Have you ever had a problem with productivity at your work? I'm sure
you have. Bad day, malfunction in air conditioning, your boss' bad day,
maybe some private situations at home. How about your IT tools? Right -
your desktop computer slowness, breaking network, your mail client
blocked by mail size reaching up your tiny quota maximum, your support
team not responding your requests immediately. Your dependencies. You
have your pretty gantt chart for your project, created in your favourite
PM tool and it's all for nothing if something is impacting your
productivity.
Productivity is - I dare to
say so - everything in your work. It's the key. You do want your work
done. There's always something to do, new tasks and new projects, so you
better make it done as soon as possible. There's life outside work too -
your family and friends, your hobbies, your free time, your duties at
home, your vacations. You want to deal with all weaknesses you have, all
dependencies you don't control and all tasks you simply can do but need
time in the best manner and quick. You'll feel passion to some of your
tasks, you'll feel mission or duty to some others, you'll feel some bad
things about the rest - but no matter what you feel, you're paid to do
your job. And get the bill.
Life is short.
Life is quick. Life is brutal. You've got a high priority task to do -
you won't feel much interested in anything else. You'll not admire your
new laptop computer you're given to upgrade from your old box until
you're done - who would like to stuck in a migration process in between
using two computers: one too new to have all applications you need yet
and the other too old and slow to be used anymore. It's like you know
you're going to get your new car soon, the old scrap stinks in garage,
you kind of don't want to use the oldie but the new one isn't really
available yet. Stuck. That's your feeling.
I
don't really want to spend much time on discussing productivity issues
and solutions here. I think I made my point. We all know them. They're
everywhere, so in BSM.
BSM gives you information on your
applications you're responsible for (somehow, let's assume that's your
role) before you really know something went bad. You want to know
proactively. You want to know the root cause and have a solution. An
automated script solving your application's issues or a team in order to
delegate to solving the issue for good. A process. I mean - you do not
have got just one application to deal with, do you? There must be a
pattern to follow every time new issue arise! There must be a way for
sorting out those thousands critical events! You don't want to open
thousands of incidents!
How to make things easier? Is there a way? Is there a quick solution? Is there one for all times?
In
order to be productive here, the answers must be Yes. But how? How to
make sure my applications are good enough shape to serve my business
services to users within SLA margins? Notice - I didn't say: for 99%. I
said: good enough. So people using them stay productive. Can do work
they're paid for. On time. Good enough. Does such a KPI exist? If yes,
then how to measure it? Well, every technology has another methodology
to measure performance. But does the sum of satisfactory KPIs equal to
end user satisfaction? What if he complains? Will you say: it works for
me?
BSM puts priority to services you
offer. That's what count. Is the client happy? Does he or she have any
reason to complain about not met SLA conditions? Is he or she stuck?
Does your infrastructure offer any redundancy? Have you started using
it? How much are you reactive vs. proactive and how long has your
application's time to recovery been recently? How much have your
application's outages fit into allowed maintenance windows recently?
No
wonders - the miracles won't happen, you won't be 100% ready in 100%
cases. But then - can you explain what happened, present a recovery plan
or a solution or an improvement to avoid issues in future?
Can
you do all of that? Can you do that with one tool? One UI at least? Do
you maintain your service or application model up to date to know its
gaps and weaknesses? Do you have your event catalog? An overall outage
report? Not resource oriented but the whole service oriented? Are you
service oriented? Are you productive yourself in learning about status
of your service you're responsible for?
This
is BSM. It might be referred to as an APM in some cases. Whatever you
call it: it needs to address your use cases but since there's no magical
way to put all service dependencies together but by creating a service
model - you need one. You need a template in case your model is
something repeatable to use. You need to spend some time on bringing one
to life. And find a way to keep it up to date, so it works for you, it
informs you of all aspects of your applications quick and precise. So
you stay productive.
