Business Service Management

IT priorities must be clearly aligned with other driver s of business value. In order for IT to organize its activities around business objective s, the organization must link to business processes and services – not just observe them. IT leadership must engage in a meaningful dialogue with line-of-business owners and communicate in terms of desired outcomes.

The transition from managing infrastructures to managing services is marked by a fundamental difference (Figure 5.15). While managing infrastructure requires a focus on component operational availability, managing services is centred on customer and business needs. Operational information about the infrastructure’s health is a critical foundation but is not enough. IT organizations intuitively recognize the need to link their activities with business objectives but frequently struggle in deciding how far to go in exposing the linkages between business activities and IT execution.

Figure 5.15 The IT management continuum

Organization s are increasingly less focused on IT infrastructure and application s than on coupling applications internally and with business partners in the quest to automate end-to-end business process es and deliver business service s. The challenge is to derive operational objective s from business services and to manage accordingly. Business perspective s, however, often do not easily relate to IT infrastructure.

A strategy aimed at this challenge is Business Service Management (BSM). BSM differs from previous strategic methods by offering a holistic top-down approach aimed at aligning the IT infrastructure with the business.

Business Service Management is the ongoing practice of governing, monitoring and reporting on IT and the business service it impacts.

BSM provides the means by which the service provider manages business services. When the provider focuses its operations on business services it is better able to align investments in infrastructure and operational activities with business objective s. BSM sets forth a model for developing business-focused metric s, enabling adaptation to future needs as driven by the business requirement s.

The cornerstone to BSM is the ability to link service asset s to their higher-level business services. The links are based on causality instead of correlation. The view of IT infrastructure shifts from a topological map to a dependency model (Figure 5.16). This model identifies the asset-to-service linkages, allowing infrastructure event s to be tied to corresponding business outcomes.

Figure 5.16 The embedded nature of services

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14