The New Realities BSM Interview with Casey Kindiger

A couple years ago, the top-returned item in a google search of "BSM" was the "British School of Motoring." So it's a great leap forward already just to get to the clarification that it generally refers to "Business Service Management" (at least stateside).

Now for the next question, when a company says they do "business service management," what does that mean exactly? The entry in Wikipedia describes it as a "methodology for monitoring and measuring IT services from a business perspective" including both process and software. What it really amounts to is one of Peter Drucker's new realities of how you view and use technology to make your business work better every day.

If anyone knows what's at the heart of BSM, it's the CEO of IBM's top-ranked Tivoli partner and service management software reseller, Casey Kindiger. Here's an interview that just came out in TechRepublic where I sat down with Casey to ask ten questions about what is really at the heart of this new way of looking at the purpose of technology in business, as well as the three types of BSM players out there today.

Upcoming Webinar Series on Service Management

I'll be hosting a webinar series on service management coming up in October if you're interested in ways to make your technology act more businesslike.  The series is a prequel to IBM's big annual Pulse event at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas next quarter.  The three webinar presentations will come from experts at generationE and IBM and will cover automating service management, service quality management, and the service desk of the future.  The first call is on October 8. For a full description and the registration page, see the link here.

BSM (IT For Business): The Next Big Thing

"Business Service Management" -- viewing IT processes purely as a business facilitator and not an independent function -- is on the cusp of IT-analyst Gartner's latest hype-cycle for operations management tools. It is making the critical transition from the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" to the "Trough of Disillusionment," (which sounds more like something from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress than typical IT-lingo). Computerworld chimes in with their own agreement that Kool-Aid style BSM is "the next big thing."

BSM is being followed over the expectations peak by the CMDB (database to track IT environments) which IT Week said yesterday is "set to double in the next year," and web services management. The CMDB is at the heart of BSM, so its catching up over the curve is essential to BSM's success and it has made quite a jump from last year's report, in which Gartner projected its productivity at ten years out. In Gartner's assessment, BSM now follows the spread of the IT Infrastructure Library, which provides the foundation of best practices necessary for BSM to work effectively.

Women's clothing manufacturer Coldwater Creek says it has saved more than $1.8 million and gained another million in profit using BSM to speed the opening of new locations, as well as another $700 thousand in licenses and software negotiations, which should help to assuage at least some of their disillusionment.