By Dick Stark

Last week RightStar held its fifth annual Remedy User Group Meeting at the GSA Regional Office Building in Washington, DC. BMC discussed new Remedy features like Smart IT as well as the Remedy Roadmap. It was a very good event.

Smart IT for Service Desk Agents

BMC began by discussing the digital imperative for ITSM, now DSM, and the impact that it has on IT. Digital businesses deploy digital services (like Remedy 9.1) and the shift to digital is intensifying, with Gartner predicting 44% total IT budget spend in 2018. Like the ITIL mantra of cheaper, better faster, digital IT leaders look for operational efficiency, customer and employee engagement, and business agility.

Remedy 9.1 is not “your father’s Oldsmobile;” it is a new vastly improved product with a new look and much improved functionality, especially with Smart IT, MyIT and Smart Reporting. A long time RightStar local customer stood up and said, “We absolutely love Remedy 9.1, especially Smart IT. It is the best product that we’ve ever received from BMC. It has been fabulous. Right out of the box it was easy to use.”

So, what does the customer like so much about Remedy 9.1? The persona-based-UX, along with better access to knowledge articles, assets, and other records with automatic contextual insights, allows agents to solve tickets faster. Better process improvements greatly simplify the change management process, especially the unified change calendar and automated collision detection. New asset management, along with BMC Discovery allows user to track and manage physical, virtual, and cloud assets. And, self-service allows instant access on every device to everything you need to be more productive at work. Smart Reporting has a drag and drop report creation and offers a much improved search capability.

Next up was “ask the expert,” RightStar’s “expert” with more than ten years of BMC and RightStar experience explained how easy it is to use BMC’s new Single Sign-on, which supports SDPA, Kerberos, CAC/PIV, and SAML. His favorite Remedy module: Change Management, because it is powerful and simple for users. His least favorite: SRM, but he agrees that the new MyIT interface is much improved.

So, what does the future look like? According to Gartner, most of the largest 200 companies will integrate AI into their systems. Known as Cognitive Service Management, this encompasses predicative intelligence, virtual agents, and chatbots. In other words, users will have a digital conversation with a chatbot that will provide answers and “self-healing,” This result is a “shift-left” on the service desk, reducing the number of agents (and cost), and improving the user experience. The end result: the future looks bright for BMC and its Remedy customers.