Adventures in Business Service Management

Episode One: Planning a New BSM Installation
Business Service Management (Illusion or Reality?)

• Never Assume Anything when planning for implementation of BSM software and tools.
• Best Practice includes rigorous process research with a ‘beginners mind’, then clarifying intent, and (quite often) re-stating goals.
• Intrepid BSM implementor/explorers often find themselves in a totally different swamp than they thought. Which might as well be marked “Here Be Dragons”.

A common theme these in IT these days is Service Management. In order to provide business services support, performance management, service optimization, resource planning, event and impact management, scheduling and workload management, best practices and solutions – the diligent consultant adventurer must be willing to dig deeper than the surface Illusions and find the Reality.

It sounds like a simple enough quest: Entry into the time and money-saving world of BSM.

The Challenge: To first create an IT model that represents the actual functions and processes that make up the most important applications in my business.

Event and Impact Management. Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? All you have to do is identify the key processes that support the various functions represented, figure out how they all work together, and then make sure you have all the monitoring in place to drive the model.

Simple? Not at all for most adventurers in BSM. This is a case of: ‘How difficult can entry into BSM be?’ The answer being: far more challenging than most anyone expects. But far more complicated than it needs to be.

Here’s how it goes for many first-time planners and adventurers into BSM

First, be prepared to start up in detective mode for information gathering; and then to uncover the ghastly fact that anyone associated with the development of the industry-specific application/s to be monitored have long since left the company. Also your thorough BSM investigation suggests that parts of the application use third party products that are no longer supported.

Additionally, it will be uncovered that the internal group responsible for service assurance and maintaining the app has only a superficial understanding of the application and is barely able to CYA and fix things when they break. And system monitoring consists of the barest infrastructure possible, none of which would help you identify whether the application is actually running or not.

So what do you do? Throw up your hands in disgust and come to the stark realization that Service Management is the unobtainable brass ring? Or just the buzz word that your software rep throws around to try and get you to spend more money? Not at all! For new users, there is a simple solution to entering into the Business Service Management arena.

Try Adventure Dave’s radical new user enterprise system management tool. A healthy alternative to new user start-up anxiety and endless pre-planning sessions.

Start asking questions.

Question: What are you really trying to do anyway?

Answer: You want to represent service availability from an end-user perspective.

So why not invest in a couple of robot transaction simulators? Place them in strategic locations where the users are concentrated. They can exercise the applications and identify what functions are working correctly, which ones are getting slow response time, and which ones simply aren’t working at all.

As for Service Decomposition (another illusive buzzword): in order to begin implementing BSM – do you really need to know that the order entry function depends on a farm of JVM’s and a database backend?

Not really. From an end user perspective – it either works or it doesn’t. For pre-implementation BSM fact-finding missions, you don’t need to know the intricate internal architecture of each application. You merely need to know the basics from a user perspective: there is (for example) a logon process, an order entry process, and a parts lookup process. Any user of the application can tell you that.

And users can tell you what causes them pain and what you need to monitor. So as a first entry into BSM, try building your service decomposition model from an End-User point of view. Drive the model with events from the robot transaction simulators you installed earlier. And if you are really ambitious and adventurous, you can also utilize your existing infrastructure monitoring to correlate with the transaction monitoring events. Now, maybe those high CPU use events might mean something when you also receive a slow application response time event!

The Big Picture

Crude? Yes. Effective and easy to implement? Yes, as well. To overcome BSM implementation anxiety, sometimes you have start with an approach that is Big Picture in scope – but that quickly discovers unique industry and user needs and directly addresses them.

Once the true needs of any IT structure can be determined (as opposed to the Illusory Needs; Or, what we thought we needed before research, investigating and exploring) – then Service Management implementation becomes more – well – manageable. As well as truly quantitative and going directly to the areas in need of Service Management. Predictive Intelligence in BSM is a Reality.

You could be an IT Hero tomorrow!

This approach will produce highly useable data and provide value immediately. It will demonstrate the amazing monetary savings potential and need for more analytical and specific areas of Business Service Management in your organization. Even for the most non-adventurous.

Dave Karthauser | Senior Consultant| Advantis Management Solutions, Inc|