By Lamont Wood

BSM In The Mainstream
Business Service Management, or BSM, has become a widely accepted method of improving service while lowering costs. In fact, more than half of IT organizations either use BSM or plan to do so over the next 12 months, according to market watchers IDC.

Why the rush? Because BSM helps CIOs move from process standardization to business-driven procedures. That’s what technology investment is really all about, says Stephen Elliot, Research Director at IDC’s enterprise software service. With BSM, basic infrastructure services are managed through a central automated facility. This simplifies everything, Elliot explains.

“BSM pushes the boundaries of proactive management, automatically identifying problems and triggering automated responses,” he says. “This lets IT professionals discuss the business aspect of a problem.”

BSM users see cost savings, too. The average BSM user can avoid hiring additional administrative staff, since existing staff can be more productive — even in the face of growing infrastructure. Potential soft savings include fewer trouble tickets, improved customer relations and more efficient delivery of IT services.

In the IDC survey, conducted October 2007, IT professionals were asked to identify the most important areas for BSM. Their top choices: IT process workflow automation (cited by nearly 40 percent), business application management (35 percent), service/help desk (35 percent) and infrastructure performance (35 percent).

A Center for Innovation
Adding value for customers and innovating compelling new products are the two driving forces behind CA’s recent decision to open a $30 million, state-of-the-art technology center in Hyderabad, India.

The 30-acre India Technology Center (ITC) campus opened in October 2007 and accommodates more than 1,600 employees and nearly 20 product-development labs. About a third of CA’s R&D workforce for distributed products is located at the ITC, as is one of the solution provider’s five global data centers.

But the ITC’s main objective is customer value. “We will accelerate the development for our existing products, and we will launch innovations,” says Lokesh Jindal, a CA Senior VP and General Manager who heads the ITC. “Value is the goal.”

The ITC is already a source of innovation. Its employees have either filed or are in the process of filing for many U.S. patents. “The ITC increases our overall capacity to focus on R&D and customer support,” Jindal says. “We can develop more, and leverage expertise to better support existing products.”

ITC software engineers will work on multiple CA product lines that will help customers govern, manage and secure IT more effectively and cost-efficiently — enabling them to adapt dynamically to changing business demands and optimize technology investments. The ITC team will also work closely with several of India’s top-tier system integrators, helping them to meet both their own IT needs and those of their customers worldwide.

Top CIO Challenge: Recruitment
Recruitment and retention are the biggest challenges facing CIOs, according to a recent survey by the Society for Information Management (SIM). The reason: CIOs find themselves caught in an HR perfect storm, with baby boomers starting to retire, fewer computer-science graduates emerging from the nation’s schools, and greater demand for IT services. The result: more vacant jobs than CIOs can fill.

Fixing the problem may seem a simple matter of increasing computer science enrollments. But the remedy would be years away, says Jerry Luftman, Associate Dean at Stevens Institute of Technology and the author of the SIM survey. “We have to get word out to young people and their advisors about the strong demand in IT. A career in IT is clearly the place to be.”

Luftman also called on IT programs to Offer more training in such “soft” skills as business, management, negotiation, marketing and presentations. That’s because these nontechnical issues appeared prominently on SIM’s list of top CIO challenges.

TOP CIO CHALLENGES

1. Attracting, developing and retaining IT professionals
2. Aligning IT with business requirements
3. Building business skills in IT
4. Reducing costs
5. Improving IT quality

DATA: Society for Information Management June 2007 survey of 112 CIOs