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Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect. Today, we present a sponsored podcast panel discussion on how rapidly advancing IT service management (ITSM) capabilities form an IT imperative, and therefore a bedrock business necessity.
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| Gardner |
The good news is that a new wave of ITSM technologies and methods allow for a more rapid ITSM adoption -- and that means better rapid support of agile business processes.
To help us explore a practical guide to fast ITSM adoption as a foundation for overall business agility, please join me in welcoming our panel, John Stagaman, Principal Consultant at Advanced MarketPlace based in Tampa, Florida. Welcome, John.
John Stagaman: Hello.
Gardner: We're also here with Philipp Koch, Managing Director of InovaPrime, Denmark. Welcome, Philipp.
Philipp Koch: Thanks.
Gardner: And lastly, we are here with Erik Engstrom, the CEO of Effectual Systems in Berkeley, California. Welcome, Erik.
Erik Engstrom: Good morning, Dana. Glad to be here.
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Stagaman: If we think back to the typical IT management project historically, what happened was that, very often, you would buy a product. You would have your requirements and you would spend a year or more tailoring and customizing that product to meet your internal vision of how it should work. At the end of that, it may not have resembled the product you bought. It may not have worked that well, but it met all the stakeholders’ requirements and roles, and it took a long time to deploy.
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| Stagaman |
It was a lesson learned by IT organizations. Today, saying that it will take a year to upgrade, or it will take six months to upgrade, really gets a response. Why should it? There's been a change in the way it’s approached with most of the customers we go on-site to now. Customers say we want to use out of box, it used to be, we want to use out of box, and sometimes it still happens that they say, and here’s all the things we want that are not out of box.
But they've gotten much better at saying they want to start from out of box, leverage that, and then fill in the gaps, so that they can deploy more quickly. They're not opening the box, throwing it away, and building something new. By working on that application foundation and extending where necessary, it makes support easier and it makes the upgrade path to future versions easier.
Moving faster
Gardner: It sounds like moving toward things like commodity hardware and open-source projects and using what you can get as is, is part of this ability to move faster. But is it the need to move faster that’s driving this or the ability to reduce customization? Is it a chicken and egg? How does that shape up?
Engstrom: I think that the old use case of "design, customize, and implement" is being forced out as an acceptable approach, because SaaS, platform as a service (PaaS), and the cloud are driving the ability for stakeholders. Stakeholders are retiring, and fresher sets of technologies and experiences are coming in. These two- and three-year standup projects are not acceptable.
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| Engstrom |
Gardner: Philipp, how do you come down on this? Is this about doing less customization or doing customization later in the process and, therefore, more quickly?
Koch: I don't think it's about the customization element in itself. It is actually more that, in the past, customers reacted. They said they wanted to tailor the tool, but then they said they wanted this and they took the software off the shelf and started to rebuild it.
Now with the SaaS tool offerings coming into play, you can’t do that anymore. You can't build your ITSM solution from scratch. You want be able to take it according to use case and adjust it with customization or configuration. You don’t want to be able to tailor.
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| Koch |
Gardner: Let’s just unpack a little bit the relationship between ITSM and IT agility. Obviously, we want things to move quickly and be more predictable, but what is it about moving to ITSM rapidly that benefits? And I know this is rather basic, but I think we need to do it just for all the types of listeners we have.
Back to you, John. Explain and unpack what we mean by rapid ITSM as a means to better IT performance and rapid management of projects.
Best practices
Stagaman: For an organization that is new to ITSM processes, starting with a foundational approach and moving in with an out-of-box build helps them align with best practice and can be a lot faster than if they try to develop from scratch. SaaS is a model for that, because with SaaS you're essentially saying you're going to use this standard package.
The
standard package is strong, and there's more leverage to use that. We
had a federal customer that, based on best practice, reorganized how
they did all their service levels.
Those service levels were aligned with services that allowed them, for
the first time, to report to their consuming bureaus the service levels
per application that those bureaus subscribed to. They were able to
provide much more meaningful reporting. They wouldn’t have done that necessarily if the model didn't point in that direction. Previously, they hadn't organized their infrastructure along the lines to say, "We provide these application services to our customer."
Gardner: Erik, how do see the relationship between rapid and better ITSM and better IT overall performance? Are there many people struggle with this relationship?
Engstrom: Our approach at Effectual, what we focus on, is the accountability of data and the ability for an organization to reduce waste through using good data. We're not service [process] management experts, in that we are going to define a best practice; we are strictly on “here is the best piece of data everyone on your team is working [with] across all tools.” In that way, what our customers are able to see is transparency. So data from one system is available on another system.
Those kinds of mistakes are reduced when you share across tools. So that’s our focus and that’s where we're seeing benefit.
What that means is that you see a lot more reduction in types of servers that are being taken offline when they're the wrong server. We had a customer bring down their [whole] retail zone of systems that the same team had just stood up the week before. Because of the data being good, and the fact they were using out-of-the-box features, they were able to reduce mistakes and business impact they otherwise would not have seen.
Had they stayed with one tool or one silo of data, it’s only one source of opinion. Those kinds of mistakes are reduced when you share across tools. So that’s our focus and that’s where we're seeing benefit.
Gardner: Philipp, can you tell us why rapid ITSM has a powerful effect here in the market? But, before we get into that and how to do it, why is rapid ITSM so important now?
Koch: What we're seeing in our market is that customers are demanding service like they're getting at home at the end of the day. This sounds a little bit cliché-like, but they would like to get something ordered on the Internet, have it delivered 10 minutes later, and working half an hour later.
If we're talking about doing a classical waterfall approach to projects as was done 5 or 10 years ago, we're talking about months, and that’s not what the customer wants.
IT is delivering that. In a lot of organizations, IT is still fairly slow in delivering bigger projects, and ITSM is considered a bigger project. We're seeing a lot of shadow IT appearing, where business units who are demanding that agility are not getting it from IT, So they're doing it themselves, and then we have a big problem.
Counter the trend
With rapid ITSM, we can actually counter that trend. We can go in and give our customers what's needed to be able to please the business demand of getting something fast. By fast, we're talking about weeks now. We're of course not talking 10 minutes in project sizes of an ITSM implementation, but we can do something where we're deploying a SaaS solution.
We can have it ready for production after a week or two and get it into use. Before, when we did on-premise or when we did tailoring from scratch, we were talking months. That’s a huge business advantage or business benefit of being able to deliver what the business units are asking for.
Gardner: John Stagaman, what holds back successful rapid ITSM approach? What hinders speed, why has it been months rather than days typically?
Stagaman: Erik referenced one thing already. It has to do with the quality of source data when you go to build a system. One thing that I've run into numerous times is that there is often an assumption that finding all the canonical sources of data for just the general information that you need to drive your IT system is already available and it’s easy to populate. By that I mean things like, what are our locations, what are our departments, who are our people?
The other major thing that I run into that introduces risks into a project is when requirements aren't really requirements.
I'm not even getting to the point of asking what are our configuration items and how are they related? A lot of times, the company doesn't have a good way to even identify who a person is uniquely over time, because they use something with their name. They get married, it changes, and all of a sudden that’s not a persistent ID.
One thing we address early is making sure that we identify those gold sources of data for who and what, for all the factual data that has to be loaded to support the process.
The other major thing that I run into that introduces risks into a project is when requirements aren't really requirements. A lot of times, when we get requirements, it’s a bunch of design statements. Those design statements are about how they want to do this in the tool. Very often, it’s based on how the tool we're replacing worked.
If you don't go through those and say that this is the statement of design and not a statement of functional requirement and ask what is it that they need to do, it makes it very hard to look at the new tools you're deploying to say that this new tool does that this way. It can lead to excess customization, because you're trying to meet a goal that isn’t consistent with how your new product works.
Those are two things we usually do very early on, where we have to quality check the requirements, but those are also the two things that most often will cause a project to extend or derail.
Gardner: Philipp, any thoughts on problems, hurdles, why poor data quality or incomplete configuration management and data? What is it, from your perspective, that hold things back?
Old approach
Koch: I agree with what John says. That’s definitely something that we see when we meet customers.
Other areas that I see are more towards the execution of the projects itself. Quite often, customers know what agile is, but they don’t understand it. They say they're doing something in an agile way. Then, they show us a drawing that has a circle on it and then they think they are agile.
When you start to actually work with them, they're still in the old waterfall approach of stage gates, and milestones.
So, you're trying to do rapid ITSM implementation that follows agile principles, but you're getting stuck by internal unawareness or misunderstanding what this really means. Therefore, you're struggling with doing an agile implementation, and they become non-agile by doing this. That, of course, delays projects.
Quite often, we see that. So in the beginning of the projects, we try to have a workshop or try to get the people to understand what it really means to do an agile project implementation for an ITSM project. That’s one angle.
They should be asking whether it's easy to tailor the solution. It doesn’t really matter how.
The other angle, which I also see quite often, goes into the area of the requirements, the way John had described them. Quite often, those requirements are really features, as in they are hidden features that the customer wants. They are turned into some sort of requirements to achieve that feature. But very seldom do we see something that actually addresses the business problem.
They should not really care if you can right-click in the background and add a new field to this format. That’s not what they should be asking for. They should be asking whether it's easy to tailor the solution. It doesn’t really matter how. So that’s where quite often you're spending a lot of time reading those requirements and then readjusting them to match what you really should be talking about. That, of course, delays projects.
In a nutshell, we technology guys, who work with this on a daily basis, could actually deliver projects faster if we could manage to get the customers to accept the speed that we deliver. I see that as a problem.
Gardner: So being real about agile, having better data, knowing more about what your services are and responding to them are all part of overcoming the inertia and the old traditional approaches. Let’s look more deeply into what makes a big difference as a solution in practice.
Erik Engstrom, what helps get agile into practice? How are we able to overcome the drawbacks of over-customization and the more linear approach? Do you have any thoughts about moving towards a solution?
Maturity and integration
Engstrom: Our approach is to provide as much maturity, and as complete an integration as possible, on day one. We've developed a huge amount of libraries of different packages that do things such as to advance the tuning of a part of a tool, or to advance the integration between tools. Those represent thousands of hours that can be saved for the customer. So we start a project with capabilities that most projects would arrive at.
This allows the customer to be agile from day one. But it requires that mentality that both Philipp and John were speaking about, which is, if there’s a holdout in the room that says “this is the way you want things,” you can’t really work with the tools the way that they [actually] do work. These tools have a lot of money and history behind them, but one person’s vision of how the tools should work can derail everything.
We ask customers to take a look at an interoperable functioning matured system once we have turned the lights on, and have the data moving through the system. Then they can start to see what they can really do.
It’s a shift in thinking that we have covered well over the last few minutes, so I won't go into it. But it's really a position of strength for them to say, "We've implemented, we’ve integrated. Now, where do we really want to go with this amazing solution?
So
the faster we can help customers start to see a working system with
their data, the easier it is to start to move and maintain an agile
approach.
Gardner: What is it about the new toolset that’s allowing this improvement, the pre-customization approach? How does the technology come to bear on what’s really a very process-centric endeavor?
Engstrom: There are certain implementation steps that every customer, every project, must undergo. It’s that repetition that we're trying to remove from the picture. It’s the struggle of how to help an organization start to understand what the tools can do. What does it really look like when people, party, location, and configuration information is on hand? Customers can’t visualize it.
So the faster we can help customers start to see a working system with their data, the easier it is to start to move and maintain an agile approach. You start to say, "Let’s keep this down to a couple of weeks of work. Let us show it to you. Let’s visit it."
If we're faster as consultancies, if we're not taking six months, if we're not taking two months and we can solve these things, they'll start to follow our lead. That’s essential. That momentum has to be maintained through the whole project to really deliver fast.
Gardner: John Stagaman, thoughts about moving fast, first as consultants, but then also leveraging the toolsets? What’s better about the technology now that, in a sense, changes this game too?
Very different
Stagaman: In the ITSM space, the maturity of the product out of box, versus 10 years ago, is very different. Ten or 15 years ago, the expectation was that you were going to customize the whole thing.
There would be all these options that were there so you could demo them, but they weren’t necessarily built in a cohesive way. Today, the tools are built in different ways so that it's much closer to usable and deployable right out of the box.
The newest versions of those tools very often have done a much better job of creating broadly applicable process flow, so that you can use that same out of the box workflow if you're a retailer, a utility, or want to do some things for the HR call center without significant change to the core workflow. You might need to have the specific data fields related to your organization.
And, there's more. We can start from this ITSM framework that’s embedded and extend it where we need to.
Gardner: Philipp, thoughts about what’s new and interesting about tools, and even the SaaS approach to ITSM, that drives, from the technology perspective, better results in ITSM?
If you’re looking at ITSM solutions today, they're web based. They're Web 2.0 technology, HTML5, and responsive UIs.
Koch: I'll concur with John and Erik that the tools have changed drastically. When I started in this business 10 or 15 years ago, it was almost like the green screens of computers that slide through when you look for the ITSM solution.
If you’re looking at ITSM solutions today, they're web based. They're Web 2.0 technology, HTML5, and responsive UIs. It doesn’t really matter which device you use anymore, mobile phone, tablet, desktop, or laptop. You have one solution that looks the same across all devices. A few years ago, you had to install a new server to be able to run a mobile client, if it even existed.
So, the demand has been huge for vendors to deliver upon what the need is today. That has drastically changed in regards to technology, because technology nowadays allows us, and allows the vendors, to deliver up on how it should be.
We want Facebook. We want to Tweet. We want an Amazon- or a Google-like behavior, because that’s what we get everywhere else. We want that in our IT tools as well, and we're starting to see that coming into our IT tools.
In the past we had rule sets, objects, and conditions towards objects, but it wasn’t really a workflow engine. Nowadays, SaaS solutions, as well as on-premise solutions, have workflow engines that can be adjusted and tailored according to the business needs.
No difference
You’re relying on a best practice. An incident management process flow is an incident management process flow. There really is no difference no matter which vendor you go to, they all look the same, because they should. There is a best practice out there or a good practice out there. So they should look the same.
The only adjustments that customers will have to do is to add on that 10-20 percent that is customer-specific with a new field or a specific approval that needs to be put in between. That can be done with minimal effort when you have workflow engine.
Looking at this from a SaaS perspective, you want this off the shelf. You want to be able to subscribe to this on the Internet and adjust it in the evening, so when you come back the next day and go to work, it's already embedded in the production environment. That's what customers want.
Gardner: Now if we’ve gotten a better UI and we're more ubiquitous with who can access the ITSM and how, maybe we've also muddied the waters about that data, having it in a single place or easily consolidated. Let’s go back to Erik, given that you are having emphasis on the data.
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Engstrom: The concept of services and the way that service management is done is really around services. If we think about ITIL and the structure of ITIL [without getting into too many acronyms] the ability to take Services, Assets, and Configuration Management information, [and to have] all of that be consistent, it needs to be the same.
A platform that doesn't have really good bidirectional working data integrations with things like your asset tool or your DCIM tool or your UCMDB tool or your – wherever it is your data is coming from-- the data needs to be a primary focus for the future.
Because we're talking about a system [UCMDB] that can not only discover things and manage computers, but what about the Internet of Things? What about cloud scenarios, where things are moving so quickly that traditional methods of managing information whether it would be a spreadsheet or even a daily automated discovery, will not support the service-management mission?
It's very important, first of all, that all of the data be represented. Historically, we’ve not been able to do that because of performance. We've not been able to do that because of complexities. So that’s the implementation gap that we focus on, dropping in and making all of the stuff work seamlessly.
Same information
The benefit to that is that you’re operating as an organization on the same piece of information, no matter how it’s consumed or where it’s consumed. Your asset management folks would open their HP IT Asset Manager, see the same information that is shown downstream at Service Manager. When you model an application or service, it’s the same information, the same CI managed with UCMDB, that keeps the entire organization accountable. You can see the entire workflow through it.
If you have the ability to bridge data, if you have multiple tools taking the best of that information, making it an inherent automated part of service management, means that you can do things like Incident and Change, and Service Asset and Configuration Management (SACM) and roll up the costs of these tickets, and really get to the core of being efficient in service management.
Gardner: John Stagaman, if we have rapid ITSM multiple device ease of interface, but we also now have more of this drive towards the common data shared across these different systems, it seems to me that that leads to even greater paybacks. Perhaps it's in the form of security. Perhaps it's in a policy-driven approach to service management and service delivery.
Any thoughts about ancillary or future benefits you get when you do ITSM well and then you have that quality of data in mind that is extended and kept consistent across these different approaches?
The
ability to know what’s connected to your network can identify failure
points and chokepoints or risks of failure in that infrastructure.
Stagaman: Part of it comes to the central role of CMDB and the universality of that data. CMDB drives asset management. It can drive ITSM and the ability to start defining models and standards and compare your live infrastructure to those models for compliance along with discovery.
The ability to know what’s connected to your network can identify failure points and chokepoints or risks of failure in that infrastructure. Rather than being reactive, "Oh, this node went down. We have to address this," you can start anticipating potential failures and build redundancy. Your possibility of outage can be significantly reduced, and you can build that CMDB and build the intelligence in, so that you can simulate what would happen if these nodes or these components went down. What's the impact of that?
You can see that when you go to build, do a change, that level of integration with CMDB data lets you see well, if we have a change and we have an outage for these servers, what's the impact on the end user due to the cascading effect of those outages through the related devices and services so that you can really say, well, if we bring this down, we were good, but oh, at the same time we have another change modifying this and with those together coming down we may interrupt service to online banking and we need to schedule those at different times.
The latest update we're seeing is the ability to put really strict controls on the fact that this change will potentially impact this system or service and based on our business rules that say that this service can only be down during these times or may not be down at that time. We can even identify that time period conflict in an automated way and require additional process approvals for that to go forward at that time or require a reschedule.
Gardner: Philipp, any thoughts on this notion of predictive benefits from a good ITSM and good data, and perhaps even this notion of an algorithmic approach to services, delivery, and management?
Federation approach
Koch: It actually nicely fits into one of our reference installations, where that integration that Erik also talked about of having the data and utilize the data in a kind of on-the-fly federation approach. You can no longer wait to have a daily batch job to run. You need to have it at your fingertips. I can take an example from an Active Directory integration where we utilized all the data from active directory to allocate roles and rights and access inside HP Service Manager.
We've made a high-level analysis of how much we actually save by doing this. By doing that integration and utilizing that information, we say that we have an 80 percent reduction of manual labor done inside service manager for user administration.
Instead of having a technician to have to go into service manager to allocate the role, or to allocate rights, to a new employee who needs access to HP Service Manager, you actually get it automatic from Active Directory when the user logs in. The only thing that has to be done is for HR to say where this user sits, and that happens no matter what.
We've drastically reduced the amount of time spent there. There's a tangible angle there, where you can save a lot of time and a lot of money, mainly with regards to human effort.
With big-data analytics, you'll be able to see that that manual change model is used often and it could be easily automated.
The second angle that you touched on is smart analytics, as we can call it as well, in the new solutions that we now have. It's cool to see, and we now need to see where it's going in the future and see how much further we can go with this. We can do smart analytics on utilizing all the data of the solutions. So you're using the buzzword big data.
If we go in and analyze everything that's happening to a change-management area, we now have KPIs that can tell me -- this an old KPI as such -- that 48 percent of your change records have an element of automation inside the change execution. You have the KPI of how much you're automating in change management.
With smart analytics on top of that, you can get feedback in your KPI dashboard that says you have 48 percent. That’s nice, but below that you see if you enhance those two change models as well and automate them, you'll get an additional 10 percent of automation on your KPI.
With big-data analytics, you'll be able to see that manual change model is used often and it could be easily automated. That is the area that is so underutilized in using such analytics to go and focus on the areas that actually really make a difference and to be able to see that on a dashboard for a change manager or somebody who is responsible for the process.
That really sticks into your eye and says “Well, if I spend half an hour here, making this change model better, then I am going to save a lot more time, because I am automating 10 percent more." That is extremely powerful. Now just extrapolating that to the rest of the processes, that’s the future.
Gardner: Well Erik, we've heard both John and Philipp describe intelligent ITSM. Do you have any examples where some of your customers are also exploring this new level of benefit?
Success story
Engstrom: Absolutely. Health Shared Services British Columbia (HSSBC) will be releasing a success story through HP shortly, probably in the next few weeks. In that case, it was a five-week implementation where we dropped in our packages for Asset Management (ITAM), Service Management (ITSM), and Executive Scorecard, which are all HP products.
We even used Business Service Management (BSM), but the thinking behind this was that this is a service-management project. It’s all about uniting different health agencies in British Columbia under one shared service.
The configuration information is there. The asset information is there, right down to purchase orders, maintenance contracts, all of the parties, all of the organizations. The customer was able to identify all of their business services. This was all built in, normalized in CMDB, and then pushed into ITSM.
With this capability, they're able to see across these various organizations that roll-up in the shared service, who the parties are, because people opening tickets don’t work with those folks. They're in different organizations. They don’t have relevant information about what services are impacted. They don't have relevant information about who is the actual cost center or their budget. All that kind of stuff that becomes important in a shared service.
The customer was able to identify all of their business services. This was all built in, normalized in CMDB, and then pushed into ITSM.
This customer, from week six to their go-live day had the ability see, what is allocated in assets, what is allocated in terms of maintenance and support, and this is the selected service that the ticket, incident, or change is being created upon.
They understood the impact for the organization as a result of having what we call a Configuration Management System (CMS), having all of these things working together. So it is possible. It gives you very high-level control, particularly when you put it into something like Executive Scorecard, to see where things are taking longer, how they're taking longer, and what's costing more.
More importantly, in a highly virtual environment, they can see whether they're oversubscribed, whether they have their budgeted amount of ESX servers, or whether they have the right number of assets that are playing a part in service delivery. They can see the cost of every task, because it's tied to a person, a business service, and an organization.
They started with a capability to do SACM, and this is what this case is really about. It plays into everything that we've talked about in this call. It's agile and it is out-of-the-box. They're using features from all of these tools that are out-of-the-box, and they're using a solution to help them implement faster.
They can see what we call “total efficiency of cost.” What am I spending, but really how is it being spent and how efficient is it? They can see across the whole lifecycle of service management. It’s beautiful.
Future trends
Gardner: It’s impressive. What is it about the future trends that we can now see or have a good sense of how the events fold that makes rapid ITSM adoption, this common data, and this intelligent ITSM approach, all so important?
I'm thinking perhaps the addition of mobile tier and extensibility out through new networks. I'm thinking about DevOps and trying to coordinate a rapid-development approach with operations and making that seamless.
We're hearing a lot about containers these days as well. I'm also thinking about hybrid cloud, where there's a mixture of services, a mixture of hosting options, and not just static but dynamic, moving across these boundaries.
So, let's go down the list, as this would be our last question for today. John Stagaman, what is it about some of these future trends that will make ITSM even more impactful, even more important?
Stagaman: One of the big shifts that we're starting to see in self-service is the idea that you want to enable a customer to resolve their own issue in as many cases as possible. What you can see in the newest release of that product is the ability for them to search for a solution and start a chat.
The other thing that we're seeing is the ability to bridge between on-premises system and SaaS solution.
When they ask a question, they can check your entire knowledge base and history to see the propose solutions. If that’s not the case, they can ask for additional information and then initialize a chat with the service desk, if needed.
Very often, if they say they're unable to open this file or their headset is broken, someone can immediately tell them how to procure a replacement headset. It allows that person to complete that activity or resolve their issue in a guided way. It doesn't require them to walk through a level of menus to find what they need. And it makes it much more approachable than finding a headset on the procurement system.
The other thing that we're seeing is the ability to bridge between on-premises system and SaaS solution. We have some customers for whom certain data is required to be onsite for compliance or policy reasons. They need an on-premise system, but they may have some business units that want to use a SaaS solution.
Then, when they have system supported by central IT, that SaaS system can do an exchange of that case with the primary system and have bidirectional updates. So we're getting the ability to link between the SaaS world and the on-premises world more effectively.
Gardner: Philipp, thoughts from you on future trends that are driving the need for ITSM that will make it even more valuable, make it more important.
Connected intelligence
Koch: Definitely. Just to add on to what John said, it goes into the direction of the connected intelligence, utilizing that big data example that we have just gone through. It all points towards that we want to have a solution that is connected across and brings back intelligence towards the end user, just as much as towards the operator that has that integration.
Another angle, more from the technology side, is that now, with the SaaS offerings that we have today, the new way of going forward as I see it happening -- and the way I think HP has made a good decision with HP Service Anywhere -- is the continuous delivery. You're losing the aspects of having version numbers for software. You no longer need to do big upgrades to move from version 9 to a version 10, because you are doing continuous delivery.
Every time new code is ready to be deployed, it is actually deployed. You do not wait and bundle it up in a yearly cycle to give a huge package that means months of upgrading. You're doing this on the fly. So Service Anywhere or Agile Manager are good examples where HP is applying that. That is the future, because the customer doesn’t want to do upgrade projects anymore. Upgrades are of the past, if we really want to believe that. We hope we can actually go there.
Mobile
and bring your own device were buzzwords -- now it's already here. We
don’t really need to talk about it anymore, because it already exists.
You touched on mobile. Mobile and bring your own device were buzzwords -- now it's already here. We don’t really need to talk about it anymore, because it already exists. That’s now the standard. You have to do this, otherwise you're not really a player in the market.
To close off with a paradigm statement, future solutions need to be implemented -- and we consultants need to deliver solutions -- that solve end-user problems compared to what we did in the past, where we deployed solutions manage tickets!
We're no longer in the business of helping them and giving them features to more easily manage tickets and save money on quicker resolution. This is of the past. What we need to do today is to make it possible for organizations to empower end users to solve their problems themselves to become a ticket-less IT -- this is ideal world of course -- where we reduce the cost of an IT organization by giving as much as possible back to the end user to enable him to do self service.
Gardner: Last word to you, Erik. Any thoughts about future trends to drive ITSM and why it will be even more important to do it fast and do it well?
Engstrom: Absolutely. And in my worldview it's SACM. It's essentially using vendor strengths, the portfolio, the entire portfolio, such as HP’s Service and Portfolio Management (SPM), where you have all of these combined silos that normally operate completely independently of each other.
There are a couple of truths in IT. Data is expensive to re-create; the concept that you have knowledge, and that you have value in a tool. The next step in the new style of IT is going to require that these tools work together as one suite, one offering, so that your best data is coming from the best source and being used to make the best decisions.
Actionable information
It's about making big data a reality. But in the use of UCMDB and the HP portfolio, data is very small, it's actionable information, because it's a set of tools. This whole portfolio helps customers save money, be more efficient with where they spend, and do more with “yes.”
So the idea that you have all of this data out there, what can it mean? It can mean, for example, that you can look and see that a business service is spending 90 percent more on licensing or ESX servers or hardware, anything that it might need. You have transparency across the board.
Smarter service management means doing more with the information you already have and making informed decision that really help you drive efficiencies. It's doing more with “yes,” and being efficient. To me, that’s SACM. The requirement for a portfolio, it doesn’t matter how small or how large it is, is [that] it must provide the ways for which this data can be shared, so that information becomes intelligence.
Organizations
that have these tools will beat the competition. They will wipe them
out, because they're so efficient and so informed.
Organizations that have these tools will beat the competition at an SG and A (Selling, General and Administrative) level. They will wipe them out, because they're so efficient and so informed. Waste is reduced. Time is faster. Good decisions are made ahead of time. You have the data and you can act appropriately. That's the future. That's why we support HP software, because of the strength of the portfolio.
Gardner: Well, great. I am afraid we'll have to leave it there. We have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect Podcast panel discussion on how rapidly advancing ITSM capability forms an IT imperative, and therefore bedrock, business necessity. We've seen how a new wave of ITSM technologies and methods allow for rapid ITSM adoption, and that means better, rapid support of agile business.
Unleash the power of your user base
Gardner: This is Dana Gardner. I'd like to thank our audience as well for joining, and don’t forget to come back next time to BriefingsDirect.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.
Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on how enterprises can benefit from the newest IT service management methods and procedures. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.
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