Total Cost of Ownership of BPPM - Part 2: Customization

BPPM out-of-box solution provides basic monitoring features, so do many other low-priced and open-source monitoring solutions.  The reason you have paid a premium price for BPPM is not just for the brand name, it is for its flexibility to customize the solution to fit your unique business requirements exactly.  That is how you can fully realize the ROI from BPPM. 

Your implementation is not just installation and configuration.  Every enterprise IT ended up customizing BPPM - some did it well planned but some did it as a rescue mission. I have been to enough rescue mission to tell you that a well planned customization will cost you far less time, money, and headache.

One of the major components that will largely affect total cost of ownership is customization.  How can customization affect your total cost of ownership?

1) Negatively, it costs you extra time and money in your implementation project.

2) Positively, it adds the functionaries that your business requires to improve your business bottom line.

3) More positively, it reduces the work in maintenance/operations through automation and consistency so you need a smaller operations team - that is a big cost saving year after year.

Many people might think customization increases maintenance/operations work.  Well, that would be the case if customization were not done right.  I have seen some clean customization that streamlined maintenance/operations work.  I have also seen some messy customization that simply became maintenance nightmare.  Similar to the customization made in your house, if the customization follows standards and consistency, it will reduce maintenance/operations work.  A simple example would be a customization you do to the light switches in your house that allows you to control all lights through a mobile app remotely.  We will talk about standards and consistency in later posts.

Not only you need to budget extra time and money for customization in your implementation project, you also need to hire the right developer for customization because customization is primarily code development and it requires totally different skill set from installation.

Unfortunately customization is often under-addressed by both BMC and BMC customers.  BMC just tells you that BPPM is totally customizable without providing you the necessary training and best practice on customization.  BMC customers are aware of the need for customization but have no solid understanding what detailed features/automation they need and what it takes to get there.

As a consulting practice for the last 12 years, we specialize in BPPM customization.  Please feel free to contact us if we can be any assistance for your BPPM customization.  We also provide training in BPPM customization including advanced MRL programming and PSL programming that are not available in BMC.