In October, Neebula conducted a Business Service Management survey, covering 84 companies that have recently completed BSM projects. For quite some time we've been getting informal comments about the frustration with BSM results and wanted to check whether they were pointing to a pervasive problem. Based on the survey results, it definitely seems so.
The majority of BSM projects took too long to complete, did not succeed to maintain accurate service models, and most of all, failed to meet their objectives.
Here's a summary of our findings, and a few conclusions as a summary:
Survey Sweet Spot: 50-500 business services, 700-5000 servers
The majority of respondents (44%) have 1500-5000 servers in their data center. The next group (25%) manages 700-1500 servers. These data centers enable 50-100 business services (34%) or 100-500 services (31%).
Over 2 years to complete a BSM project
The duration of BSM projects was one of the most surprising findings. Over 50% said projects lasted more than 2 years (2-3 years, 21%; more than 3 years, 32%), and 33% gave up before achieving satisfactory results.
10 days to map a single business service
We drilled down to understand the reasons behind the unending projects and asked how long it took to model a single business service. The answer - 10.5 days. This was split so that 2.1 days were spent on information gathering and 8.4 days on definition and mapping. If you consider an organization with 100 business services, this explains the never-ending projects.
5% of service models remain accurate over time
Being aware of how changes are introduced to IT with virtualization and the cloud, we asked users to rate the accuracy of their service model over time. 42% responded that their model had 'significant deviation' and 40% described their model as 'not accurate.' There were only 5% who could define their service model as accurate.
Up to 100 IT changes on a weekly basis
We wanted to quantify the changes to IT environments, leading to the inability to maintain accurate service models. The majority (48%) reported they had 10-100 changes on a weekly basis.
Fewer than 10% of business services covered
With such long projects, we were curious about coverage. How many business services were covered by the BSM solution? Over half of the respondents (51%) reported that only 5% of their business services were successfully covered. 32% said that the coverage percentage of their total services was between 5 and 10%.
Conclusion – How to achieve better results
It seems that there is a reason behind the frustration with most BSM project implementations - companies invest significant efforts over a long period of time, yet see a limited return on investment.
What can you do to be more successful? Here are our top two pieces of advice:
Building a service map that accurately maps the dependencies between a business service and its IT components is a complex and tedious task, which is always underestimated. If done manually, the recommendation is to drastically limit your project scope. A more practical way is to automate the discovery process using a tool that can accurately map all components, regardless of the environment.
Maintaining a service model that is accurate and up-to-date should be at the top of your list. The rate of changes is simply overwhelming, so that only a model that is automatically updated with changes to configurations will enable a successful BSM project with real time insight and control.
About Yuval Cohen
Yuval Cohen, Neebula CEO, has over 20 years of experience in the high tech industry. Prior to co-founding Neebula, Yuval was Vice President of Marvell Semiconductor and General Manager of Marvell Software Solutions, Israel. In these roles he was responsible for Marvell's successful software strategy, including enterprise and consumer networking software. Cohen joined Marvell in 2003 through the company's acquisition of Radlan Ltd., where he served as Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering.
RELATED LINKS
Related Links:
Business Service Management survey
7 Practical Tips for a Successful Business Service Management (BSM) Implementation
The Latest
In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 5, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the network source of truth ...
A vast majority (89%) of organizations have rapidly expanded their technology in the past few years and three quarters (76%) say it's brought with it increased "chaos" that they have to manage, according to Situation Report 2024: Managing Technology Chaos from Software AG ...
In 2024 the number one challenge facing IT teams is a lack of skilled workers, and many are turning to automation as an answer, according to IT Trends: 2024 Industry Report ...
Organizations are continuing to embrace multicloud environments and cloud-native architectures to enable rapid transformation and deliver secure innovation. However, despite the speed, scale, and agility enabled by these modern cloud ecosystems, organizations are struggling to manage the explosion of data they create, according to The state of observability 2024: Overcoming complexity through AI-driven analytics and automation strategies, a report from Dynatrace ...
Organizations recognize the value of observability, but only 10% of them are actually practicing full observability of their applications and infrastructure. This is among the key findings from the recently completed Logz.io 2024 Observability Pulse Survey and Report ...
Businesses must adopt a comprehensive Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) strategy, says Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a leading IT analyst research firm. This strategy is crucial to bridge the significant observability gap within today's complex IT infrastructures. The recommendation is particularly timely, given that 99% of enterprises are expanding their use of the Internet as a primary connectivity conduit while facing challenges due to the inefficiency of multiple, disjointed monitoring tools, according to Modern Enterprises Must Boost Observability with Internet Performance Monitoring, a new report from EMA and Catchpoint ...
Choosing the right approach is critical with cloud monitoring in hybrid environments. Otherwise, you may drive up costs with features you don’t need and risk diminishing the visibility of your on-premises IT ...
Consumers ranked the marketing strategies and missteps that most significantly impact brand trust, which 73% say is their biggest motivator to share first-party data, according to The Rules of the Marketing Game, a 2023 report from Pantheon ...
Digital experience monitoring is the practice of monitoring and analyzing the complete digital user journey of your applications, websites, APIs, and other digital services. It involves tracking the performance of your web application from the perspective of the end user, providing detailed insights on user experience, app performance, and customer satisfaction ...
