There was a short note on this blog in recent weeks about end-to-end business metrics. It got me thinking about BSM. What exactly is it and how does it work? BSM is a much used term in IT circles. It essentially refers to the process of ensuring that that when measuring the quality of IT services that one uses business relevant metrics. ‘Business service management (BSM) is a methodology for monitoring and measuring IT services from a business perspective. BSM consists of both structured process and enabling software – wiki. Its all common sense really I suppose. The trouble is that it is extremely difficult to decide what business metrics to use as KPIs and more importantly how to collect actual performance data on them.
As a provider of SLA management software we are exposed to a wide range of KPIs. There is a very simplistic traditional approach which suggests that data on KPIs can be pulled directly from vertical operational tools – there is a certain technical symmetry about doing this – but the KPIs selected according to this model are usually fairly technical and certainly not aligned to the BSM model. A more sophisticated approach would pull data from a variety of different systems and perhaps even manual sources, aggregate that data and then give a real picture of performance against a service or business KPI.
I think the concepts and logic associated with BSM in the IT world is equally valuable in the context of non-IT services like HR, Recruitment, Facilities, Finance and Accounting etc. All of these types of services are delivered using core IT systems and too often technical KPIs are used to measure service quality. In many cases I suspect that the metrics are selected for the ease with which they can be extracted from systems rather than the extent to which they reflect service quality.
I am interested in any studies that have been carried out in this area. Does anyone have access to material to support our efforts to clearly outline a strategy to create business metrics for Service Level Agreements and an innovative and straightforward way to measure them?
