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
The consequences of outages have become a pressing issue as the largest IT outage in history continues to rock the world with severe ramifications ... According to the Catchpoint Internet Resilience Report, these types of disruptions, internet outages in particular, can have severe financial and reputational impacts and enterprises should strongly consider their resilience ...
Everyday AI and digital employee experience (DEX) are projected to reach mainstream adoption in less than two years according to the Gartner, Inc. Hype Cycle for Digital Workplace Applications, 2024 ...
When an IT issue is not handled correctly, not only is innovation stifled, but stakeholder trust can also be impacted (such as when there's an IT outage or slowdowns in performance). When you add new technology investments and innovations into the mix, you have a recipe for disaster ...
To get a better understanding of the top issues facing IT teams in financial services, Auvik recently released its 2024 Financial Services IT Trends Report ... Not surprisingly, the experience of FinServ IT teams is significantly impacted by the onslaught of cyberattacks facing financial services organizations as well as the complex regulatory environment of this industry ...
The CrowdStrike outage serves as a potent illustration of the risks associated with complex security environments. Enterprises are increasingly advised to consider simpler, more robust solutions that do not rely heavily on reactive security measures ...
When IT leaders started telling Enterprise Management Associates (EMA™) more than a year ago that their personnel were using premium ChatGPT subscriptions to create device configs and automation scripts, we knew the industry was on the verge of a revolution ...
The rapid rise of creative "right-brain" generative AI (GenAI) has opened the door to greater adoption of the more analytical "left-brain" AI decisioning solutions by global businesses, according to new research from Pegasystems ...
The majority of executives (61%) are harnessing the power of generative AI, with at least one application in production, and among these early adopters, 86% of those reported an increase in revenue, estimated at more than 6%, according to new global research from Google Cloud ...
Optimizing the performance of applications remains a top challenge for most organizations, particularly when those applications are spread across a hybrid IT estate that includes core, public cloud, and edge. Even if there were a magic performance wand, organizations would still need to know there was a problem and then do something about it — at Internet speed ...
According to Forrester's The Top 10 Emerging Technologies In 2024 report, generative AI (genAI) for visual content, genAI for language, TuringBots, and IoT security are the top emerging technologies that will deliver the most immediate ROI for businesses in 2024 and beyond ...