A “balanced scorecard” method is disclosed for determining degrees of
impact on business service elements (BSE's) caused by degradations of configuration items (CI's) in an underlying IT
system. The formulas are used by an
Impact Calculation Engine (ICE) of a Business Services Management (BSM)
system. They provide enhanced accuracy by accounting for “service aspects” of alerts (using categories such as performance, availability, security,
end user, capacity, and financial) and / or degrees of CI degradation (in some embodiments using OSI Standards). The method eliminates manual assignment of degrees of
impact. Preferred embodiments convert alerts to a common alert format, determine a separate degree of
impact for each service aspect, and use default formulas when custom formulas are not provided. Some embodiments use a service subscription
wizard to at least partly automate the assignment of CI-to-BSE relationships. Different balanced scorecards can apply to the same BSE at different times, dates, usage levels, etc.