The next BriefingsDirect thought leadership panel discussion centers on how rapidly advancing
IT service management (ITSM) capabilities form a bedrock business necessity, not just an IT imperative.
Businesses of all stripes rate the need to move
faster as a top priority, and many times, that translates into the need
for better and faster IT projects. But traditional IT processes and
disjointed project management don't easily afford rapid, agile, and
adaptive IT innovation.
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 deeply explore a practical guide to
fast ITSM adoption as a foundation for overall business agility the panel consists of
John Stagaman, Principal Consultant at
Advanced MarketPlace based in Tampa, Florida;
Philipp Koch, Managing Director of
InovaPrime, Denmark, and
Erik Engstrom, CEO of
Effectual Systems in Berkeley, California. The discussion is moderated by me,
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: John Stagaman, let me start with you. We hear a lot, of course, about the faster pace of business, and
cloud and
software as a service (SaaS)
are part of that. What, in your mind, are the underlying trend or
trends that are forcing IT's hand to think differently, behave
differently, and to be more responsive?
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.
That level of customization and tailoring resulted in
a system that was hard to maintain, hard to support, and especially
hard to upgrade, if you had to move to a new version of that product
down the line. So when you came to a point where you had to upgrade,
because your current version was being retired or for some other reason,
the cost of maintenance and upgrade was also huge.
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?
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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.
If you're not able to do fast time-to-value, you're
not going to get funding. Funding isn’t in the $8 million and $10
million tranches anymore; it’s in the $200,000 and $300,000 tranche.
This is having a direct effect on on-premise tools, the way the
customers are planning, and
OPEX versus
CAPEX.
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.
But customization happens while you deploy the
project and that has to happen in a faster way. I can only concur with
all the other things that have already been said. We don't have huge
budgets anymore. IT, as such, never had huge budgets, but, in the past,
it was accepted that a project like this took a long time to do.
Nowadays, we want to have implementations of weeks. We don’t want to
have implementations of months anymore.
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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When
we look at a new-generation ITSM solution and practice, how do we
assure that the data integrity remains strong and that we don't lose
control, given that we're going across peers of devices and across a
cloud and SaaS implementations? How do we keep that data whole and
central and then leverage it for better outcomes?
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.”
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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.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.
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