BSM Appliance?
Posted by Yesudas Jayson Kurisinkal
In December, while the entertainment critics were busy compiling their lists of Top music albums and Top movies of 2008, I was toying with the idea of making a year-end list of ITSM tools. But, as my hands-on experience is limited to specific tools in the industry, I felt that my list would be biased. However, I found a coherent list of the BSM winners and losers of 2008 on Doug McClure’s blog. Not surprisingly, Mr. McClure gives the Best ITSM concept of the year award to BSM Lite.
Much debate has already happened over getting rid of the complexity in ITSM tools. As fellow blogger Arvind asked – will you end up having a CMDB for your CMDB? Let’s not go there - let’s not make ITSM an Ourobouros.
Among our clients, as in the industry, the fear of customizing the ITSM tool was more pronounced during the period 2007-08. Organizations realized the difficulty in carrying over the customizations in a version upgrade, let alone the effort in maintaining it. Some of them even had to migrate (build a new platform with latest version and migrate the data) instead of doing an upgrade; in some cases even suggested by the vendors. One good thing though - this gave an opportunity for the organizations to get rid of their primitive processes and become more compliant with ITIL.
Customization or Configuration? We need to clearly differentiate between these two. While implementing a tool, the requirements laid out by the organization should be classified into configurable requirements and customizable ones; the latter have to be thoroughly reviewed and justified. This exercise can be carried out only with a thorough understanding of the tool features. If you been in this domain for some years, you might have already seen that yesterday’s customization might have become today’s configuration! A perfect example for this would be the multi-tenancy option. While we struggled to implement this in shared ITSM platforms earlier, it has become a one touch configurable option in some of the recent tool releases.
Coming back to the concept of BSM Lite, what makes BSM products heavy, other than the pricing? Some reasons could be:
- Complex product architecture - as most vendors developed a BSM portfolio by a series of product acquisitions, or on the fly feature additions
- Integrations – number of interfaces and “integration engines” bundled with the product
- Duplication of features – for most products, this is mostly visible in the reporting functionality.
Having a Lite tool (in terms of cost and functionality) instead of a heavy one, is not entirely a new idea. BMC Software, for instance, already had an “Express” series of ITSM products, BMC ITSM Express (based on former Magic); but as the website clearly says, it is for mid-size organizations. That poses another challenge – If we have a Lite tool for a large organization, will it scale up?
What do you think the tool vendors should do to achieve BSM Lite?
