Business Service Management Hub

The Hub Commentary_

I’ll start with, those that lead their markets, lead by a lot.  It is no surprise the leader of the Top 25 Social CIO’s is SAP.  Oliver Bussmann not only leads by >20% over the nearest follower, but by >80% over the #3 competitor.  Just as I mentioned in my previous post this morning, the next generation will be our future leaders, workers, buyers and customers.

I love when I can manage to triangulate and hit the trifecta of 3 blog posts in one day (Metrics, Top 25 Social CIOs and this article).  This is an IT department that doesn’t measure number of tickets closed or server uptime, but product innovation, interactions with customers, etc.  This is the difference in a CIO that “keeps the lights on” spending 1-2% of revenue annually just operating, from one that counts the financial aspects of business transformation and the one that leads strategic innovation and growth of the company.

I think back to 2007 and my entre into social media marketing.  I had a forward thinking marketing co-worker, Frank Strong, who was always on me to post a blog driving our companies presence in the market.  I must say, I would avoid him in the hall.  Then I didn’t have a Tweet account, much less Facebook, etc.  Then I needed to figure out how to build awareness for a product in a family of dozens of products and how would I make this small fish standout in the market – Social Media.  That was late 2010 / early 2011 ….. The BSM Hub had a Facebook page long before I had one personally.

Today, I communicate with my network via LinkedIN, Twitter, Facebook, etc. from my TweetDeck console over coffee and lunch each day.  I have had customers reach in and I have had a few prospects do a bit of research via the Twitter that I’ve attended to personally, long before a sales executive is involved.  Oliver is correct, putting a face to the product and company, making it personable is much more the norm than a customer working directly with a sales executive these days.  I know I would never hear from my baby nephew if I didn’t learn to text, Tweet and Facebook!

This is how the next generation works and buys, are you social and personally available to your customers, workers, prospects and the market?

Michele

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Picture yourself as an Executive in 2017, struggling to make sense of how many of your peers failed to become social. Many of them pushed aside by their more savvy underlings who built up both internal and external social networks.  Their large networks wield tremendous power, collective intelligence and the ability to influence both employees and customers. Many of the executives that didn’t adapt were caught in a type of ‘vocational innovator’s dilemma’; where they stubbornly refused to change despite the warning signs.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Often times IT organizations find Business Service Management projects daunting, when in fact they should be viewed in small pieces, a service at a time.  I chose to post this bit of news to describe an easy entry point into Business Service Management.

Business Service Management is an imperative today with the explosion of service providers and cloud based services.  The service providers are selling to your business because they are speaking the language of the business – service, cost and value.  IT has to adopt the same service speak to be successful.

Often times, the service desk is viewed as the starting point given it is the touch point to the customer, however, on the back-end we are still thinking in terms of servers, networks, applications and the customer is talking about the service they are attempting to access.  Then there comes what is the appropriate response, how critical is it really?

These days an integration platform bringing together the physical/logical data and relationships and representing it as services consumed by the customer is an imperative.  The same data has to be represented in many views depending upon the role of the viewer.  Service desk folks are reacting to incidents and seek root cause and information as to an ETA to restoration starting at the top of the service as the customer contacts the service desk.  The change manager acts proactively in requiring a view of all scheduled changes against the components and how they inter-relate in a service model view to mitigate risk and impact of too many changes at once or the grouping of changes to minimize downtime.  The final view is that of the service delivery team communicating overall service cost and value to the business.

Most organizations have many systems that they will require to tap into in order to represent a complete view, however, it does not mean you need to boil the ocean in your first attempt at service views.  Think a single data source, what does it provide, what are my most critical services and map the most critical first and continue to enhance the information with additional sources of data over time.

Is business service management an imperative in your organization?

Michele

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Longtime partners Novell and SAP, which in recent years have focused heavily on packaging applications for use on the Suse Linux Enterprise operating system, are now cozying up on services management.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

This headline caught my eye as I will be the first to debate that IT is not a profit center.  However, this is a prime example of IT realizing and classifying services based upon Service Value and applying Business Service Management practices.  In an effort to first cut support costs from old systems, right sourcing decisions and partnerships were established for industry must haves and I applaud these decisions.

I’ve seen this consortium model a couple of times in my career and it can be successful when set-up like this with the outsourcer as the intermediary managing the infrastructure and service with the ability to market, sell and replicate the solution across the industry.  The service is an industry standard and not specific to the business and thus no competitive advantage across the industry.  However, what usually keeps it from being successful is the size of the market that it can be sold to and how easily the others in the industry can just plug into the service.

The tipping point to concentrate on growth investments for IT and decrease the IT spend for cost saving measures may be enough to push to consortium like success for these types of services in the coming 12-24 months.

Michele

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Give a man a fish, the proverb goes, you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Turns out there’s a quasi-corollary for corporate IT: Give your company a more efficient system, and you cut costs; give your industry a better way to operate, and you increase revenue.  (Read Full Article…)