BSM confusion

Denis Gaughan from AMR on the confusion created and spread by vendors on promise and scope of the Business Service Management (BSM)

With all the marketing hype surrounding Business Service Management (BSM), you’d think that everyone has a clear understanding of services. But right now, the vendors are too far ahead of the market. By and large, the vendors that market BSM assume that their users’ definition of a service is the same business-centric view that the vendor is pitching. Far too often, we see organizations that implement BSM technology, but they are just essentially re-creating the same granular infrastructure-centric services, simply slapping a pretty dashboard on the same old event console.

His conclusion -

It all starts with your organization’s definition of an IT service. Relying solely on the IT organization to define services will likely lead to services that end users don’t understand or need. Sit down with your business peers to understand what IT services mean to them, and then build services back to IT rather than from IT out to the business.

Though its a required change but I don't see this happening any time soon. IT is increasingly getting centralized where its much easier (process-wise) to throw a definition of "IT service" to the business side. For this definition to come from business or to come with their collaboration we need to bring business much closer to IT both process-wise and technology wise. It's not there yet.