In making a major purchase, such as for an automobile or a new home, do you make your decision impulsively, based on initial impressions and few facts, or do you thoroughly research the options first? When purchasing a car, you might consider the price, mileage per gallon (mpg), customer satisfaction surveys, professional reviews such as those published in Consumer Reports, and so on. In fact, you might spend a few days gathering information and data from across several sources. You might even crowd source the decision by asking friends on Facebook or Twitter about their experiences with various automakers.
Likewise, business decision making also must consider facts and data from disparate sources across the enterprise. Yet such data can be hard to gather and even harder to interpret, particularly in today’s hybrid IT environments. That’s where Business Services Management (BSM) comes in.
BSM in Today’s Hybrid IT Environments
The BSM platform integrates technology, processes, and people across the organization for service excellence. In cloud computing, BSM helps tie the cloud initiatives with the current legacy IT environment. As the organization matures, the legacy environment follows along seamlessly. This requires best practice adoption, as well as technology that adheres to best practices, such as solutions that enable BSM.
BSM also helps with decision support for cloud computing initiatives. With the growth of cloud computing, it is more important than ever to look at the organization from a holistic, collaborative perspective. The service knowledge management system (SKMS), for example, enables collaboration and business decision making across the organization. Think of SKMS as enterprise resource planning (ERP) for IT: It helps connect the pieces across process areas to provide the necessary data and tools for various business stakeholders to make decisions. It allows organizations to manage data from an integrated and collaborative perspective, translate collected data into information, transform information analytics into knowledge, and knowledge into stakeholder wisdom for decision making.
A System 1 and 2 Decision Making Perspective
Dashboards, monitoring tools and the resulting metrics can empower decision making from what might be called a System 2 thinking perspective, versus a System 1 thinking perspective. Think of System 1 as based primarily on experiences and tribal knowledge: This is the way things happen. This is what I feel to be true. System 2 bases decisions on actual data and metrics. Combined with your industry experiences and the factual data available from the SKMS, you’re able to make better overall decisions as they relate to your specialized role in the organization for the services you deliver and support, as a team or as a company, rather than from an individual silo perspective.
Successful organizations that are efficient, have market effectiveness, and are profitable tend to be visionary, agile, and mission-driven. Success in service management enabled by BSM helps with increased organizational performance, longevity and overall organizational viability for service value. Success is riding on the critical leadership decisions made in today’s hyper-competitive business climate. Good decisions require well informed business leaders and supporting staff with access to complete pertinent information from across the enterprise. With BSM, IT can provide the business value necessary to drive even greater business success.
By Anthony Orr