- The real relationship of BSM and IAM January 23rd, 2008
-
BSM, e.g. Business Service Management, is one of today’s most important buzzwords in IT. It’s related to ITIL and ISO 20000, thus it is about managing IT and the IT processes. BSM is definitely more than the former systems management, but currently it is – in most cases – IT service management and not business service management. That’s because the focus is on IT services and not on business services.
Let me explain this in the context of IAM. If you use a virtual directory to define “identity storage services” which abstract the physical identity stores like directories from the applications you provide services. These can be managed in the BSM paradigm, following for example the ITIL v3 approaches. But in that case you provide IT services. A business service, in contrast, shall start at the business level. Take a contract and define how it is handled in IT. A business service defines proper contract handling, e.g. how it is stored, how it is archived, how information rights are applied to shield the contract, who is allowed to access it in which way and so on. Thus you could define such a business service which involves many different IT services. But in most cases, today’s business service management is far away from that level – it focuses on IT service management (ITSM), a buzzword which is used less often than BSM…
The second interesting aspect of relationship between IAM and BSM is about the question whether there is any advantage of buying IAM from the BSM vendor. There might be, for sure: Enterprise license contracts, sometimes familiar architectures and interfaces, trust in the vendor, and other advantages a single-vendor-strategy offers. But sometimes BSM vendors try to convince me that there are advantages due to the tight integration of their IAM offering in the BSM offering. That’s an interesting position. If there were such an advantage it could only be because the BSM doesn’t optimally integrate different existing technologies. But BSM has to support all the services from all systems, hasn’t it? Thus is should support identity services from any identity management solution, regardless of the vendor. A BSM for (only or mainly) a vendor’s own tools isn’t sufficient.
Given this, it might make sense to buy IAM from your BSM vendor because of the general advantages mentioned above. But it shouldn’t be because the BSM vendors IAM is the only one to be managed by the vendors BSM. Then you should rethink the BSM decision, honestly spoken.
This relationship and some other interesting aspects of the BSM market will be discussed on April 25th at the BSM forum which will be held first time as part of the European Identity Conference 2008 – a BSM forum which obviously is around BSM and IAM. More about the specific topics and the speakers to be announced soon…
