BMC’s annual Federal user group conference, Exchange, was held this on June 7 at the Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, DC. Attendance was up this year with more than 400 customers, partners, and BMC employees in attendance RightStar and BMC presented, Increasing Employee Productivity with a Digital Workplace Initiative, to a room full of attendees. Here is a short Exchange 2017 update.

Dan Streetman, BMC Senior VP, Worldwide Strategic Sales and Operations acted as the host for Exchange and opened with talk about the digitalization of government. He cited several examples of government done well, like real time earthquake information from the Department of the Interior, prospective driver crash and inspection information from the Department of Transportation, and a “bug bounty program set up by the Pentagon.

Dan looked at service innovation using a new graphic, borrowing from DevOps:

The objective of any mature service desk is to “shift left” or reduce the calls to the service desk through self-help, improved knowledge or problem management, and better workflow or AI tools. And BMC has the right tools to truly innovate the service desk: Monitoring tools, like TrueSight; Policy tools like BladeLogic (Threat Director), Automation tools like Atrium Orchestrator, and Workflow tools like Remedy with Smart IT.

Keynote speakers included Margaret Graves, Deputy CIO, White House OMB, and Don Rucker, MD, National Coordinator for Health IT. Margaret spoke about modernizing government and mentioned that agencies today need better collaboration and used USCIS / Department of State as an example of the need for interagency communication. Modern IT can help. Don Rucker then described the progress that has been made in medical IT, especially electronic medical records, and discussed several government success stories.

RightStar’s session detailed the progress at DOJ we have made in replacing a paper catalog system housed on SharePoint with BMC’s MyIT Service Broker.

The old manual system was based on PDF and Excel spreadsheets that the requestor filled out and submitted. This system had no audit trail or tracking mechanism, and no way to report on the outcome of the request and associated cost.

The new system has a modern “Amazon-like” interface that makes it faster and easier for DOJ users to access IT services. The trial system is now live and DOJ is looking to roll this out to all.