The other day Martin Atherton over at our partner Freeform Dynamics got me thinking again about the IT service management (ITSM) / application management / business service management (BSM) hoopla we've long been saddled with in the IT industry.

I can absolutely see why vendors would want to try and avoid being seen as "just" providers of ITSM tools and make themselves look more ‘businessy’. It's another example of the stack race phenomenon you see in so many areas—development tools, middleware, etc—and the simple idea is that if you can make your offering look and sound as if it can help customers talk more effectively to businesspeople, it's better than an offering that is a bit oily under the fingernails.

And I absolutely believe there's a place for tools that can help customers explain the value of IT investments in a way that makes sense to the people who pay the bills.

The problem is that the vast majority of the technology and practice out there does nothing of the sort—at least not without the expenditure of a lot of blood, sweat and tears. To characterise the ITSM/app management/BSM "stack" probably crassly unfairly, all that happens as you move higher up the stack is that events and alerts are correlated at ever more abstract levels. Events from routers, servers and switches are aggregated to give higher-level views of health and performance of infrastructure; infrastructure events are correlated with stats from DBMS instances, application servers, web servers and more to give higher-level views of health and performance of "applications"; and information at the application level can sometimes be aggregated further.

But fundamentally all we're doing is reporting on more chunky technology outcomes. The outcomes we're reporting on are still technology outcomes. The insight is about performance, uptime, security, and so on. There is no business context.

I could argue that we do have technology that can help provide business context to ITSM, app management and BSM—business activity monitoring (BAM). But to focus first on technology is missing the point.

The real underlying point is that to really manage services that make sense in a business context, the whole mindset of the IT organisation has to be turned inside out. IT organisations have to stop focusing so much on internal perspectives of process improvement and efficiency (are we doing things right?), and start focusing a bit more on a more external perspective (are we doing the right things?)

To pursue this idea of "inside out IT" into the software development realm, let's not forget—as I said to an audience of CIOs last night—you can be at CMMi level x and still not guarantee that the things you do will drive business value; instead you can turn out irrelevant systems, but in a very predictable way.