ITIL Worship

There is a lot of “ITIL® talk” and buzz about Business Service Management (BSM) on conference calls and in boardrooms these days. It’s not like the dot-com bubble. This is real.  But what are the CIO and their teams doing about it? They should be asking “What do we need to do to get the full value from our Business Service Management initiatives? How do we streamline, link and optimize our IT and business functions?”

What’s in it for you? It amounts to huge efficiencies for your operation. Then come bonuses, career advancement, and glowing compliments from your team. (Okay, that was a stretch). Or how about, your competition may be implementing BSM right now? Does that do it for you?

Because having one place to go to get a “single version of truth” about the underlying configuration of your IT environment is rapidly evolving from a “nice to have” to a “must have” for all kinds of reasons.  I mean, imagine what the Internet would be like without having a set of top-level authoritative Name Servers (the Internet’s single version of truth).  Chaos, that’s what.

So, even without ITIL, a new CMDB can offer IT a much greater level of control over what’s happening in their organization. A well-configured CMDB can automatically monitor configuration items (CIs) — their location, status, and relationships to each other — and consolidate diverse data sets, while ensuring compliance. This capability ensures assets are used effectively (not overbuilt). That function alone greatly reduces costs.

Going even further, a BSM-oriented CMDB offers an accurate picture of available assets and their use, and serve as a true synchronization and coordination point for all IT processes. This capability ensures assets are used effectively (not overbuilt).

A recent Forrester Research report (April, 2006), titled ‘Implementing BSM,’ states “As 76 percent of the IT budget goes to operations, firms that implement BSM can potentially save 25 percent of their overall IT budget.” They went on, “Developing true BSM systems requires understanding the metrics business users employ to decide if IT is providing value, and linking these metrics and their associated business services to IT infrastructure components.”

Forrester predicts the number of large companies (with revenues over $1 billion) implementing BSM will triple over the next two years.

It’s connecting the dots

ITIL has a number of goals for configuration management.  Some of the most important ones are: account for all the IT assets and configurations within your organization and its services; provide accurate information on relationships and documentation to support all Business Service Management processes; build a sound basis for Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, and Release Management;  provide verification of the configuration records against the infrastructure, and correct any exceptions swiftly and easily.

If you build it, the benefits will come – right off the bat

CMDBs are available with ITIL-compatible, preconfigured tools that integrate easily with varied supporting applications. This capability greatly lowers the time and cost to deploy services. Next, identify your current IT data collection processes. Create a list of services that your IT group provides to end users. This is critical, because with it you go to key business areas to determine the services that the business department sees IT providing. Once you know what services IT is doing for your business units, you’ll have a good idea of what you are not currently providing and what you’ll need to add to populate your new CMDB. Without a CMDB, organizations run the risk of over-provisioning because they cannot track which assets are used for which purposes, or which are available for much more use. 

Here is a small real-world example: the service desk, help desk, or run-time monitoring tools capture events from a variety of different sources. Those events are filtered, standardized, and prioritized based on severity, scope, or impact on the business using information contained in the CMDB. This automatic action opens a trouble ticket that the support staff can further prioritize, based on the goals and priorities of the ITIL business processes used to filter events. The process is automated and much more repeatable, and eliminates the slow, manual burden typically used with prioritizing and filtering which can also bring in human error.

A good “training manual” is available to get you up to speed -- Innovation: Information Technology and Business – now available in PDF. It includes articles by each member of BMC’s Thought Leadership Council and covers a large selection of IT/business topics.

Let’s talk. Give me your comments.  Is your IT department on the right track with BSM? And let’s get together for some stories at BMCUserWorld in San Francisco, August 28 – September 1.