ITSM / BSM - can we make all this a bit easier to engage with?

I need to make this clear - we don't have the answers to the stuff I'm talking about below yet so this is almost an 'intro to an intro' of some interesting things we have in the pipeline, plus the current / recent musings of the FFD team while attending various events over the last few weeks.

The one that wound us up most recently was a discussion on the nature of BSM and ITSM - we tend to get into these discussions regularly as analysts, because some have their own definitions (which is fine) and want to tell the world about them (less fine if you have to sit through it) but whats least fine is when vendors show off their version / definition which doesn't really tally with the last vendors and so on and so on.

''Ours is bigger/better/broader because theirs is only a subset of ours''
(cue analyst in wind-up mode)
''OK but theirs has the word 'business' in the title so surely that's fundamentally more important given its actually all about making ones business work better?''
''Erm yeah but ours is more encompassing''

repeat a couple of times / go bang head against wall...

Anyway, this is really not life and death - just a minor irritation and indeed (see below) more importantly right now, almost academic for many organisations. Deciding on and sticking to a decent industry standard definition of BSM and to a lessor degree ITSM (we have lots of organisations including ITIL, ITSMF that do this already) and so on would be a good thing, but really whats needed is a way of ignoring the fact that 1. IT vendors have lots of products to sell and 2. a good way of doing so is by attaching them to terms so as to capture the spirit of them in the vendor's own terms, (its ok, these guys are running businesses after all) and point the definition back at the market:

What i mean by this is (to steal Jon Collins' understatement during the CA event last week) that ''we just need to agree that Business Service Management is all about managing business services, and IT Service Management is all about managing IT services''

That's actually rather good.

No vendors to confuse things, no conflicting points of view, nothing except what the customer actually needs:

What does your business do?
Whats most important / makes you different / better?
OK so lets prioritise these areas for improvement. If we treat them as consumable entities which need watching, controlling, measuring and monitoring and occasionally changing, we can help you out in making them work better - and by the way, we just defined your critical business services without even trying...

OK - so what IT components support these business services...guess what we call these..??
etc etc

you get the drift.

The other massive benefit of this is that it removes the worst thing that this area needs right now, and that's customer confusion. If important concepts like this are defined in terms of customers' own specific requirements and not the vendor's, we could take a small but significant step forwards.

This is a pretty hot space right now, not least due to the new ITIL release - even without that it would still be - but lets not kid ourselves - and this is aimed squarely at the vendor community - the majority of organisations' IT shops do NOT communicate in terms of 'services' to the business - Freeform has the data to prove this. Now, while this isn't a huge problem in itself, what it does mean is that the mainstream audience is one step removed from wholesale buy-in, so rather than getting stuck into a service-oriented mentality, and approaching all future management related IT investment from this position, vendors will a. struggle to get their points across to the right people (that's the IT guys and hopefully even some business guys too - in the interests of IT-business alignment!) and b. investment will likely continue piecemeal, which is basically adding more mess to an already pretty messy area.

Hence my final point, if vendors want their mainstream target audience to get to grips with all this service stuff then its time to stop pretending that everyone gets it and revisit some areas which need it. How hard can that be?

Like i said, this is the starting point for some very interesting work we have in the pipeline - so stick with us and lets see if we cant work out how to get this stuff from 'good idea' to 'stuff we all do', without having to bang our heads against the nearest wall.