Finally, proof that there are people out there that understand what a BSM dashboard is supposed to deliver.
Recently, BSMdigest published Five Dashboard Must-Haves for BSM, by Steve Tack of Compuware. What he has to say are guiding concepts anyone delivering BSM (or any reasonable facimile thereof) should follow.
Pay particular attention to his comments about "role-relevant views". So many of the screens I see assume the viewer is a technician; an international webcast from a major vendor yesterday showed screens that were nearly all technical in nature.
All of this misses the point entirely. If we are not going to deliver information a business manager can understand, why do we call it "Business Service Management" in the first place?
The technical information is necessary, as it answers the "Why?" question, as in "Why is my widget factory out of commission?".
However, BSM is not about the "Why?", it is about the "What?". The goal is to take the information we have about the monitored technology elements, and translate that into the impact on the business, otherwise known as the "What?".
BSM helps us understand that the widget factory is what is out of commission, and the reason why is that the supply chain order inventory server went down due to a process failure.
Furthermore, this idea of "What?" is entirely relative, since it is based on who you the viewer are. Since BSM is not a solution we deliver to a systems administrator, why do we insist on demonstrating, building, and delivering dashboards whose top-level view requires those skills just to get started? (It gets worse from there.)
Notice the "What?" part of this is a "widget factory". That is an entity the business manager understands on so many levels, and one that may have no meaning at all to a technician.
Dashboards should present initial views which make sense to the business management audience, then provide additional detail if the viewer wants or needs to know more. This is the correct way to get to the "Why?" information.
Next, we'll discuss the underlying reasons this information is relevant to the business manager. You already know the reasons, but you may not have thought to orient your dashboard to show you the information that makes it all possible.
At Epsilogix, we understand all this, and we know how to deliver it, because we've done it before. If you find yourself confused by what we (and Steve Tack) are talking about, or wonder about the difference between what you've been seeing everywhere and what we are talking about here, call us. The difference will open your eyes.
