Business service management

Overview

Business service management (BSM) is a methodology for monitoring and measuring IT services from a business perspective. BSM consists of both structured process and enabling software.

BSM allows IT departments to operate by service rather than by individual configuration items or technology silo, enabling prioritization of efforts, ultimately improving the service that is delivered to the business or organization.

Touching on all the lifecycle processes within the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, BSM is a way to bring together many disparate processes and tools, and creating quantifiable improvement in efficiency and the ability to view technology as it is germane to business process.

BSM vs. traditional network monitoring

Traditional network management systems focus on measuring and monitoring the technical metrics and trends of IT applications and infrastructure. The primary users of these systems are technicians and systems administrators in the IT operations organization. Although these systems enable the IT operations team to identify problem areas from a technical point-of-view for a given piece of the infrastructure, significant gaps exist in determining the business impact of a specific problem. If a router and a server fail at the same time, these systems offer no way for the NOC operator to determine which of these is more critical or which business services have been impacted by the failure of these devices.

Additionally, newer technologies such as service-oriented architectures (SOA), virtualization, cloud computing, portal frameworks, grid architectures, and mashups within an organizations make troubleshooting and monitoring of business services very difficult. A single business process or service may be supported by a number of composite applications, all of which could be dependent on a diverse set of distributed computing and communications elements. An isolated issue anywhere in this complex web may impact one or more tasks in the business process. Traditional network management systems and technology-centric monitoring approaches are incapable of determining the business impact of an issue in such a complicated infrastructure environment.

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a set of IT management frameworks and concepts, has recently identified BSM as a best practice for IT infrastructure management and operations.

See also

• Business process management
• Business transaction management

External References

• BSM Review
• BSM Article in Data Center Journal
• Bitpipe Tech Library
• CIO Update Article