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IT and Business Alignment: Has APM Evolved to Fulfill the Promise of BSM? Part 1

Sridhar Iyengar

Over the years, IT systems management has evolved dramatically. What started as monitoring just the network infrastructure via ping/telnet/SNMP has transformed into monitoring and managing multi-tier, geographically distributed IT infrastructures and applications deployed on physical and virtual environments as well as private, public and hybrid cloud environments.

Around a decade ago, Application Performance Management (APM) emerged as an independent category within systems management. APM enables one to measure and eventually ensure availability, response time, and integrity of critical application services used by the business, i.e., the consumers of the IT application services. A couple of years later, another IT management technology called Business Service Management (BSM) emerged to align IT with business objectives.

Now, interest in BSM is resurging as companies strive to make their IT departments more responsive to their business needs. Simultaneously, APM has also emerged stronger in the last few years to encompass a broader scope in IT management. This two-article series looks at the evolution of BSM and APM, the key drivers for both technologies, and how we're seeing them converge to fulfill the promise of aligning IT with business.

Enter BSM

In the last decade, IT teams were often left in the dark whenever a problem in the IT infrastructure led to the unavailability or poor responsiveness of an IT application service used by the organization's business process. The problem? The lack of mature IT processes and tools meant IT teams rarely had any insight into the impact of the problem on the business.

As a result, IT was often criticized for being not aligned with the needs of the business. This led to the coining of the term "business service" which was different from an IT service. A business service was defined as an IT service that was provided by the IT team to the business and that had an intrinsic financial value associated with it.

Any impact to a business service always had a financial implication, and it was all the C-level executives cared about. This led to the pursuit of the lofty goal of identifying, measuring and ensuring availability and response time of business services, aka Business Service Management (BSM).

BSM dynamically linked business-focused IT services to the underlying IT infrastructure. It was what the CIOs and IT heads of the time wanted to hear, and the marketeers served up BSM to them as the holy grail of IT.

BSM promised:

- Alignment of IT and business: BSM was typically sold to the C-level executives as "The Tool" - a magic pill that could automatically help them align IT with business. Numerous productivity numbers and terms such as "time to gather business insights" were thrown up to justify BSM purchases.

- Faster time to resolve problems: BSM users were touted to be an order of magnitude faster in isolating and diagnosing problems compared to those not using it.

- Easier implementation: Not only could BSM improve IT productivity and business profitability, it was also supposed to be a breeze to set up and automatically configure.

- Better TCO and ROI: IT operations would be able to reactively and proactively determine where they should be spending their time to best impact the business. The cost savings in faster troubleshooting and increased business profitability would justify the investment in BSM.

- Power and control for business owners: Business owners were promised visibility and control into what was happening and how it could be fixed.

BSM Oversold and Under Delivered

As organizations started gradually buying and using BSM products, they realized that those products required a lot of manual effort and complex procedures to work. It was not the plug-and-play solution that was originally promoted.

BSM was a term coined to fill the gap between businesses' needs and IT capabilities. When business failed to see the value in BSM, the BSM promises fell flat.

So why didn't BSM live up to expectations? Probably because:

- BSM did not truly reflect the financial impact of IT on business.

- BSM did not have automated, real-time updates to reflect the current status of IT. As IT changed, BSM systems would either have older data or require manual update of the status.

- There was no easy and automated way to capture all the dependencies of a business process on the underlying IT components. Capturing such details was complex and often inaccurate, and it required a lot of effort.

- BSM was probably ahead of its time. BSM-required technologies such as automated discovery and dependency mapping and end-user monitoring were not sufficiently matured at that time.

As originally brought to market, BSM solutions failed to deliver the coveted alignment of IT and business. However, the initial failure did little to discourage organizations from pursuing their goal.

In the second article of this two-part series, we will take a look at the rising popularity of APM and the resurgence of BSM as companies continue to seek alignment.

Read Part 2 of this article: IT and Business Alignment: Has APM Evolved to Fulfill the Promise of BSM? Part 2

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IT and Business Alignment: Has APM Evolved to Fulfill the Promise of BSM? Part 1

Sridhar Iyengar

Over the years, IT systems management has evolved dramatically. What started as monitoring just the network infrastructure via ping/telnet/SNMP has transformed into monitoring and managing multi-tier, geographically distributed IT infrastructures and applications deployed on physical and virtual environments as well as private, public and hybrid cloud environments.

Around a decade ago, Application Performance Management (APM) emerged as an independent category within systems management. APM enables one to measure and eventually ensure availability, response time, and integrity of critical application services used by the business, i.e., the consumers of the IT application services. A couple of years later, another IT management technology called Business Service Management (BSM) emerged to align IT with business objectives.

Now, interest in BSM is resurging as companies strive to make their IT departments more responsive to their business needs. Simultaneously, APM has also emerged stronger in the last few years to encompass a broader scope in IT management. This two-article series looks at the evolution of BSM and APM, the key drivers for both technologies, and how we're seeing them converge to fulfill the promise of aligning IT with business.

Enter BSM

In the last decade, IT teams were often left in the dark whenever a problem in the IT infrastructure led to the unavailability or poor responsiveness of an IT application service used by the organization's business process. The problem? The lack of mature IT processes and tools meant IT teams rarely had any insight into the impact of the problem on the business.

As a result, IT was often criticized for being not aligned with the needs of the business. This led to the coining of the term "business service" which was different from an IT service. A business service was defined as an IT service that was provided by the IT team to the business and that had an intrinsic financial value associated with it.

Any impact to a business service always had a financial implication, and it was all the C-level executives cared about. This led to the pursuit of the lofty goal of identifying, measuring and ensuring availability and response time of business services, aka Business Service Management (BSM).

BSM dynamically linked business-focused IT services to the underlying IT infrastructure. It was what the CIOs and IT heads of the time wanted to hear, and the marketeers served up BSM to them as the holy grail of IT.

BSM promised:

- Alignment of IT and business: BSM was typically sold to the C-level executives as "The Tool" - a magic pill that could automatically help them align IT with business. Numerous productivity numbers and terms such as "time to gather business insights" were thrown up to justify BSM purchases.

- Faster time to resolve problems: BSM users were touted to be an order of magnitude faster in isolating and diagnosing problems compared to those not using it.

- Easier implementation: Not only could BSM improve IT productivity and business profitability, it was also supposed to be a breeze to set up and automatically configure.

- Better TCO and ROI: IT operations would be able to reactively and proactively determine where they should be spending their time to best impact the business. The cost savings in faster troubleshooting and increased business profitability would justify the investment in BSM.

- Power and control for business owners: Business owners were promised visibility and control into what was happening and how it could be fixed.

BSM Oversold and Under Delivered

As organizations started gradually buying and using BSM products, they realized that those products required a lot of manual effort and complex procedures to work. It was not the plug-and-play solution that was originally promoted.

BSM was a term coined to fill the gap between businesses' needs and IT capabilities. When business failed to see the value in BSM, the BSM promises fell flat.

So why didn't BSM live up to expectations? Probably because:

- BSM did not truly reflect the financial impact of IT on business.

- BSM did not have automated, real-time updates to reflect the current status of IT. As IT changed, BSM systems would either have older data or require manual update of the status.

- There was no easy and automated way to capture all the dependencies of a business process on the underlying IT components. Capturing such details was complex and often inaccurate, and it required a lot of effort.

- BSM was probably ahead of its time. BSM-required technologies such as automated discovery and dependency mapping and end-user monitoring were not sufficiently matured at that time.

As originally brought to market, BSM solutions failed to deliver the coveted alignment of IT and business. However, the initial failure did little to discourage organizations from pursuing their goal.

In the second article of this two-part series, we will take a look at the rising popularity of APM and the resurgence of BSM as companies continue to seek alignment.

Read Part 2 of this article: IT and Business Alignment: Has APM Evolved to Fulfill the Promise of BSM? Part 2

Hot Topics

The Latest

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...

In March, New Relic published the State of Observability for Media and Entertainment Report to share insights, data, and analysis into the adoption and business value of observability across the media and entertainment industry. Here are six key takeaways from the report ...

Regardless of their scale, business decisions often take time, effort, and a lot of back-and-forth discussion to reach any sort of actionable conclusion ... Any means of streamlining this process and getting from complex problems to optimal solutions more efficiently and reliably is key. How can organizations optimize their decision-making to save time and reduce excess effort from those involved? ...

As enterprises accelerate their cloud adoption strategies, CIOs are routinely exceeding their cloud budgets — a concern that's about to face additional pressure from an unexpected direction: uncertainty over semiconductor tariffs. The CIO Cloud Trends Survey & Report from Azul reveals the extent continued cloud investment despite cost overruns, and how organizations are attempting to bring spending under control ...

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