Category: Customers

Expect Your ISV to Provide a Business Service

Monday, September 24th, 2012 · Customers, ITSM

Business owners expect IT professionals to deliver business services designed to meet their needs. These services generally include:

• Defined processes to complete the service
• Deliver data to the user to make decisions
• Infrastructure to support the service
• The communication backbone to complete the service

We believe that you should expect the same comprehensive solution from your service desk provider.

For example, as IT professionals perform their daily operational tasks, an effective solution would combine the understanding of important relationships and dependencies, with the actual steps to perform a process (say, propose a change) within a communication framework that facilitates not only communication but effective collaboration around the task.

Next add intelligence to the process whereby detailed analysis is presented to the IT professional surrounding the potential impact of a change, and that analysis is then automatically delivered to the right people who have a stake in the issue at hand.

Thus, IT professionals are equipped with a single solution that combines knowledge with intelligent analysis and automatically delivers that information to the right people within a communication framework that ensures consistent context. The result is an IT organization that collaborates more efficiently, resolves issues faster, and delivers business services more effectively while increasing quality and customer satisfaction. This is the solution we have created with ITinvolve for Service Management.

Logan

A (Small and Medium) Business Service Management Conundrum

Wednesday, September 12th, 2012 · Customers, ITSM

For a number of years, many large enterprises have wrestled with implementing a service management strategy that integrates relevant data resident in a configuration management database (CMDB) with an understanding of business services as derived from / by IT service dependency mapping tools in order to streamline problem, incident, and change management processes.

The benefits provided to IT professionals in obtaining insight from a service view of their IT environment is critical when managing changes or solving incidents/problems. Thus, significant effort and expenditures have been spent on obtaining those views. However, for the less than enterprise sized IT environments, the cost required to obtain an IT service view has been too high both in terms of tool cost as well as in terms of resource allocation. Currently available solutions were simply not designed for their needs.

There is a gap between the commoditized approval/resolution tracking functionality provided by most service desk tools and the full blown service desk/CMDB/auto discovery and dependency mapping features resident in very large deployments.

I believe ITinvolve is the solution for these the medium sized IT environments. We provide a very easy to implement solution that captures the human knowledge resident in the minds of the IT professionals utilizing a truly collaborative methodology. Combined with robust impact analysis, the ability for users and groups to create customized service views, and reporting scalable to the device or CI level, the result is a truly revolutionary solution. In many ways, it far exceeds what current vendors provide in that it is built on knowledge that has been socialized and verified by the right people within the community.

Some CEO Thoughts on the New Gartner ITSSM Magic Quadrant

Thursday, September 6th, 2012 · Customers, ITSM, News

Last week Gartner released their “kinda annual” magic quadrant for the service desk market. I say “kinda annual” as they skipped the prior year citing there was really nothing new to report. This year, the big news was that there still was nothing new to report. Gartner concluded there were literally no innovators and no leaders in their report. For those interested in the source document, it is titled “Magic Quadrant for IT Service Support Management Tool” issued August 20, 2012 numbered G00231576.

I agree with Gartner’s conclusions that IT service desk tools themselves are no longer sufficient for maintaining business productivity. I believe the reason is service desk vendors have not spent cycles on innovation due to the lack of perceived return on the innovation investment.

I’ll take social collaboration as one example of service desk vendors asserting they have innovated where there really is none. Virtually all service desk tools claim they have social collaboration, but in reality their definition of social collaboration means opening a ticket via an IM session or chat rooms around a particular topic. That is not social collaboration. That’s a joke.

Collaboration innovation means:

• A subscribe/unsubscribe capability to allow you to follow the items you care about
• Automatic notification of only the items you care about
• A methodology where all stakeholders are looking at items in the same context
• Enabling virtual processes creation with common content and context
• A simple methodology to retain knowledge and associate it with a particular item in your IT environment such that the information is not lost in a knowledge base black hole

Social collaboration needs to be in the fabric of a service management solution, not an “add on” check box. At ITinvolve, we understand what it means to innovate. Check out our service management capabilities and see how we are innovating.

Logan Wray
CEO, ITinvolve

The Future of IT Operations — Principle 4: Enable IT Individuals and Teams to Collaborate in Context

Wednesday, August 29th, 2012 · Customers, ITSM

This is part five of a six part series from our CEO — Logan Wray.

Much is being made of the social media revolution we are experiencing in the workplace these days, making it difficult to separate fact from hype. We heard that IT professionals don’t necessarily need more chatter in their IM or email in-box. Instead, they want to collaborate and exchange information in the context of a specific issue at hand. They told us how important it is to cut out all the extraneous noise so each team member can follow and participate in a discussion thread related to a specific problem important to that individual and his/her role.

While everyone agrees about the benefits of collaboration, IT professionals need a more practical means to collaborate with each other virtually. They don’t have time to sit on the phone for hours in mind-numbing reviews of changes or struggle with locating the right people to bring together to address an incident or problem. They need to be automatically notified when a change, incident or issue affects something in their area of responsibility.

The future of IT operations will be shaped by in-context collaboration that leverages familiar social media-style formats but is focused on specific channels of communication around the things they care about. This is the only effective way to help ensure all the right people are effectively communicating in the specific context of the issue, without extraneous noise or chatter. Giving each stakeholder the ability to review related information, including in-context comments from all participants combined with relevant analysis and visualization, would go a long way to streamlining decisions, and helping responders resolve incidents and make decisions more quickly and effectively.

Just as important, these collaborative engagements with other stakeholders need to be recorded and captured for reference in the future so that collective knowledge builds over time and lessons learned through first-hand experience can be shared with others down the line so they never have to be re-learned.

Stay tuned for Principle 5: Access to the collective knowledge of people is a fundamental imperative for operational success.

The Future of IT Operations — Principle 3: Present Intelligent and Relevant Analysis to Stakeholders Automatically

Tuesday, August 28th, 2012 · Customers, ITSM, Product

This is part four of a six part series from our CEO — Logan Wray.

Current service desk tools simply do not have the analytic functionality needed to present information required by IT professionals to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively today. What is needed is a way to take the collective knowledge of individuals and data sources involved, analyze the relationships and dependencies related to a specific issue, and then provide the relevant information to the IT operations users to help them make better decisions.

Service management tools need to stop making IT users spend valuable time searching for information among multiple sources, and then forcing them to spend even more effort to sort out and analyze key information once they’ve found it. Rather, the tool itself should help each IT professional analyze key relationships and dependencies and then automatically present this information to stakeholders.

By presenting users with key information through a concept that we call Active Knowledge Delivery, appropriate stakeholders are automatically alerted to the potential impact of incidents or changes and brought into the discussion, helping them resolve operational tasks with unprecedented speed. This kind of capability — one that IT professionals could only dream of until now — would be able to bring the analysis and knowledge necessary to improve the performance of operational tasks to the right people at the right time, in the context of their specific role or job.

Stay tuned for Principle 4: Enable IT individuals and teams to collaborate in context.

The Future of IT Operations — Principle 1: Capture All Kinds of Knowledge for Better Understanding

Friday, August 24th, 2012 · Customers, ITSM

This is part two of a six part series from our CEO — Logan Wray.

In conversations with hundreds of IT professionals, we heard that IT team members working in complex environments needed a better understanding of critical dependencies and relationships when responding to incidents, resolving problems and making changes. Too often the knowledge supplied by current service management tools was fragmented, incomplete, out of date and simply not trustworthy.

We also discovered that every team member possesses sources of information and expertise about managing his or her particular realm that serve them well as an individual but are not always shared or available to the wider team. Whether its access to a CMDB or special database, detailed VISIO diagrams of a particular application or service, or simply a sharp memory in recalling a relevant incident from the past, IT professionals use a wide range of knowledge to accomplish tasks and solve problems every day — much of it outside of the scope of their existing service management tools.

Therefore, the IT Ops professional now and in the future needs easier access to knowledge (both structured and unstructured information) without having to spend hours searching for it. This knowledge should not be required to conform to any one particular source, nor should it depend on purely auto-discovered content. IT professionals need a kit where they are provided the right information fast, tapping into all kinds of sources, so they can leverage the key information best suited to the issue at hand.

Stay tuned for Principle 2: Find better ways to see the IT environment and how it relates to others.