HP Business Service Management (BSM) Solutions: Real-Time Critical Business Data




Business service management can successfully link sales and operations to the IT services that support them, providing real-time critical business data, says HP's marketing manager EMEA, Ian Bromehead.

The Michelin brothers developed the pneumatic tyre and then won bike races for months on end. Their vision was facilitated by observation of the time wasted repairing cloth-based wheels, an innovative approach applying technology successfully, associated with fine commercial judgement.

So, just like the Michelin brothers, we think that observation is a key requirement in keeping your finger on the business pulse, before triggering teams into action and collaborating to increase the company's agility, flexibility and capacity to use change as a competitive advantage.

MONITORED PROCESSES

That is exactly what several customers have found by implementing HP Business Service Management (BSM) solutions, which provide a missing link in many organisations, through business process monitoring.

When sales are indirect and depend on channels, can you see your business processes end to end? Can you see when your customers are adversely impacted by high latency in your channel systems to provide the business service they need?

Telecommunications, banking, insurance, pharmaceutical and retail businesses, to name a few, are beginning to see the advantages provided by monitoring in real time their key business processes. While IT is progressively increasing its professionalism and capabilities to govern resources, the advantage is ensuring that delivery of services is linked solidly to business impact. That's the definition of BSM.

OPERATIONS BACKED BY IT

Your business operations, as well as IT service delivery teams, need to keep the finger on the business pulse, and they can do so using BSM. Not just another acronym, analysts agree that board-level executives can obtain strategic advantage by strongly linking the business operations to the IT services that support them.

BSM will typically provide outstanding visibility and the power to impact business operations as fast as real time:

  • Real-time dashboards that, up-front, provide just enough information on business operations through real-time KPI measurement
  • Real-time analysis of these operations compared with previous operational behaviour
  • Instant indication of service degradation correlated to the business impact and visibility of how customers are impacted
  • Root-cause analysis, allowing your teams to see which service has degraded, who's responsible and what corrective action is scheduled

UP-TO-THE-MINUTE KPIS

No doubt you have dashboards, balanced scorecards and reports from the data warehouse, and they are key to strategic planning. Imagine how exceptions could be avoided, initiatives taken and customers impacted, if information was able to show you and your business teams the actual key performance indicators as business transactions occur, and compare this to the reports that show how things occurred previously. Even experts in the leading business intelligence, data warehousing and mining domains see this need, which is why many of them have partnered with HP to provide this online visibility.

Though BSM is a new domain, there are already clear examples of where reduction in time-to-deliver, improved visibility of inventory movement, reduced order fulfilment times, detection of stale sales opportunities and vastly improved data synchronisation, among others, are multiplying very rapidly.

AWARD-WINNING SOLUTIONS

You might not traditionally think of HP as a supplier of such business management solutions. In actual fact, HP is a leader in providing management software, and has provided the means to supervise and administrate networks, systems and applications for more than 16 years. Customers, analysts and other experts agree that the approach HP is taking with HP BSM solutions is innovative and provides strong value – winning innovation prizes and awards, a gauge of the value these services have created.