Business Technology Optimization. Not everyone ready for it...

HP Software's direction is BTO (a term evolved from 'bussiness services management') that became a hot topic these days with the acquisition of Mercury. Starting from Infrastructure management and then off to service management the next logical step is business service management but I firmly believe that unless you have graduated the infrastructure and service management school, then you are not ready for business service management. A number of our customers are monitoring the IT infrastructure and services from the business point of view (meaning linking the infrastructure to the service and then managing the end service with monitoring, reporting and support). These kind of customers get into the business processs by monitoring the parts of the process. E.g. for banking payment systems there is a flow of the business process to accept for example utility payments either through on-line banking, ATM and other payment machines, process the payment and inform core banking, and other external systems and/or agencies of the payment status. Mercury has great tools to help us map application interaction and monitor the flow between them, which will help with the manual process we currently use to get people in a room and try to map the application flows on a whiteboard. How fast then can an organization move to BTO? That varies significantly, depending on a number of factors but unless these projects (infrastructure, service management) are backed by the top IT management then the expect a very slow pace graduating the ITIL arena with little projects that will win concensus and then move on to BTO.
George