Doug McClure: Thoughts on BSM, ITSM, Change and Release Management

A couple weeks ago, I had a chance to speak with Doug McClure about his perceptions in regards to Business Service Management (BSM), IT Service Management (ITSM), and its relationship to Change and Release Management. Doug is a Senior Managing Consultant for Business and IT Service Management within the IBM Tivoli Lab Services (ISST) organization, and believe me when I say that he lives and breathes this stuff. See Doug’s blog for more insight.

I’ll start by summarizing Doug’s comments: Everything in the IT environment rolls up to BSM. By “everything” Doug is referring to the people, process, components, systems, services, and technology that make up an IT organization. While BSM and ITSM are becoming more and more mainstream in today’s computing industry, Doug believes that most organizations still need to engage in a fundamental organizational breakdown to instill a true business service management perspective within the IT organization.  This would replace IT’s own lingering view that IT is responsible for “managing the Windows servers” e.g. the organization’s technology.

To begin our conversation, I asked Doug where he would advise organizations to start in bringing IT under the BSM umbrella. Doug responded with a sentiment that seems to be growing among those in the industry that advise and consult on such matters: the organizations that are most successful at adopting BSM and ITSM are those that drive adoption from the top, e.g. the executive office. These types of organizations build a true partnership between the business analysts that truly understand business, speak business language, and operate within business context, and the IT personnel who understand the technology, its power, and how best to use it.

One other aspect to this – when organizations “personalize” BSM and ITSM (in other words put it in their own terms of what BSM means to their business, rather than simply repeating what vendors or analysts say it means), the organizations regularly meet the goals and satisfy the objectives about BSM and ITSM that they put forth. It’s because they understand in their own terms what they are striving to accomplish.

I was curious to know whether Doug viewed the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, and social/collaborative networking as a bane or boon to the adoption of BSM. There was no uncertainty in his answer. The adoption of social networking technology is absolutely a requirement for next generation BSM, to attract and keep people engaged.

This is not just because collaborative communication is the growing trend of communication. It is much more a requirement because organizations that universally adopt wikis, blogs, etc. tend to express things in a much more transparent and honest manner. For example, when business people “talk about the pain of an IT outage” using public collaborative means, that information reaches the “deck plate” where those on the front lines can be exposed to this unique business perspective.  This can be more impactful than hiding this information in a slide deck, an executive report, or behind the intranet firewall

Doug and I went on to discuss several other topics of interest, including his perspective on the importance of a Configuration Management DataBase (CMDB) to BSM, the importance of Change and Release Management to BSM, and the importance of Data Center Automation (DCA) to BSM. However, instead of giving all the highlights away here, I’ll invite you to listen to the conversation online.

My thanks to Doug for providing his time and invaluable insight. I look forward to speaking with him in the future about a variety of subjects related to BSM and ITSM.

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Filed Under: Change Management, IT Operations, Interviews, Interviews-Bloggers