Dr. Jerry N. Luftman: Common-sense Advice about Deploying BSM and Understanding Its Relationship to ITIL
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This is from the Jan. 15th update at Enterprise Leadership.
Dr. Jerry N. Luftman
Executive Director of Graduate IS Programs
Stevens Institute of Technology
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When Dr. Jerry N. Luftman established the information systems (IS) graduate program at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, he didn't envision that it would someday become one of the world's largest, with more than 1,000 students. Most of the graduate students have at least 10 years of professional experience. The effective alignment of IT (or IS) with the needs of a business has become a critical part of the curriculum and a major research area for Dr. Luftman. Students put themselves in the tactical role of a CIO, and then in the strategic role where a CIO builds business strategy driven by IT.
During the past 20 years, many processes have evolved to improve the over-arching relationship between IT and business. Business service management, or BSM, has emerged as an important concept for improving availability and performance. It's also a complement to the IT Infrastructure Library, or ITIL. BSM tries to ensure that IT processes are in harmony with business processes so IT can improve a business's services. Specifically, BSM looks at what effect each of the different services and technologies supported by IT can have on a business.
Dr. Luftman says that BSM has become necessary because today's systems are tightly integrated. He says, "You have a myriad of different hardware and different software technologies, such as Web servers, databases, file servers, middleware, and virtual servers. If there's a problem with any of these things, how can you stay out in front to be more proactive, to be responsive to your business, and to be able to minimize the impact it might have on the business? That's where BSM comes in."
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