From the perspective of practical enterprise IT operations, BSM (Business Service Management) is one of the best practices for driving IT-business alignment and achieving and improving corporate IT management and governance.
Traditional IT tools and processes focus on technology rather than business objectives. BSM enables IT to easily meet business needs, transforming the enterprise environment so that business and IT leaders can share a common language, face challenges through a unified interface, and understand the impact of new changes.
BSM allows users to monitor the long-term health of business services, understand the correlation between IT changes and the business, ensure secure access to critical business services, maximize business value by taking the right approach at the right time, effectively manage changes based on business priorities, and deliver promised service levels. BSM can manage any impact IT has on the business and map IT resources to key business objectives. In other words, BSM emphasizes applying a business perspective to operate and maintain enterprise IT systems, thereby maximizing IT’s role as a driver for the business.
How can BSM drive the fusion of IT and business to achieve true IT operations management?
IT is a strategic asset for delivering business value. The relationship between business operations and IT systems is increasingly tight. Business demands that IT support continuous innovation and growth, constantly optimize business processes, and reduce operational risks. At the same time, the quality of IT facilities and services influences the direction and deployment of business strategy.
To achieve organic IT-business fusion through BSM, theoretically, efforts should be made in the following areas:
1. Establish a Management Philosophy Centered on Business Value and Business-Driven Management
The first step toward being business-oriented is to establish a “business-driven” IT governance and management mindset at the organizational level. This business management philosophy treats the capability to support business and the effectiveness of management as the primary metrics for evaluating IT system utility and IT department performance. Only in this way can an enterprise-wide awareness and culture of “technology serves business development” be established, serving as the fundamental driving force for truly achieving IT-business fusion.
2. Establish a Key Business Service Architecture So That Business and IT Departments Can Have a Unified Management Language and Perspective
Based on corporate strategy and current business operations, identify enterprise business services, especially critical business applications. Business Service Management serves these core business systems by building a business service model that clearly describes the relationships between business and IT and the key objectives of IT services. Establishing a business architecture effectively helps IT managers consider business units and groups holistically, and helps define how to monitor and manage business services.
3. Establish a Business Service View for Business Operation Monitoring and Management, So That All Critical Business Parameters Are Prominently Projected onto the Business Architecture, Reflecting Real-Time Business Operations
The business service management system establishes a business service view consistent with the enterprise’s current IT architecture and management model, integrates relevant business indicators and technical management metrics, and visually presents business service operations in a hierarchical, graphical way, helping all business-related personnel across the enterprise understand the operational status and mechanisms of the business:
4. Establish Real-Time Business Usage Management to Monitor and Manage Business Usage Status, User Distribution, and Separate Real-Time Traffic Flows for Different Services
Discussing business assurance without considering business usage is meaningless. For the business, the end users are people. Whether a business system is healthy, whether business volume is sufficient, and how to view various system operating parameters鈥攁ll these are directly related to online usage. Business performance analysis cannot be divorced from the premise of business load.
5. Rely on Solid, Comprehensive Infrastructure Management to Establish a Business Fault Analysis and Discovery Mechanism With Integrated Thinking, and Possess the Management Capability for Service Impact Analysis and Root Cause Localization.
How to promptly discover hidden business operation risks, and how to effectively evaluate and pinpoint the root cause of events and faults that significantly impact the business? Having an efficient and accurate fault discovery mechanism and the ability to conduct effective root cause analysis is a critical indicator for BSM “implementation.” The difficulty lies in the fact that the points where “problems” occur may be widely distributed and unpredictable. Therefore, robust infrastructure management capabilities are essential, widespread detection points are necessary, and a sample data collection mechanism with sufficient frequency is equally indispensable.
6. Provide Service Level Management
The business service management system needs to support the establishment of formal SLAs (Service Level Agreements) between business and IT departments and ensure their effective execution. It comprehensively provides event collection, consolidation, processing dispatch, process creation/management/processing query, duty management and shift scheduling, service quality assessment, expert knowledge bases, and necessary peripheral support information for event handling. Integrated with the service desk, the event management system effectively and comprehensively combines the problem discovery and processing mechanisms in business management.