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.

iOpener

This past week finished off on Friday with the "iOpener" event, one of the city's biggest annual technology executive events, hosted by ic stars at the Chicago Cultural Center downtown. Among the topics at the event was the need for creativity in technology, especially its value in the new high-tech workforce.

Peter Drucker said there are only two real functions of a business; marketing and innovation. Innovation is the point where creativity stops being a clever idea and starts showing a return on investment. But creativity is where the initial value lies in a world where access to technology resources is becoming increasingly ubiquitous.

Michael Krauss, President of Market Strategy Group and member of the Mayor's Council of Technology Advisors, moderated a collaborative discussion through the audience at Friday's event to create message points on why 18-25 year olds should choose IT as a career. The results of the discussion will be published in an upcoming paper entitled, "Move the Future," in response to the continuing decline in enrollments for technology-related education and the increasing difficulty in finding people for IT positions.

The tools to make the next facebook or a photobucket or a digg are out there for anyone with a laptop, and the value of creativity to see them in a new way is the new trump card. As an executive at Apple said a couple years ago (pre-iPod), "We want to be the ones who come up with new ideas -- not the ones who snap the pieces together..."