When Salesforce.com had an outage earlier this year, Paul Rubens at ServerWatch wrote that the response from the community was ridiculous and that just about all enterprise applications are unavailable occasionally. He also adds that the moment things do go wrong, CEO Marc Benioff cracks the whip and unleashes a truck-load of techies to scurry around and fix things as quickly as they can. I don’t know if Paul is an IT guy but his post reminded me of a friend – a typical technology focused IT operations guy. Let’s call him “Joe the (Server) Plumber”! Almost every IT organization today has their own equivalent of Joe the (Server) Plumber who is usually an expert on technology. However Joe never understands why the CEO gets worked up and angry whenever an enterprise application fails. Meanwhile the CEO hopes that someday people like Joe understand that the business is losing money and the trust of customers and that it’s not just a Hard-disk read error or a MS-SQL cache problem that was promptly fixed in 6 hours! This is exactly what Business Service Management (BSM) is all about and it is pretty easy to see the benefits if BSM can indeed solve the problem. But how ? The first step in addressing this problem is visibility. Joe needs to see the problem the way the CEO sees it. See the two charts below 
The chart above shows what Joe is seeing today. CRM Server availability is around 30% in a week. The chart below tells Joe that the company is losing $242K per week because of the failure of CRM. 
At ManageEngine we believe that if we empower Joe by giving him visibility into the Business Impact of an IT failure, Joe will be able to do different things to improve the efficiency of IT Operations. (Update : Thanks to Doug McClure who was the first person I came across with a clear understanding of the goal of BSM. ) And with ManageEngine IT360 you can get started with what is now known as “Common Sense BSM”. If you have a Joe in your organization you can empower them by downloading ManageEngine IT360. You can also see a live demo here. Even after all this, Joe still needs to understand that when everything is working fine, nobody is going to call him and thank him. Welcome to IT, Joe 🙂 
Hi Doug,
Please accept my apologies. I’ve have updated the blog with the well deserved credit. Thanks for bringing it to my notice.
Girish
“At ManageEngine we believe that if we empower Joe by giving him visibility into the Business Impact of an IT failure, Joe will be able to do different things to improve the efficiency of IT Operations. And with ManageEngine IT360 you can get started with what we call “Common Sense BSM”.”
C’mon Girish, give me credit there…
Think, Operate and Respond Different, Common Sense BSM, BSM Lite, whatever we want to call it… it’s all about the simple things we can do to get every level within a company thinking, operating and responding differently than they would have if they didn’t have the contextual information about how something impacts the business goals and objectives. BSM 101 here!
Doug
BSM/ITSM Blog: http://dougmcclure.net
I wrote about this very thing last May on a site that I used to contribute to. Here is the way that you get Joe the (Server) Plumber to start down the road to understand the business impact of outages etc.
http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/michaelkeen/archive/2008/05/31/get-from-it-business-quot-alignment-quot-to-it-business-quot-integration-quot.aspx
Cheers
Michael Keen
Business and Technology Agility analyst
DABCC.com