An interesting angle about Business Service Management is that it's actually not only about enabling companies to save money through the implementation of more efficient and automated IT processes.  A tougher benefit to explain but one that I argue is more important is the goal of making IT increasingly invisible for many companies so that they can funnel more investment to their core businesses. That should be the primary goal of BSM enthusiasts, not just the simple allure of saving money. I believe that any cost-savings that result from BSM will be, and should be, swallowed up elsewhere in the enterprise and THAT should be the desired result.

Consider the newspaper business.  It has evolved from a time in which the lionshare of investment was in printer hardware and other physical elements of the production process to where we find ourselves today (Internet challenges aside).  Today it matters less about how the words make it to the page than it does about what the actual words are.  I recall being in Grade 7 and going with my class on a tour of the city's newspaper.  It was fascinating because it was all about the loud machines printing and moving paper up, down, and around a massive room before finally folding and stacking them at the end of the line.  We saw writers, it was whispered, as we snaked through the front office space but, really, the point of the tour was entirely about getting to the machinery at the back.  (It was cool that we each got to take home a free copy, even though my mother didn't see the big deal as I arrived home with a second copy of the very same paper she was reading).  You know what happened to those newspapers that didn't see the age of electronic printing and eventually, digitization, coming their way.  They ended up spending too much of their financial and human capital on machinery and were made irrelevant by more nimble competitors.

Scary as it may seem to those in the IT industry but companies must evolve to the point where the lionshare of their IT-related investments should not be in hardware and software but rather in people who, enabled by tools (software, yes, but perhaps non-IT software), will be able to make something valuable from the information. This is why I welcome the advent of Web 2.0 and its attendant silliness, hype, and the conflicting and competing technologies.  It's exciting and wildly democratic. It's in its infancy and we have definitely crossed over to a new way of thinking that says, saving money is not the message. The message is to make money, to use technology as the vehicle for turning ideas into practical answers.

I recommend you register and attend the BMC Virtual Conference where you will learn all about the next wave of BSM.  The future is inevitably about automation, about simplifying the management of IT to the extent that it will dynamically (and invisibly) respond, and accomplish what business requires.  In the future it may even be able to make business happen before business becomes aware that it needs to do something new.

During a long car ride back from a customer the other day, while we edged slowly through traffic constricted by summertime construction, one of the guys on my team mentioned another customer who presented a peculiarly 21st century challenge.  He described how the customer technical contact was very cordial with him each time they spoke but was curt and belligerent with the BMC engineer who was assigned to the account.  My staff member concluded, after weeks of participating in conference calls and virtual observation, that the customer had less respect for the BMC engineer because English was the engineer's second language.  He tested this by relaying the same information to the customer as the engineer had and receiving a far different, much more positive, reaction.  In my staff's member's opinion, the engineer is hardworking and very technically sound, and yet that didn't stop the customer from reinforcing his negative view of the engineer by completing scathing surveys after each interaction.  Now BMC, like many large companies, automatically sends surverys to customers after reported cases are closed.  We use the data to measure and improve our overall service and the service of the individual engineer who worked the case.  You can draw conclusions now about how that customer's opinion, as expressed in those surveys, could be used against the engineer. Is it valid data? Would taking it seriously improve BMC's ability to deliver better service?

Don't worry too much about the engineer.  As should be the case in situations where statistics are gathered in an attempt to make business decisions, care is taken to eliminate, or at least reduce, abnormalities of data that can unfairly skew the results and potentially invalidate the outcome.  We actually have a process where a manager will call the customer when surveys show wild results on either end of the spectrum.

The story reminded me of an article I recently read on the National Public Radio website, called Take Our Survey: Are There Too Many Surveys?  I know how I feel when I receive surveys after I attend webinars, download whitepapers, book travel tickets, buy books or clothing on the web and I am asked to complete a short survey.  Argh!  I would have a better experience if you didn't ask me about it!   I know, it's a dilemma for companies.   How can you find out how you're doing if you don't ask?  Still, it feels to me that much of our economy is about gathering data but without as much thought as it should require.  I really don't think effective and trustworthy business decisions can be made from the data that comes from surveys. and yet I suspect that's exactly what many companies rely upon to make them. 

I asked my staff member if he challenged the customer when he concluded that there was obvious disrespect being shown to the engineer.  He told me he had and the customer replied that he really wanted to work with a U.S. resource.  So, the problem wasn't about technical aptitude and the value of the service delivered by the engineer.  It was about one person's politcal views.  Big idea but the wrong way to go about advancing it, especially since the engineer in question is a U.S. citizen living in sunny California.

My wife and I recently moved into a new condo and in the process of arranging for a transfer of our internet service, I had to speak to the provider.   An important item to note, I found out afterwards, is that the provider's customer relationship management software makes a huge assumption if the subscriber does not know the postal code (zip code for my American readers) of their new home.  When I was asked by the call center employee for all my pertinent subscriber information, I did not yet know the postal code of our newly constructed condo tower.

"No problem", he said cheerily. But then..."Hmmm...that's interesting. When I submit the query to see if your new building has high speed service, it tells me that it does not. It is likely that your new home is in an area that is not yet serviced by high speed."  This troubled me to hear that as my new home is in the heart of Toronto, a city of 5 million people, Canada's largest city, our condo is one block away from the epicenter of what the world has come to learn is the safest banking system on the planet. I told him it is very likely that, in fact, my new home IS serviced by high speed and that he must be mistaken.  There was no way I could correct him and he assured me that the field technician would determine the true answer on our move day when he came to activate the service.  Well, we didn't have to wait until the moving date, which was still three weeks away, because we found out the very next day.  We later learned that when the call center guy submitted the change request to transfer our service, the software could not transfer the high speed service we enjoyed in our existing home over to a home that was not serviced by high speed (because the postal code was not specified, it ASSUMED that we were in perhaps a remote Arctic community without that benefit, I suppose), and therefore cut off the high speed to our current home as well. We were told of this by the business office when we called to complain that we didn't have high speed access anymore.  They said there was an easy interim solution...use dial-up.  When was the last time you used dial-up?  When was the last time you had a computer with an internal modem? To compound the problem, the business office apologetically informed us it would be a week before we would get our high speed restored. One day to cancel a service and a week to restore it? Huh?

What's the lesson?  What's Armaly on about here?  One little software programming assumption caused a one week outage in service. Because the software made a huge assumption about the serviceability of a location based on whether the postal code was specified, regardless of the actual address (it should be smart enough to know that when the city of Toronto is specified, then the neighborhood is covered), it went ahead and scheduled a cancelation of our existing service.  To the provider's credit, they did waive our next two months of charges but in the end, it didn't really make up for the inconvenience.  At the peak of my frustration, I was one day away from going with their competitor.

I came across this pretty good site (Doug McClure) containing clear definitions of Business Service Management and many of its constituencies.    What I like about this blog piece is not just the explanation that Doug provides.  I like the fundamental truth that he says about it being an evolution and the implication he makes that you have to be patient.  The whole exercise takes time and energy and any vendor who tells you otherwise is simply not telling the truth.   As I continue to grow in this industry, as I build my personal library of stories from customers, I have yet to come across any evidence that there are any shortcuts in the orchestration of significant change (of the magnitude required by BSM).

My team works closely, daily, with an extremely large global customer, helping them maintain and improve their IT service management platform. The relationship has its ups and downs and lately, since November I would say, it's been down. It has been rocky for a number of reasons but primarily because in the customer's mind, the solution isn't as stable as they would like it to be. Purely and simply, they want it to be 100% stable. How can I argue with that? I don't blame them at all. If I was them, I would want the same. So, we keep trying to focus on fixing the problems while trying to understand whether in fact, they are actually due to the software (development of, testing of, installation of) or to an inherent weakness or flaw in the underlying architecture or in the way their teams support the environment and third-party software that our solutions rely on. Complicated or what. Enterprise software performance problems can be particularly difficult to diagnose since there are so many moving parts involving so many pieces of software and hardware. What appears to be a cause at first blush, may in fact just be a victim of the true culprit upstream. In the end, there is no substitute for cooperation and teamwork when it comes to determining the causes and a course of action to prevent the problem from resurfacing in the future.

Consider that scenario then and you can imagine my pleasant surprise to learn today that the customer has selected BMC has one its very few (5) strategic vendors. This means they want to increase the time they spend in building the relationship and in the amount of money they invest in our solutions. Counter-intuitive? At first glance, yes, but think of it this way. Some people stick it out with bad boyfriends or girlfriends because they see or saw potential greatness or goodness at one time or another. They know the fundamental building blocks of happiness are there but they might need more attention to make it consistent, trustworthy, and dependable.

My last entry dealt with how infrastructure, instead of wallowing in obscurity as it has for the last 10 years, is now enjoying the attention it deserves. Society is finally coming to terms with the inescapable conclusion that to be highly evolved and full functioning, there must be in place a strong foundation of infrastructure to support everyday mundane tasks. IT leaders seem to have finally clued in as well and I’m witnessing a renaissance in the exceedingly difficult art of performance management.

I lead a team of people who are charged with assisting customers extract as much value as possible from BMC’s solutions. This role also exposes me to conversations that can go as deep as the technology allows or so lofty that a casual listener wouldn't know we were discussing software at all. Because BSM is such a large and complicated undertaking, it makes sense then that the people who make decisions to purchase BSM solutions will have broad and abstract questions that need answers. They might ask, “So, once we have the whole shooting match in place (they mean our solution), how do we ensure that it will change as our business changes?” Or, as a customer VP said to me just yesterday, “I don’t want your team to come in and then leave. I need you guys to be different. I need your commitment to a partnership. You need to be here with us for the long-haul.” She could've been talking about any business at all but she was talking about the help her organization will reauire after the implementation consultants leave. Too often, so many businesses are left with too many questions and nowhere to turn.

The more I work in this business, the more interesting it becomes because I get to watch and work with customers as they make progress. I am privileged to be able to have regular conversations with them after they’ve implemented software that’s improved, for example, the way they automate changes to their applications and systems. They feel that the job they are doing is making a big difference to the company they work at and to the customers that they serve. They’re right.

I listened to an interview on the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) the other day with a professor from the University of Washington. He was discussing research he had conducted about a very serious subject. He found that people, no matter their income, race, or religion responded the same way when presented with a straightforward scenario. They were asked to choose, of the following two situations, which caused them to feel the most empathy or sorrow:

• 45 people died out of a population of 1,100 and the cause was a flood in Africa
• 4500 people died out of a population of 1,100,000 and the cause was a war in Africa

He found 100% of the study’s participants felt more sorrow for the victims of the natural disaster. Further testing with slightly different scenarios caused him to conclude that empathetic reaction in humans is less strong as the relative percentage of victims grows and if they learn that the cause is perceived as political. In other words, they could more closely relate to the survivors in the small community than the large community that was affected by the war. He was stunned; I wasn’t. It makes sense to me that people identify more with relative impact. It’s not admirable but it’s understandable, likely a coping method to deal with something that is too large to think about.

The interview made me think how statistics seem to sometimes raise more questions than answers. When software vendors do presentations or you read in their annual reports that they have 15,000 customers worldwide, you should ask yourself, “What does that really mean?” Since you have no idea how many companies there are in the world (i.e. how large the market is), does that number really mean anything? In my first 7 years at BMC, I delivered countless presentations and never did I talk about how many customers our company had. I felt that if I couldn’t tell specific stories or give concrete examples of success, then I shouldn’t mention other customers, even how many we had. If I said we had 6,000 customers, would that really be less impressive than if I had said 12,000? There is a very well known software vendor (not BMC) who throughout the 1990s and the first 5 years of the 21^st century would tell anyone listening that they had, oh say, 20,000 customers worldwide using their systems management solution. Of all the customers and prospects I met in all those 7 years, in countries all over the world, I met only one customer of that vendor’s solution, and they shelved the solution because they couldn’t get it to work. 20,000? What the heck?

Trust your instincts; don’t absorb the raw numbers; ask questions; get the answers that mean something to you.