Musings on Network and Business Service Management

Let me first start with a small parable which was told in India many years ago ( I modified it a bit, as I hate to call myself a blind man). It’s an example of how limited focus can lead to mis-interpretation. Six wise men (but blinded because of narrow focus ) were asked to, define what an Elephant is?

• The first one happening to fall against the broad and sturdy side, thought an Elephant is like a Wall.
• The second one while feeling the round and smooth tusk, thought that an Elephant is a Spear.
• The third one feeling the trunk, thought that an elephant is like a snake.
• The fourth one while looking at the legs, thought that an elephant is like a tree.
• The fifth one touched the ear and, thought that an elephant is like a Fan.
• The last one dragged on the tail and exclaimed that an Elephant is like a rope.

Well we all know what an Elephant is, dont we? Its a “Whole” of all these parts and functions. So how is this related to Business Service Management? In a lot of ways our approach to understanding it is similar to the Elephant parable. Each of us have a different view of what is a part of BSM. To some extent that may be not an issue at all. May be our only requirement is to be able to monitor the IT resources (like the tusks being used as a spear as that is the only function that you need) in which case all we need is a good ESM tool ( we will talk about them in a subsequent blog).

There are lot of cool blogs which define what is BSM and I dont want to paraphrase all those again in here. Doug McClure maintains one such blog which has a few good pointers in this area.

In here I will start with an assumption that what we are looking for is a holistic Business Service Management solution and not just the sub-functions or the building blocks that make the whole. In my subsequent blogs I will concentrate more on the implementation and integration details and how to arrive at that whole picture from the individual pieces. With all due respect to my writing skills I would rather read my technical docs vs my other general ones.

So what are some of the building blocks of a good Business Service Management Solution? Here are a few of them:

1. A Configuration repository of the network, IT and business components. Ideally we should be able to build this using some auto-discovery tools.
2. A good ESM and Network management platform to monitor the Network and IT resources on which the Business applications rely on.
3. A service modeling platform that defines the business rules, dependencies, Metrics and quality indicators (KPIs & KQIs).
4. An SLA platform that defines the service level agreements, violations, penalities, Service Trends etc.
5. A visualization platform to bring all the above pieces together to provide a complete dashboard.

In the next blog we will talk about how we achieve the above functions, which tools we can use etc.

Welcome to my blog on Network and Business Service Management. In this site I intend to document my 2 cents worth on industry trends, challenges, solutions and cool ideas on BSM.