Business Service Management
Alongside the monitoring of IT infrastructure components and IT service levels, business service management is becoming an increasingly important area for the company. Some of the obvious advantages of this business-process-orientated approach are greater transparency with regard to IT performance, the facility for user-related cost allocation and estimates of the likely harm to business processes in the event of failure of particular elements of the IT infrastructure. And yet users demand even more than that. These days, it is particularly necessary for IT, seen as a support tool for business processes, also to be measured in terms of the degree of efficiency with which it supports business processes.
In practical terms, BSM predominantly means monitoring metrics used for assessing the added value aspect of IT solutions. The challenge here is to identify the relevant business services, to map them dynamically with their specific metrics onto the IT infrastructure and then to monitor and evaluate these metrics. It is also possible in many cases to take a converse approach, i.e. to deduce the efficiency of business processes from the data assembled within IT systems and to use this information to open up the potential for further improvements for the company.