By Dick Stark

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

-Leonardo Da Vinci

Several weeks ago, CIO Magazine’s cover story, In Search of Simplicity, detailed how complex IT has become.  Between private and public clouds, mobility, BYOD, social media, Big Data, security, and misuse of technology, IT organizations have more to deal with than ever before.  Additionally, applications have proliferated, and at a recent seminar, a hospital customer confided in me about the hundreds of applications they run, many of which are no longer needed, maintained or supported.

IT support has also become more difficult, and ironically, simplified processes now have come at a price–more sophisticated support software. Several customers have complained about Remedy upgrades to version 7.604 taking too long, up to six months, depending on the situation. In addition, developing Service Request Management (SRM) workflow can be very tedious and time consuming adding to already lengthy implementations. During a recent customer visit, I asked the project manager to describe the value she thought she would gain after upgrading to the current Remedy version.  Her answer: “I’m not sure; we just want to be on the current version.”

Fortunately, Remedy software is getting much easier to implement.  Now with Abydos, which is included at no charge with all current versions of Remedy, complex workflows which previously required hours of implementation can be accomplished with a few simple design steps.  BMC has also stated that the next minor release after version 8 will include a capability to allow upgrades to occur in an hour, instead of the days previously required.  Of course, BMC’s SaaS offering, Remedy onDemand, means never having to upgrade, since SaaS based upgrades occur in the cloud.  What else can your organization do to reduce service management complexity?

• BMC offers less complex solutions such as FootPrints and Remedyforce. Both applications allow for integrated incident, problem, change, and configuration management to be up and running in days instead of weeks.
• Application consolidation.  According to the Hackett Group, typical companies run more than twice as many applications as high performance companies.  As a result, the best managed companies deliver IT services 15% more cheaply than typical companies.
• Service Catalog/SRM is a “front end” for asking for anything within the organization, not just IT.  And the CMDB should not just be for IT assets.
• Virtualization.  BMC’s BladeLogic Server Automation offers virtualization management and automation across an organization’s entire server population. This offers more opportunity for IT simplification than any other solution.

A new BMC RightStar customer in Cleveland summed up their recent service management selection this way:  “We chose BMC because we wanted a service management suite that was easy to use and fully integrated between the service support, automation, and assurance modules. No one else offered that same level of integration simplicity.”