Business Transaction Management Blog

I’ll be honest “Business Service Management” as a phrase has never sounded exciting for me. It sounds generic, woolly and uses words that generate flashbacks of my university lectures delivered by people with red jumpers and beards. Needless to say I did some digging recently on the internet and was pleasantly surprised by the wealth of information and vendors who have a story in this space. As you might guess the definition of BSM varies, which is ok until you begin to think “Do I just make up my own definition of BSM or do I work with someone else’s?”.

BSM opinions talk a lot about managing IT from a business perspective. To be honest I haven’t seen an enterprise software pitch that doesn’t talk about aligning the business with IT these days.  For me though, the aligning bit is more of a mindset than a killer enabling technology, process or methodology.  The way an employee approaches things or thinks has a lot to do with how they manage or work. IT exists solely to deliver a competitive edge to the business that funds it. If every person in IT thought “What impact am I having on the business” once or twice a day then its my belief that the business and IT would be closer aligned, more efficient and more successful. I’ve never been a fan of IT outsourcing for this exact reason – do the people working for a 3rd party IT outsourcer ever think or care about the business they are supporting or impacting? A few do but most probably don’t I’d imagine.

Here we are in a gloomy recession where business performance is all that matters. Huge losses and decreased revenue for many businesses  have resulted in cost cutting and a focus on re-prioritizing business functions and services. How much do businesses spend on service X, Y and Z and how much do they make from X,Y and Z. It would be foolish to think that businesses would continue to invest in services that didn’t generate a return. The next bit is then figuring out where all these business services exist within the world of IT. If you’re going to focus on service X, Y and Z and de-commission A, B and C then you absolutely need to understand where X, Y, Z, A, B and C exist and what dependencies they have with each other and the applications/infrastructure that underpins them.

If businesses are going to start changing people’s mindsets in IT then they need to provide them with the right tools so they can start to learn how the business runs on IT. I bet most DBA’s have no idea which business transactions or services are executing against their schema’s these days. You might be sceptical and say why is this important? Should a DBA tune the top 10 slowest SQL Statements? or should they tune the SQL statements that relate to the top 10 business services? This is where BSM technology like Business Transaction Management (BTM) comes in handy. When you can track all business services and transactions across your entire infrastructure you gain this visibility of how the business runs on IT. With intelligence into business transaction latency, resource consumption and SLA across all tiers you begin to see first hand the real impact IT has on the business. Business services have been running across IT for decades, with BSM and enabling technology like BTM its only now IT is beginning to see the bigger picture.

I know it sounds simple but if you work in IT try thinking once or twice a day what impact will you have on your business. If you don’t know then its worth exploring what BSM and enabling technology like BTM can do for you.