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Building on BSM with an IT Performance System

Michael Procopio

For a VP of operations, the cloud, virtualization and mobile communications are making BSM harder than ever. Unfortunately your business customers don’t care. They just want your services to work when, where and how they want them. And they don’t want them to cost too much either.

But here’s the issue: while effective, the tried and true approach to BSM—focusing on monitoring and measuring end-user experience—doesn’t provide the type of insight that a VP of operations needs. Today’s IT environment is just too complex. You need higher-level insights that are possible with an IT performance system.

The Solution: Make BSM the Foundation of an IT Performance System

IT performance systems help tame IT complexity and allow you to stay true to your BSM objectives. They can offer comprehensive, real-time visibility into everything underpinning your business services. You can monitor not only the end-user experience (BSM), but the entire IT environment impacting and surrounding that service. That includes your network, infrastructure, applications and all network-edge devices—computers, smart phones, tablets, etc.

Building on your BSM capabilities with an IT performance system allows you to gain broader and deeper insights into your organization’s performance. For example, do you know which service has the most emergency RFCs? Or, which service costs you the most in the number of IT staff to support? These insights can help you work on IT as opposed to just in IT, proving your value to the business. An IT performance system gives IT leaders a method for systematically managing IT, while also providing the means to demonstrate IT’s value and contribution to the business. To be more specific, imagine an automated, dashboard-driven system that monitors your entire IT environment and provides real-time performance reports in the form of key performance indicators (KPIs).

You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure

Accurate, timely and meaningful KPIs are critical to making a performance system work. Without them there’s no way to measure how your organization is performing. From an IT leader’s perspective, this means understanding the overall health of an IT organization, revealed through KPIs like:

- cost reduction
- operations versus innovation investment
- business strategy alignment
- customer satisfaction
- percent of SLAs not met
- percent of “healthy” versus “unhealthy” projects
- average cost of IT service per customer

Key Capabilities in an IT Performance System

In order for an IT performance system to complement your current BSM efforts, it’s important that it have the right mix of core capabilities.

Comprehensive—an IT performance system needs to monitor and measure your entire IT environment, from the data center and network to your applications and mobile devices. And that includes all service-delivery models—on-premise, cloud and hybrid.

Digital and automated—to use performance information (KPIs) effectively, you need the ability to access and understand that information quickly. You can’t do that with manually-created reports in spreadsheets. Your system needs to be automated and digital.

Real time— to maintain business service quality and reliability, you must be able to prevent problems before they occur. So Like BSM, an IT performance system needs to be real-time. You need to know how your systems are performing at any given moment.

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Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

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In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

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Building on BSM with an IT Performance System

Michael Procopio

For a VP of operations, the cloud, virtualization and mobile communications are making BSM harder than ever. Unfortunately your business customers don’t care. They just want your services to work when, where and how they want them. And they don’t want them to cost too much either.

But here’s the issue: while effective, the tried and true approach to BSM—focusing on monitoring and measuring end-user experience—doesn’t provide the type of insight that a VP of operations needs. Today’s IT environment is just too complex. You need higher-level insights that are possible with an IT performance system.

The Solution: Make BSM the Foundation of an IT Performance System

IT performance systems help tame IT complexity and allow you to stay true to your BSM objectives. They can offer comprehensive, real-time visibility into everything underpinning your business services. You can monitor not only the end-user experience (BSM), but the entire IT environment impacting and surrounding that service. That includes your network, infrastructure, applications and all network-edge devices—computers, smart phones, tablets, etc.

Building on your BSM capabilities with an IT performance system allows you to gain broader and deeper insights into your organization’s performance. For example, do you know which service has the most emergency RFCs? Or, which service costs you the most in the number of IT staff to support? These insights can help you work on IT as opposed to just in IT, proving your value to the business. An IT performance system gives IT leaders a method for systematically managing IT, while also providing the means to demonstrate IT’s value and contribution to the business. To be more specific, imagine an automated, dashboard-driven system that monitors your entire IT environment and provides real-time performance reports in the form of key performance indicators (KPIs).

You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure

Accurate, timely and meaningful KPIs are critical to making a performance system work. Without them there’s no way to measure how your organization is performing. From an IT leader’s perspective, this means understanding the overall health of an IT organization, revealed through KPIs like:

- cost reduction
- operations versus innovation investment
- business strategy alignment
- customer satisfaction
- percent of SLAs not met
- percent of “healthy” versus “unhealthy” projects
- average cost of IT service per customer

Key Capabilities in an IT Performance System

In order for an IT performance system to complement your current BSM efforts, it’s important that it have the right mix of core capabilities.

Comprehensive—an IT performance system needs to monitor and measure your entire IT environment, from the data center and network to your applications and mobile devices. And that includes all service-delivery models—on-premise, cloud and hybrid.

Digital and automated—to use performance information (KPIs) effectively, you need the ability to access and understand that information quickly. You can’t do that with manually-created reports in spreadsheets. Your system needs to be automated and digital.

Real time— to maintain business service quality and reliability, you must be able to prevent problems before they occur. So Like BSM, an IT performance system needs to be real-time. You need to know how your systems are performing at any given moment.

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...