Discussing what is a route to value, anyway?
I just started on a Routes To Value writing team this summer, and I had a lot to read just to try to wrap my head around a route to value. What is a route to value? Why were they created?
A Route To Value is basically a bite-sized, somewhat more manageable chunk of Business Service Management (BSM), showing you a way to attain BSM value according to your organization’s primary pain points. Trying to tackle all of these IT goals at once was overwhelming, to both our sales force and our customers. IT folks were asking, “Good grief, where do I start? I have this set of problems to solve, show me how. I can’t even think about implementing BSM until I get some of these other annoying recurring problems out of the way.”
Whether your organization is chaotic, reactive, or proactive, you can find value along the route, no matter what path you choose first. You can enter any route you want, focusing on the problems that plague your IT group the most.
This discovery along any route to value is what I’m calling an “Ah ha” use, similar to Real Simple magazine’s column on the same. Got only a sock to spare on board with you on a flight to the moon? As seen on the movie Apollo 13, one of the items they used to adapt their square filter into the round receptacle is a sock.
Here’s an example of an Ah ha use from BMC’s IT department. They needed to bring several databases into compliance for Sarbanes-Oxley audits. They are using BMC SQL-BackTrack for Oracle and BMC SQL-BackTrack for Microsoft SQL Server, but they found they could use BMC Remedy Asset Management to actually go out and look for the data sources that needed backing up. Ah ha! While database backup and recovery is along the Infrastructure and Application Management Route to Value, they discovered that an Asset Mangement and Discovery Route to Value helped them on their journey to their goal.
What “Ah ha” uses have you found for your software tools lately?