies, effective ongoing dialogs, documented metrics, and cultural change.
However, ITIL’s “Service Design” focus does expose one area of critical interest to EMA that is
relevant to BSM. Within BSM overall, and in particular within that sub-market, the question of value
needs to be addressed, and this is indeed a discussion requiring some radical changes in the way
traditional IT and business executives think. As IT services increasingly become business shaping,
business redefining, and even business creating, casual assumptions about assigning value simply based
on presumed need are no longer acceptable. But how to even begin to have a conversation about value
has less to do with traditional metrics for quality and cost, or traditional service usage monitoring, but
with active qualitative and quantitative contributions in terms of business transformation. It is a far
more creative and visionary discussion than most in IT or the business world are prepared to have, and
one for which, even given the attention given to “Service Design” in ITIL v3, the vocabulary is still
not yet largely in place. As it evolves, it will most likely take on a heavily verticalized flavor – as entire
industry sectors leverage IT services to redefine themselves for competitive advantage.
Business Service Management: A Model for Business-Aligned Service Management in the 21st Century
©2009 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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