Over the past few years IT organizations have become more focused on effectively defining and reporting against business services. However there is some confusion around what constitutes a business service and what constitutes a technical service. What are the differences and where do we, as IT professionals, draw the line between? More importantly, how do we explain the difference to the business?

The advantages of the top-down approach can be significant. As a consultant, one of the common themes that I hear from clients (both business and IT) is that IT is not aligned with the business; the IT department has no idea what we (the business) really do. Conversely, in many cases the business has no transparency into IT. In other words, IT cannot provide the business with the metrics that can assist with establishing the IT value proposition. Business Service Management (or Business Services Management), if executed correctly can build the bridge between IT and the business. This is achieved by providing transparency into the services that the business depends on and IT having a greater understanding of the business. More importantly BSM can provide a more stable, cost-effective and robust service. For example, a transaction that is generated by a web order experiences a service interruption due to the web server being unavailable. The interruption impact could manifest itself as latency or an actual outage. In either case, BSM can provide IT with understanding of the criticality of the issue resulting in a more targeted and timely response. In addition, both executives and IT staff can have visibility of cost of the incident.

There are a number of ways to approach Business Service Management (or Business Services Managment). Two of the most common are the top-down and the bottom-up approaches. The top-down approach starts at the business process layer and works down the stack while the bottom-up approach starts at the technical CI layer and works up the stack. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages. In this blog I will focus on the top-down approach, at a high level. As a note, I am not endorsing the top-down approach, but rather reviewing some of the main characteristics, advantages and disadvantages.