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In order to be part of this digital revolution, traditional businesses must expeditetheir own efforts to transform and stay competitive.
Forward thinking businesses are adopting digital services and implementing new technologies and processes to meet their customers’ growing expec-tations, streamline operations, and drive new revenue.
IT teams of these businesses are being tasked to leverage the best of existing assets while introduc-ing new innovations to better grow the business. These digital enterprises are looking to third-party software solutions to add functionality and opera-tional efficiencies to their existing systems. In order to be part of this digital revolution, traditional busi-nesses must expedite their own efforts to transform and stay competitive.
Here are 4 opportunities for digital transformation that can move traditional businesses forward:
1. Rapid Application InnovationIn order to keep up with changes in the market, businesses need to realize that continuous software development and rollout must replace traditional development cycles that can take months or years. Digital transformation strategies include: 1) Cross-team collaboration, streamlining internal comunica-tions to enable teams to share knowledge, feedback, and resources, and; 2) agile development, adopting processes that prioritize continual updates to prod-ucts and platforms.
2. Big Data for Improved InsightWith access to more data about their customers, their competition, and their internal operations, com-panies need the right tools and processes in place to translate this information into actionable data. Digital transformation strategies include: 1) Customer analyt-ics to drive engagement, retention, and sales; and
2) Operational auditing, analyzing internal process-es to streamline operations, improve performance, and identify new areas for innovation.
3. Enabling the Next Generation WorkplaceWith the consumerization of technology, particular-ly mobile devices, work is no longer time or loca-tion-based, but can instead take place anytime and anywhere. In order to attract and retain the best talent, organizations must create the culture and conditions that enable this new style of working. Digital transformation strategies include: 1) Employee empowerment tools, leveraging digital solutions to provide employees with access to the information, connections and resources needed to excel in their professional roles;2) Workforce mobilization, equipping employees with a secure set of technologies and tools that enable them to be productive from any location.
4. Security at the Speed of BusinessAs companies accelerate their rate of innovation, prioritizing rapid release cycles over full testing and quality assurance, they run the risk of over-looking critical security flaws and exposing sensi-tive data. Digital transformation strategies include: 1) Proactive security systems that anticipate, iden-tify and remedy vulnerabilities on a continual basis to eliminate threats, and; 2) Automated efficiencies, leveraging intelligent systems to outsource human effort and reduce error, scaling the frequency and speed of response.
This article was adapted from BMC’s ebook entitled “The Digital Transformation Playbook.” For a copy of the ebook, email [email protected].
Making The TransitionInto A Digital Enterprise
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The Impact of Workload Automation on Profitability
While IT has traditionally been viewed as a cost center with a negative bottom-line impact, the intro-duction of workload automation can turn IT into a profit center that improves the business’s bottom line. Businesses typically view profit as a result of selling goods and services to customers, however, a busi-ness can also increase its profitability by reducing in-ternal costs involved in providing products. Workload automation is one such cost-cutting solution.
So how does workload automation deliver financial gains?The elimination of routine human interaction can have a powerful impact on profitability as the following example proves. At Home Shopping Network (HSN), the average cost for an analyst is 97¢ per minute which includes all associated costs such as benefits and training. It costs them $5 per day to generate a sales report manually. Generating a report tens of thousands of time, as they do, can cost $10 million in annual expenses. With workload automation, that $10 million disappears. Says Brian Anderson who runs Production Control for HSN, “By eliminating the need for analysts to engage with most of these tasks directly, I can dramatically shrink the number of people I need to support these operations. In fact, the total cost for my data center staff, including analysts, supervisors, schedulers, administrators, and manag-ers, combined with the deposit for the BMC Control-M workload automation solution we use is well under $1 million. In other words, a $1 million investment yields $9 million in net savings that go straight to the bottom line.” In addition, Control-M facilitates audit and compliance, eases version control, simplifies the maintenance of the job schedule, and helps IT create and integrate new workflows more quickly.
How does Control-M deliver more value?Much of the value and economic benefit comes
when moving beyond basic scheduling to ITSM, a capability far beyond the scope of a built-in or Cron-type scheduler. A full-featured workload automation solution like Control-M makes it simple to map items on a run sheet to specific service level agreements (SLAs), manage and escalate negative events accord-ing to their business impact, and more.
Using a batch management (BIM) capability, Control-M can easily map workflows to a business service and SLA objectives with a single job, and then discover, track, and report on the performance of the service automatically. By analyzing the jobs in the service path, the solution can report on any failures or delays that might cause an SLA to be missed. In the event of a problem, Control-M can map the service and isolate the critical path jobs into a working view that lets IT manage the scenario interactively by changing the job or creating a workaround to ensure that the SLA is achieved. In the worst case that the SLA objective will be missed, stakeholders can be alerted proactively and briefed by IT on the cause, resolution path, and time to resolution.
Does Control-M support IT Governance?A critical challenge for IT is to help the business maximize profit while meeting demanding regulatory and operational requirements. Control-M provides a realistic, flexible, and comprehensive toolset to help IT increase profits and maintain compliance and regu-latory mandates by providing verifiable security, audit-ing, and logs of activity. Providing security at both the presentation layer and the scheduling engine layer, Control-M enables fine-grained control of access to the scheduling system as well as the ability to audit and report easily on every user action.
To learn more about Control-M Workload Auto-mation, go to http://www.rightstar.com/products/bmc-products/bmc-control-m-workload-automation/
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JIRA Service Desk 3.2 for Server: smarter, faster, simpler
Many of the top voted features on jira.atlassian.com have been shipped with JIRA Service Desk 3.2 Server release. These improvements can make a world of difference in saving your team time and improving how much work can be accomplished.Here are some highlights of what’s new:
1. Approve in one clickYour customer wants a keyboard, new software license, or even expenses reimbursed. With JIRA Service Desk’s approval workflow, managers can now simply click approve or deny right from the customer portal – no email chains or extra licenses needed.
2. Customers can transition their own requestsLet’s say an agent shares a knowledge base article with a customer. If the article solves the customer’s problem, the customer can now resolve the request right from the customer portal. In JIRA Service Desk 3.2, your customers can resolve, reopen, and esca-late issues from the customer portal.
3. Automatic knowledge suggestions for agentsWith the latest update to the Confluence and JIRA Service Desk knowledge base integration, your team can give consistent, high-quality support. Related documentation is automatically revealed inside the agent issue view. Your agents can view and share articles directly with customers without having to open another tab.
4. Automate your world with webhooksIntegrate with the tools you use every day. Web-hooks let you communicate with third-party appli-cations by sending web notifications every time an event occurs in JIRA Service Desk.
5. Deeper reporting insightsAtlassian has expanded reporting in JIRA Service Desk to give you deeper insights into your custom-er interactions and the impact of your services. Now you can drill deeper into JIRA Service Desk reports by clicking on data points to see more details about what’s going on in your project. If you want to mas-sage your data further, you can export the results to a CSV file.
6. Find things faster with quick links in the sidebarWe streamlined some common tasks by putting them on the project sidebar. For example, the “cus-tomer channels” option lets you quickly see and copy the URL or email address for your customer portal, the “raise a request” option starts creating a request immediately, and the “invite team” option lets you invite new agents to the project.
7. Upload your own request iconsIcons are an essential part of the JIRA Service Desk customer portal – they help your customers and users visually navigate content. With JIRA Service Desk 3.2, you can now upload your own request type icons. You can also drag and drop request type groups to rearrange how they appear in the portal. You can even hide certain request types that you don’t want your customers to see in the portal.
8. Silence notifications and remove participantsIf your customers are looking for a little peace and quiet, rejoice. Customers can now turn off notifica-tions about requests from the portal or via email. They’re also able to remove other participants in their requests.
This is an excerpt from an Atlassian blog article published on August 30, 2016. To read the article in full, go to http://blogs.atlassian.com/2016/08/jira-service-desk-3-2-server-smarter-faster-simpler/
hardware inventory housed within data centers with automated monitoring, inventory, and man-agement tools, by the end of fiscal year 2018.”
This is good news for BMC, and RightStar data center infrastructure management (DCIM) partner, Nlyte. How does this initiative apply?
First, BMC Discovery discovers servers, main-frames, networks, software, and storage.In fact, it discovers over 40,000 software versions (its next closest competitor discovers on ly 20,000). Then, BMC Discovery finds the dependencies, shows the services, and “if you can draw a circle with a mouse,” maps the dependencies. And with version 11’s Start Anywhere application mapping, does this very quickly. Knowing how everything is connected allows for proper data center planning.
Second, Nlyte a leading sofware provider in the DCIM space, offers solutions that manage the physical infrastructure of a data center and its on-going operation. RightStar has a proposal into a major government agency to address its data center locations (i.e., expansion and consolida-tion), assets (i.e., workload migration, capacity ser-vice refresh), and to make the most efficient use of power, cooling, networks, weight and space.
The combination of BMC Discovery along with Nlyte DCIM offers the government a better way to integrate, connect, manage and model the physical, logical and virtual layers, correlating all data center assets into one seamless business process. At the same time, this solution allows agencies to comply with the new Federal DCOI. Tony Scott summarized, “Reducing the number of data centers is still a goal. Agencies are expected to close 25 percent of their larger facilities over the next three years.”
Visit Dick Stark’s blog at http://dick1stark.com
BMC Discovery 11 and theNew Federal DCOI
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DCOI, or Federal Data Center Optimization Initiative, is a successor to the Federal Data Center Consoli-dation (FDCCI) effort. According to a recent article in FCW, results have been a mixed bag. Although FDCCI has resulted in thousands of facilities being powered down, according to a GAO report, the num-ber of data centers has grown significantly, from 3100 to nearly 7500. (Of course, a data center is defined as any room with at least one server that supports development, production, staging, or testing.)
On August 1, Tony Scott, US CIO released the final version of the DCOI. In a blog post accompanying the initiative, Scott wrote that the new policies, “include strengthened and direct CIO authority over data center related budgeting and management decisions, increased use of the cloud and inter-agency shared services, and replacement of manual data collection with more accurate and efficient automated monitor-ing tools.”
Optimization is an important priority. Agencies have new targets for energy metering, effective power use, virtualization, automated monitoring, and utilization of both servers and facility floor space. As Mike pointed out in the webcast, “Agencies shall replace manual collections and reporting of systems, software, and
by Dick Stark, President & CEO, RightStar Systems
BMC Discovery 11 and theNew Federal DCOI
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• Delivered through native mobile applications;• Social and collaborative with the ability to tag, like, follow, or comment, and consequently drive adoption;• Deeply integrated with knowledge management to stay relevant and up to date.
Social collaboration and contextual contentCollaboration tools are more readily adopted when they are inherently social. Traditional ITIL-based service desks have previously struggled with col-laboration as the restriction of ITIL means that an incident can only have one owner. Modern service desk technology must enable service desk analysts to invite other colleagues or subject matter experts into conversations to harness tribal knowledge and help resolve incidents faster.
Persona-based user experienceA modern user experience should be persona-based to shield the customer from laborious and tedious process steps. Creating a persona-based user experience requires an understanding of customers, their workflows, and their work require-ments. A persona-based approach to user experi-ence ensures that all customers have instant and intuitive access to the information they need to do their job.
Service management must take a leading role in supporting and delivering digital workplaces that enable both IT and business users to work smarter, faster, and easier.
To explore tools that help make modernized service management possible, visit: http://www.rightstar.com/its-here-bmc-remedy-9-service-management/
Optimum enterprise productivity relies on an em-powered workforce, enabled by transformative technology to help people work smarter, faster, and more easily. A modern approach to service management can make both business users and IT more productive.
Here are four key elements for modernizing service management through engaging user experiences.
Full mobilityBoth sides of the service desk must have access to a fully functional service management experience through native smartphone, tablet, and brows-er-based applications. Native applications should be tailored to suit the device, ensuring an optimum user experience. Mobile devices also offer a unique set of capabilities to enhance the service desk experience:• Built-in cameras to attach photos to incidents or scan barcodes to retrieve data;• Voice recognition to enable hands-free annotation of tickets;• GPS to provide location-aware self-service;• Touch screens to support interactive user experiences that accelerate resolutions;• Push notifications to keep consumers updated on relevant incidents, assets, changes, or other items of interest.
Consumerized self-serviceFor self-service to be accepted in the enterprise it has to help users work smarter while being quick, simple, and easy to use. Optimal adoption requires self-service to be:• Immediately useable by untrained users without manuals or tutorials;• Consumerized with app-store style interfaces;
Deliver a Service ManagementExperience That Drives Productivity
Five Best Practices for Creating SLA’s in an ITSM Environment
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Here are five best practices for creating and fulfilling IT service SLAs in an ITSM environment:
1. Separate SLAs should be created for each IT service that needs measurementSLAs are a collection of promises made to the cus-tomer. Avoid creating a single SLA for your entire service catalog. Rather than defining that all IT service requests will be fulfilled in five hours for ex-ample, create separate SLAs for each IT service you want to track. Each IT service will have its own lead time and approval schedule, and must be completed accordingly.
2. An SLA must be quantitative, well researched, and authoritativeAn SLA measurement should neither be a wild guess nor a truce in a battle with your customer. SLAs should be based on quantitative (or real) data. An SLA promise should reflect knowledge gained on what it takes to deliver the new or improved service based on actual prior experience (yours, your cus-tomers, or industry standards), along with testing and prototyping the service during the design and con-tinual review phases. An SLA for how long it should take to install software, for example, should be an actual, achievable number that the IT Service Provid-er can be held accountable for and has the capacity to reach.
3. SLAs must be measurableYour ITSM service desk must be capable of gather-ing and presenting the necessary metrics to deter-mine whether an SLA has been accomplished. SLAs must represent SMART goals (Specific, Measurable,
Achievable, Relevant, and Timely), and each individual SLA must possess the following characteristics:
Specific – An SLA must be specific and detailed enough to define expectations for service delivery.Measurable – There must be a way to track actual performance against the promised SLA. Achievable – The SLA must be realistic and able to be met. Unrealistic goals can demotivate your ser-vice delivery team.Relevant – The SLA must be directly related to the IT service being delivered and it must be relevant to evaluating performance against that goal.Timely – The SLA must contain a time frame against which the service will be delivered.
4. SLAs require periodic review and adjustment, as part of the ITIL Continual Service improvement core areaAn SLA should be reviewed and updated whenever there are any proposed or promised changes for that service, under your Continual Service Improvement process. Be sure to adjust the SLA for any change that affects service hours, availability, uptime, com-pletion, or response time. It’s tragic when because of IT service improvement, a provider can no longer meet their service level targets and it either loses a customer or faces SLA non-compliance penalties.
5. SLAs should account for usual and unusual exceptionsIt’s as important to define where the SLA doesn’t apply as where it does apply. Your SLA should define any usual and unusual situations that will hold up IT service processing.
To read the full blog article, go to http://www.bmc.com/blogs/five-best-practices-creating-slas-itsm-environ-ment/
The following article is excerpted from a BMC blog article published on September 1, 2016
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What’s So Great AboutBMC Remedyforce?by Anne Brock, RightStar
Here are some reasons why you’ll agree BMC Remedyforce is a great application:
Configuration, configuration, configurationAlmost every change in Remedyforce is done through configuration. You want to change the logo? Configuration. You want to create a new Service Request? Configuration. You want your HR Group to see a different set of fields than the IT Group? Configuration. No more trying to modify CSS files or doing specialized coding. Which not only means less work for the administrator, it means you still have all your changes after an upgrade.
And speaking of upgradesUpgrades are painless. Really. Salesforce upgrades the platform three times a year; BMC upgrades Rem-edyforce twice a year. The last time BMC pushed an upgrade to its customers’ environments, 1 person did thousands of the upgrades – in one day. And cus-tomers were logged in while the upgrade happened. No muss, no fuss; and since Remedyforce upgrades are delivered with most new features disabled, you can walk through the new features and decide which ones you want to enable for your company; you won’t just walk in one day and see a whole lot of new features without knowing what they are.
Some changes that are pretty coolThis is for those of you with Asset Manager hats… I think most of you know that Remedyforce has a robust CMDB as part of it. But sometimes we don’t want to look at “stuff” in terms of configuration items – we don’t want to look at all computer systems, we want to put our Asset Management hats on and look at them as laptops, desktops, servers (as an example). In Summer 15, the ability to slice and dice the CMDB entries as Assets as well as Configuration Items was added. Because this is a bit of a special-ized area, not everyone noticed. But if you have asset managers who want to work with the data as
assets, not CIs, they can now do that – and they can even build models of their standard asset setup to make it easier to create new records.
CMDB and specialized areasHave you looked at the normalization functionality yet? It’s another item that was added to Remedyforce in Summer 15 that you may have overlooked. Normaliza-tion is a way to standardize your CMDB data, which is especially important when people enter it manually or if you are importing data from multiple sources. For ex-ample, one record might have the manufacturer stored as BMC Software, Inc.; another might have BMC; and a third might have BMC Software. Normalization rules can set them to all be BMC Sofware Inc. which assists with reporting and tracking.
Summer 16 gave us Agentless DiscoveryIf you are ready to start bringing data into your CMDB and you don’t have an already existing discovery tool that you like – Remedyforce now includes Agentless Discovery at no additional cost. Enable it, configure it, install a scanner locally and you are ready to go. This is a great addition to the Remedyforce solution and will enable customers to get their CMDBs in place much more quickly!
So what’s the takeaway?We don’t have enough room to cover all of the items that make Remedyforce great. But what we hope you’ve learned from this is that Remedyforce is a robust product with amazing features while still being easy to use and easy to configure. If you don’t already have it, it’s time to take a look!
Have you been to BMC’s Remedyforce community lately? https://communities.bmc.com/community/bmcdn/bmc_remedyforce Ask questions and get answers from other customers, developers, partners, product managers, and pre-sales engineers.
Anne Arundel County Public Schools (AACPS) is one of the 50th largest school systems in the United States. AACPS’s 79,000 students and over 13,850 employees are supported by an IT staff of only 92 who rely heavily on the automated capabilities of BMC Remedy.
Business ChallengeAACPS has used BMC Remedy since 1999, which was implemented to help them prepare for Y2K. 17 years later, AAPCS was ready to upgrade to Remedy ITSM 9.1 with Smart IT and Smart Reporting. Since RightStar had successfully implemented the upgrade to 7.6.04 in 2012, AACPS asked them back to do the upgrade to 9.1 in 2016. Said Kim Olds, Se-nior User Support Specialist at AACPS, “Right-Star did such a great job in 2012; they were our first thought for this upgrade project.”
AACPS’s goals included loading all of its employees into BMC Remedy and easing the burden on the IT help desk by increasing the number of users who submit their own tick-ets. They also wanted to take advantage of BMC’s new technology, Smart IT, which allows IT to deliver service from anywhere with
complete mobility, and Smart Reporting, which makes running reports easy and fast.
The Remedy ITSM 9.1 Upgrade“Since I am the only person that handles Remedy, we looked for a partner that could help us get up to speed on the new version and new products quickly and effectively,” said Kim. When it came to selecting a partner for the project, she said, “We really didn’t consider anyone else since we knew what RightStar had to offer.”
AACPS and RightStar worked closely to imple-ment the upgrade and the project goals were completed ahead of scheduled time. Custom forms and data were brought forward from the legacy environment with only minor issues. Said RightStar’s on-site engineer, “AACPS was very responsive and cooperative to work with. For that reason, we had extra hours at the end of the project which enabled me to install and configure Smart Reporting.”
In addition to Smart Reporting, one of the features that convinced AACPS to upgrade to Remedy 9.1 is Smart IT. Designed for the IT sup-port team, Smart IT provides an intuitive, social, and mobile service desk experience. AACPS appreciates its ease of use and the fact that support can be provided from anywhere.
Choosing RightStar to implement Remedy 9.1“Both of our experiences with RightStar have been excellent!” said Kim when asked what she thought about RightStar’s ability to successfully complete their project. “Their first class staff are great from our account manager to our engineer to our consultants. We look forward to having them around for our next project!”
