The speed and cultural expectations inherent in the Internet economy have created a business culture that requires unprecedented agility to remain viable, let alone profitable. This has dramatically increased the pressure on CIOs to transform their organization, causing downstream impacts on IT providers searching for ways to optimize how they process requests and deliver service.
These same market pressures have caused the IT industry to undergo its own profound shifts. Unfortunately, CIOs may feel unable to make the right investments quickly enough to meet customer demand and improve time to market. This is often the result of not having the proper tools or processes in place to efficiently and confidently take action.
In the majority of organizations, information owners are managed by various departments (Business, Architecture, Operations, Service Delivery, etc.) and store data in a non-structured format (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, VISIO diagrams, PDFs, etc.). This creates the challenge of not having a single, “true” data source, and it prevents CIOs from having a quick method to know the total cost of ownership (TCO) of any given business service.
Organizations can overcome these challenges by understanding the systems landscape and engaging in business service mapping. This practice can also help CIOs make quick investment decisions that improve their ability to meet customers’ demands for new or enhanced products and services.
How to Begin Business Service Mapping
The first step is to design the architecture with a clear statement of requirements from all key stakeholders (service providers and service consumers). The process and system architecture must also be standardised, ensuring data modelling reflects “outcomes” for each stakeholder’s mapping.
Companies should map each business service to the correct business owners and note dependencies to other areas. All information owners must fully understand others’ requirements for key stakeholder data consumers, and they must agree to a data model that works across business services.
Business services should be grouped based on criticality. For example, a company may segment services into Mission Critical, Business Critical and Development Critical categories. From there, the company can develop applications associated with each business service, ensuring that upstream and downstream applications are connected with other business areas. This will help companies understand end-to-end business services, and it will clarify the potential impact of any change to the business-services landscape.
All Application to associate with Microservice’s, Server hosting type (On-Premises, Cloud IaaS, PaaS, SaaS etc.), Environment type (Development, System Test, System Integration Testing, User Acceptance Testing, Pre-Production, Production and Disaster recovery.
All servers to include, business server function (Application, dBase, Middleware etc.), OS platform, Software stack, Location, Hardware server specification, hardware model, End of life, End of Support, Network and Firewall, Interfaces to upstream and downstream servers, support owners (internally and externally) , application owners, business owners.
Before finalising the Business product service mappings, ensure that the business services include TCO (Total Cost Ownership) and data dependencies mapping to outbound businesses services and server and inbound business service and server mapping, ensuring correct alignment with services providers’ internal and external to lines of business (LOB).
The most important key lesson to takeaway is:
- Having clear Business product servicing mapping
- Know cost for running service
- Allows CIO to make quick investment decision in the correct product and services
- Working Agile way