Trend 16: Business outcomes become the new measure of service management

Organizations increasingly shift from IT SLAs to business KPIs. Most organizations face the watermelon effect, where their IT metrics appear green (positive) from outside, but the business is red (negative) inside due to unsatisfied end customers. Here, tools like HP BSM software can help define, monitor, and manage business SLAs. AIOps tools such as Moogsoft and BigPanda correlate IT metrics to business KPIs and forecast potential issues for proactive interventions. Firms can also use OKRs (shorthand for objectives and key results) to govern on business value outcomes. Here, objectives are the “whats” of the transformation, and key results are the “hows”. In a product-centric operating model, OKRs amplify service management by converting business objectives to key product KPIs. This alignment helps the team focus on outcomes, without losing the flexibility to manage their backlogs and roadmaps.

A large insurance company faced frequent issues with on-time adjudication of claims. Despite meeting IT SLAs, they were penalized for the issues. The company leveraged Infosys' Live Enterprise Application Management Platform to implement a business control center to define, monitor, and manage its business KPIs. The firm correlated metrics such as claims' auto adjudication rate with underlying IT disruptions, which helped them meet KPIs and prioritize and resolve any issues.