It has been years since BSM (Business Service Management) was first proposed and discussed, yet there are virtually no users who have truly implemented BSM. Why has BSM taken so long to gain traction in China, and why has the process been so bumpy?
Simply put, there are several key reasons. First, the lack of a solid enterprise management foundation prevents business system personnel from gaining clear insights. They do not understand the work being done by the IT department and are unwilling to collaborate with IT. Without this collaboration, the IT department simply cannot implement BSM, because without effectively sorting out the business system framework, it is impossible to build a business service model. Managing the business on that basis would be like the “blind men feeling an elephant”鈥攏aturally, you cannot grasp the truly critical inner workings of the business.
Second is insufficient attention from leadership. Who drives the BSM initiative within the enterprise plays a huge role. If it is only pushed forward by engineers, implementation becomes very difficult because engineers lack the authority to coordinate with other departments, and thus face significant resistance. The most important thing for BSM is to convince enterprise leadership of its importance, and the first prerequisite for leadership buy-in is whether IT can enhance the enterprise’s added value. Only then is success possible. Otherwise, the consequences may include limited project funding on one hand, and on the other, an analysis of business requirements that is not thorough enough. If the building of the enterprise business model and the data collection process are not solid, achieving implementation is naturally very hard. Without transparent business frameworks and the ability to capture real data, only the IT department can see clearly, making it useless for the business departments.
The third issue is a conceptual understanding. Most domestic enterprises are influenced by foreign vendors’ BSM methodologies