Dial 3-1-1

Posted on October 6, 2014 by dick1stark

CustomerService311StayConnected

By Dick Stark

Several weeks ago I attended a Technology Day seminar that RightStar co-sponsored with BMC, focused on BMC FootPrints Service Core, Asset Core, and ADDM. Hosted by the Orlando Utilities Commission, it attracted more than 30 FootPrints customers from central Florida, including several RightStar customers as well as a large Florida County.

This county’s IT department supports 9,000 employees with a staff of 180, Like most municipalities, the county must deal with budget cuts and increasingly demanding constituents. At the heart of their IT infrastructure sits BMC Service Desk Express for traditional IT functions: Incident, Problem, Configuration and Change Management.

The County understands the value of application consolidation and utilizes more than 140 seats of SDE in a multipurpose fashion.  Additionally, SDE is the centerpiece for several case management applications, an HR application, and, most importantly, a 311 application. By dialing 3-1-1, citizens request information and report non-emergency situations such as road potholes. Due to the call volume, the 311 service desk is staffed by 30 full time agents.

In order to provide a transformational customer experience, the County expanded its 311 service to its web site utilizing Magic Portal for self-service. (MagicPortal is a product built and supported by RightStar.) At the website, citizens may download an Android and iPhone app that allows them to submit requests and check the status of their requests. Of course, since the County is in the middle of hurricane country, hurricane preparedness and response is another important use of the system.

One cool benefit is that citizens utilize a GIS based web-interface that allows them to identify precisely on a map where, for example, a traffic light is out, or a dog is barking. The goal is not to just improve service to its citizens by offering an easy to use portal, but also reduce the number of agents required to answer the phone. (This County, like other SDE customers is moving to FootPrints and will migrate its existing applications to the BMC FootPrints platform. This will require a Magic Portal type product and RightStar will assist with this effort.)

This hard work has paid off. Self-service is up and calls to the 311 desk down. Most significantly, in May, the County presented its 311 solution at FEMA headquarters to President Obama and representatives from other Federal Agencies.  The purpose of the presentation was to show the president what innovative technologies (for example, BMC SDE and Magic Portal) they implemented to support residents and visitors before, during, and after emergencies.

The County CIO summed it up this way, “President Obama had a really good time with my presentation.” Clearly, the County is using technology to transform its business by better interacting with and serving its citizens.

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Critical Capabilities for the CMDB

Posted on September 8, 2014 by dick1stark

By Dick Stark

On June 16, Gartner released a report, “Critical Capabilities for the Configuration Management Database,” evaluating ten ITSM CMDB products. BMC’s Atrium CMDB, along with FootPrints and Remedyforce were included as well as products from HP, CA, ServiceNow, IBM, EasyVista, Axios, and Landesk. The winner: BMC Atrium, which scored significantly higher in all five use cases. This is no surprise since BMC has continued to lead this space since Atrium was first announced more than ten years ago. What follows is a brief summary of that report.

screenshot_Atrium_CMDB

Gartner research analysts Ronnie Colville and Jarod Greene put CMDB offerings into two camps:

Configuration Repository CMDB. These primarily integrate with management data repositories. They require organizations to manually establish relationships or configuration items and attributes for applications and IT services.

IT Service View CMDB. These primarily integrate with IT SDM tools (like ADDM) to establish peer-to-peer and hierarchal relationships among components. They also enable IT organizations to integrate various management data repositories.

FootPrints Service Core v 11.6 and Remedyforce Summer 13 scored significantly lower because they are considered configuration repository CMDBs. For example, Service Core is tightly integrated with BMC Client Management (BMC) formerly Asset Core and supports physical topology configuration items.  This means that users must manually create relationships and dependency mappings.

Service Core may also import ADDM Data into the Service Core CMDB.  Using ADDM, Service Core customers gain similar functionality as Remedy customers, with ADDM providing the data relationships and mapping, with views into the Service Core CMDB.

According to Gartner, Remedyforce “meets the basic needs of IT organizations that require insight into the configuration items they support and the associated attributes, but not service models and relationships.”  This is changing as Remedyforce, starting with the Winter 14 version now supports CMDB 2.0, Remedyforce’s Atrium like database. Customers who buy ADDM automatically get Atrium.  Remedyforce supports a Pentaho package for use with Atrium to import data into Remedyforce, for example, from ADDM. Since the Remedyforce CMDB 2.0 now supports functionality similar to Atrium, like Service Core, views in the Remedyforce CMDB are possible. Additionally, Remedyforce Summer 14 supports better searching, reporting, collision detection and impact analysis, and mapping.

The value of having the industry’s leading CMDB is real and apparent. For example at an intelligence agency, ADDM has made a significant difference, not just by identifying what’s in their data center or on the network, but how applications are mapped to related hardware and software.

At the agency, one ADDM use case, all newly discovered, newly removed (not seen for a minimum 7 days) and changed (moved) assets are tracked and compared to see if a Change Request was indeed created for these installs and moves. If a Change Request was not created, an alert is sent to the administrator to investigate.

The result is not just improved asset management effectiveness and a reduction in cost, but risk mitigation when making changes, due to a better understanding of the change and its impact to the affected underlying infrastructure.

This is a significant advantage for BMC Remedy customers, with similar functionality now available in both Service Core and Remedyforce.

 

 

 

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Knowledge Centered Support

Posted on August 23, 2014 by dick1stark

By Dick Stark

On Wednesday, RightStar and RightAnswers hosted a webinar, How Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) Methodology Can Empower Your Service Organization. This “mini-class” described the methodology behind KCS and the value that good knowledge management (KM) provides. Most eye-opening was a statement by RightAnswers that one of their customers saved $3M annually as a result of improved KCS.

RightAnswers KCS

The value of good KM to me is obvious and real. Last week, my laptop died right before a presentation to a group of IT executives at a F500 prospect. (Fortunately, I had a hard copy backup.) Later I called our service desk and was helped via remote control. The agent googled “laptop won’t boot all the way up,” but there were too many scenarios to sort through. He suspected this was a disk error and made the decision to drive to HQ to provide the fix. Had we had a better KM system in place, this trip may have been avoidable and the cost to RightStar significantly less. So how can KM help situations like this at RightStar and other organizations?

Address Mean time to Know. MTTK is the amount of time it takes to figure out how to solve the problem.  Forrester reports that MTTK is 68% of the total time required to resolve a problem, meaning shortening MTTK can significantly reduce the cost of solving an issue. RightAnswers stated that a good KCS process could cut this cost in half or more.  Since the average support call costs $75, according to Gartner, than reducing MTTK can save as much as $50 per call.

Self-Service Success.  A successful KM system must be fast, articles must be easy to find, and the system must be user friendly. There must be enough articles and the user-experience must be outstanding enough to ensure user adoptability and repeat business.

Knowledge Impact on Self-Service Channels. According to the State of Unassisted Support 2013, only 49% of self-service searches are successful. This means that more than half the time, users end up calling the service desk. This contrasts significantly with RightAnswers own customer survey where 78% of self-service channel searches were successful. This means that when users find their own answers, they don’t call the service desk. This increases user adoption and lowers costs

RightAnswers also found that self-service channel success is due to the user interface, search ability, and knowledge.  Of the three, a clean and accurate knowledge database was most significant to success.

In reality, users will search anywhere. End users are not concerned with source or company standards.  They just want results quickly.  Likewise, support agents also browse online and create knowledge articles based on web results. Fortunately, external databases such as Google and RightAnswers can co-exist and service desks should promote the value of KM and search engine integration.

One thing is certain: IT is becoming more and not less complex so continuous service desk process and technology improvements will return tremendous value to the organization. An effective KCS process that relies on a KM tool such as RightAnswers is an effective way to reduce costs and increase agent and employee productivity.

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How to Decide Between BMC and ServiceNow

Posted on August 17, 2014 by dick1stark

By Dick Stark

On July 7, Gartner released a report entitled, “How to Decide Between BMC and ServiceNow for ITSM and Beyond.” The report reviewed current offerings from both as they apply to IT Service Support Management (ITSSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM).  Not surprisingly, Gartner scored BMC much higher in ITOM and ServiceNow (SNOW) higher in the use of forms and workflow applications that support non-IT needs. The report even suggested that larger enterprises consider using both products, presumably SNOW for service support and BMC for service assurance. Here are other takeaways and observations:

Across a broad range of ITOM categories, BMC is the clear winner (see below table.)  Over the past ten years, BMC has acquired best of breed solutions such as Blade Logic for Service Automation and ProactiveNet for Service Assurance.  A clear differentiator however is BMC’s use of Event Orchestrator to provide fully integrated closed loop change or configuration management. For example, a company can request a change related to a new server, and after the appropriate automated approvals, a new server can quickly be provisioned using Event Orchestrator as the integration centerpiece.

SNOW is just starting its own acquisition binge.  Last year it purchased Mirror42 for dashboard and analytics, and recently purchased IT Service Dependency Mapping vendor Neebula Systems. This sends a strong message that SNOW recognizes the importance of areas outside of ITSM to its future growth.

In RightStar’s experience, Event Orchestrator is not widely implemented. This is due to the limited maturity level of most organizations that we work with.  Over time, this will change as companies recognize the value of automation. Additionally, before we get too excited, remember that most enterprises are not single vendor focused and instead typically procure ITOM products in a heterogeneous fashion  from various vendors like HP, CA, and IBM. However, this reinforces the value of value of integration and workflow automation such as Event Orchestrator.

Likewise, based upon our discussion with other partners, the majority of SNOW’s customers implement only three or so of SNOW’s 15 modules, meaning that SNOW’s Orchestration ability (RBA) is even less utilized than BMC’s. In summary, BMC has the edge for those customers looking for a more ITOM/BSM based solution.

Check out the Gartner link for more information:

http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1WY4VAS&ct=140710&st=sb

 

BMC vs ServiceNow

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ServiceNow’s Entry into the ITOM Space

Posted on July 15, 2014 by dick1stark

By Dick Stark

ServiceNow (SNOW) was in the news again last week for its proposed acquisition of IT Service Dependency Mapping vendor Neebula Systems for $100 million cash. Neebula gives SNOW an ADDM like product offering with its Service Dependency Mapping (SDM) and brings SNOW into the IT operations management (ITOM) market with its Service Performance Monitoring offering.  On paper this seems like another good way for SNOW to continue to take core ITSM share from incumbents like BMC and HP.   SNOW remains on a roll and is expected to overtake HP for the #2 ITSM market share position within the next 12 months.

BMC, however, is not going to allow SNOW to eat its lunch forever. Despite, all the attention focused on SNOW, BMC is still the overall market leader at around 40% counting its Numara and Track-It acquisitions.  And with FootPrints v12, Remedyforce Summer 14, and a coming new release of Remedy, BMC is fighting back with strong alternatives.

What’s even more remarkable, is that SNOW’s momentum exists arguably despite Remedy’s technical superiority as compared to SNOW. The Gartner Magic Quadrant still rates BMC higher, and ITSM University, an independent ITSM “think tank” as of February 2014, still rated BMC Remedy considerably higher across a wide range of categories such as functionality, architecture, and pricing.  Perception is reality, and this is where SNOW really shines.

SNOW has also excelled because of its SaaS based architecture which is becoming a defacto standard among CIOs. CA, HP, and BMC have all struggled to keep up. The good news is that Remedyforce is BMC’s fastest growing ITSM product with more than 600 customers.  In that same ITSM University study, Remedyforce was ranked third behind Remedy and SNOW, and ahead of HP, Frontrange, Heat, and CA.  Other competitors such as EasyVista and Cherwell were not evaluated due to their relatively small market share.

SNOW is “making hay” with this perceived SaaS competitor weakness.  For example, when SNOW competes against Remedyforce SNOW points out that Remedyforce is not for larger organizations because of its lack of enterprise integrations, especially around monitoring and discovery. That is not true. . RightStar has already developed or assisted with integrations from Remedyforce to BMC systems such as FootPrints Asset Core, ADDM, BPPM, and Atrium Orchestrator.  Additionally, we’ve also integrated Remedyforce to non-BMC products such as SCCM, LANDesk, Altiris, Courion, Spiceworks, Active Directory, Cloud Coach, VersionOne, Lawson, and Workday.

One place where SNOW excels is the user interface. For incident management, SNOW is very user friendly, and activity history and date and time tracking are easier to see. But don’t count Remedy or Remedy on-Demand out yet.  The usability and performance improvements in the next version of Remedy will provide a significant improvement over past versions and a strong counter to SNOW’s claim that its software is much easier to use than Remedy.

Finally, SNOW doesn’t win them all.  Just this past weekend RightStar migrated 60,000 SNOW tickets to Remedyforce for a large public relations agency.  The customer turned off SNOW because it is consolidating its US and UK operations into a single incident, problem, change, and configuration management system based upon Remedyforce.

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RightStar is the Value

Posted on June 23, 2014 by dick1stark

By Dick Stark

“The value used to be in the products and services. With products and services commoditized, the seller becomes the value.  This is a massive shift.”

—Mike Schultz and John Doerr, Insight Selling

How does RightStar show value?  One way is good account management which results in excellent customer satisfaction.  Indeed, in the recent Forrester ITSM consultancy Wave report RightStar received a 4.6 out of 5.0 for overall customer satisfaction.  This is good news, but we need to continue to raise the bar.  Here are several ways that we show value.

Provide something of value for free. RightStar offers free L1 trial support for a month, free remote admin trial, free Remedy upgrade consultation, free FootPrints Service Core upgrade consultation.  We also had good success with free Apollo 13 simulation training, thanks to the donation of time and training materials from Gaming Works.  We’ve also provided plenty of “lunch and learns,” which offer excellent content, and of course a “free lunch.”

Raise the bar.  Customers like Amazon, Apple, Ritz Carlton, and Nordstrom, are known for their excellent customer service, and buyers of ITSM (or anything), expect their experience to be similar.  How can we compete? We have increased customer contact at every step during an implementation, more regular and improved customer surveys, scheduled maintenance checks for our L1 accounts, and improved documentation and reporting.  In general, more and quicker touch points.  We should never be surprised if a customer tells BMC that their experience with RightStar was not favorable.

The customer is not always right. At RightStar we will never abandon a customer, and will always see a job through to completion. This can be challenging, especially if the customer is difficult to work with.  Recently I asked one of our subcontractors if they would ever consider working with one of our long-time customers.  This job did not go well, because the customer PM was a bully and demanded more than was reasonable.  The subcontractor did not hesitate: “no, and I’ll be happy to introduce them to one of our competitors.”  It is ok to fire a customer.  This also sends a message to our employees that we’re willing to put them ahead of a customer.

Finally, as customer satisfaction guru Shep Hyken says, “create a demanding customer.”  Not one that complains or is high maintenance, but one that loves our services and demands it of others.  When we are so good that we meet and exceed the high expectations we set with our customers, we make it harder for our competitors, including BMC.  In the end, that is what de-commoditizes our business, and heightens the experience thereby creating a demanding, but satisfied customer.

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2014 BMC Partner Forum Summary

Posted on June 12, 2014 by dick1stark

By Dick Stark

I attended BMC’s Partner Forum last week in Houston.  It was an upbeat event as BMC continues to perform very well and is starting to make significant ITSM product improvements in its fight against ServiceNow.  What follows is a brief summary.

The BMC CTO spoke about the changing IT landscape and the emphasis on enabling a great customer experience. He was optimistic about BMC’s innovation especially in areas like MyIT 2.0, the next release of Remedy, Cloud Lifecycle Management 4.0, and Control-M, especially Hadoop Management.

BMC’s Pre-Sales Director discussed the roadmaps for Remedy, FootPrints, and Remedyforce. She was extremely excited about the direction and pace of innovation at BMC. The good news is that BMC is fighting back in a big way with the upcoming Remedy release due out in the October timeframe.  This, plus the Remedy roadmap sent a strong signal that Remedy will re-tain its innovation leader ITSM status.

BMC then showed a new video on the future of Remedy. The video demonstrated that through improved problem and collision management, a ticket can be quickly resolved based upon past history, using an automated/predictive approach.  The idea is to be the Apple in the ITSM space. This is the most exciting new offering I’ve ever seen from BMC.

BMC is also focusing on the large amount of “white space” available in other BMC product areas. For example, 88% of ADDM customers own Remedy.  This means there is more opportunity than ever for products like ADDM, BPPM and BBSA into our customer base.  Also hot is BMC Control-M, workload automation.  It is all alone in the upper most right-hand corner of the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

 

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Remedyforce: Driving Greater Cost Efficiency

Posted on June 3, 2014 by dick1stark

By Dick Stark

RemedyForce logo 1

I’ve been in the ITSM business since co-founding Evergreen Systems in 1997.  Back then, Evergreen sold and supported a mid-market toolset, DP Umbrella, which eventually begat McAfee Help Desk which begat Magic, which finally became BMC Service Desk Express (SDE). We also sold an enterprise toolset, Software Artistry, which became Peregrine Service Center by way of IBM Tivoli. I didn’t really understand then why DP Umbrella which had 75% of the functionality of Software Artistry, sold for less than a third of what enterprises would pay for Software Artistry.

Fast-forward 17 years to today, and we have a similar dichotomy between Remedyforce and Remedy.  What compounds this is that most customers that purchase “enterprise-grade” ITSM toolsets have a Gartner ITSM maturity level of less than level 3.  This means that they have overspent for a product that they can’t take full advantage of anyway, What gives? And, what makes 1997 different from 2014?

First of all, no sizeable organization wants to admit that their maturity level is less than it should be and overcompensates, hoping that the enterprise toolset will make up for their lack of maturity.  The result is often frustration and occasionally blame directed towards the consulting firm and ITSM toolset vendor. What’s different in 2014 is financial transparency: cost matters, budgets are tighter, and organizations are now held accountable.

This means that Remedyforce and FootPrints Service Core, which offers a more rapid ROI (and other competing products like Cherwell and Easy Vista) could start to gain ground relative to the more expensive offerings like Remedy and ServiceNow. Today, RightStar has more than 200 Remedyforce implementations under its belt with customers ranging from mid-size businesses to large enterprises.  What’s noticeable is the growing number of large organizations that have switched to Remedyforce to meet their ITSM needs. For example, RightStar helped a Global 20 organization roll out a large enterprise Remedyforce call center, and assisted a Fortune 500 customer, implement a sizable BMC BPPM/ADDM service assurance and automation system that included Remedyforce as the ITSM toolset.  Indeed, we also recently assisted a large government agency with an organization-wide ITSM consolidation using Remedyforce as the ITSM centerpiece.

 What about the argument that Remedy and other Enterprise ITSM tools offer the most integration flexibility?  It is true that integrations to and from Remedy already exist for almost any type of product, but Remedyforce is not far behind. RightStar has already developed or assisted with integrations from Remedyforce to BMC systems such as FootPrints Asset Core, ADDM, BPPM, and Atrium Orchestrator.  Additionally, we’ve also integrated Remedyforce to non-BMC products such as SCCM, LANDesk, Altiris, Courion, Spiceworks, Active Directory, Cloud Coach, VersionOne, Lawson, and Workday.   This makes Remedyforce truly an enterprise ready ITSM toolset. Combine integration flexibility with rapid time to value, easy and fast upgrades, and the stability of the Force.com platform, and it’s a “no-brainer” to select Remedyforce for mid-size to large organizations looking for a SaaS based ITSM solution.

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Why FootPrints v12 Will be a Real Hit

Posted on May 28, 2014 by dick1stark

By Dick Stark

Last Thursday RightStar hosted a BMC Foot-Prints/Service Core v12 Webinar for a large group of SDE, Remedy, FootPrints, and Track-It customers and prospects.  One of the participants emailed, “I’m loving the Footprints 12 demo.   Thoroughly impressed!  You might just have a sale” What makes FootPrints v12 so different?  Here are several reason why FootPrints v12, which was just released last month will be a real hit.

FP v12

Visuals/Views. First, v12 is not an upgrade to old FootPrints, it is a brand new product. And it sure looks good.  Overall appearance and colors are customizable by user and department. Multiple portals are now supported, e.g., IT, HR, and Facilities. The modernistic design consists of tiles, tabs, and bread crumbs.  Additionally, there are plenty of attractive icons, e.g., Service Catalog IT items and non-IT requests like a hot or cold thermometer. (A blue thermometer means that you need to submit a facility request to turn up the heat—you get the idea.)

End-User Experience. What really jumps out, is that the BMC designers understand the importance of user adoption. RightStar’s experience with more than 800 deployments in 10 years is that the implementation of the toolset is the easy part. What’s difficult is getting clients to fully buy-into the changes that accompany a new process redesign and toolset roll out. Because of the emphasis on the end-user experience, the value of v12 to the client organization becomes obvious and real.

One place that BMC made significant improvements is the self-service interface. By making the interface intuitive and self-learning, users can quickly search the knowledge base and submit requests. Since neither requires a call to the service desk, the impact to the organization is significant. One specific “cool” feature is the self-service form layouts.  By creating forms that offer “complete the sentence” functionality, forms can be filled out quickly and easily.  Best of all the use of common language for the end users allows the service desk to categorize and prioritize the incident automatically.

Graphical Work-Flow Designer. A significant improvement over old FootPrints is the ease of customization and building workflow.  V12 uses an intuitive Visio like layout. For example, for a change process, requests, workflow, approvals, and business rules are all included in one easy to follow flow chart. To update an existing workflow, drag and drop, and connect the lines as appropriate.

FP v12 workflow

Finally, v12 is a complete offering consisting of all required ITIL modules.  Combined with Asset Core, organizations can take full advantage of the value that effective asset management brings to an organization.  For example, a service desk technician can view all the systems that an end-user has access (or a log-in).  This assists in trouble shooting the incident and problem management to prevent similar problems from re-occurring.

Even better, RightStar hosts both Service Core and Asset Core for organizations that don’t want to hassle with servers or software. Steve Jobs liked to say, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” For v12 that rings true.

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Making Masterful Presentations

Posted on May 20, 2014 by dick1stark

Ferrari

By Dick Stark

Excellent presentation skills are essential for almost all of us. Whether you are in Sales or Operations, a single presentation may determine whether or not your organization wins a new job, or whether you kick off a new job successfully.  The good news is that you don’t have to be Steve Jobs to be a great presenter. Here are a few tips from a two day Mandel class that I completed last week at BMC.

Have a Plan. At Mandel, that plan is known as the Mandel Blueprint Process.  Begin by setting building specifications, build the core message using SCIPAB (see below), add detail, and finish with color spots. Effective communicators plan in advance, develop a compelling story, and make it easy for listeners to follow the narrative. Remember we do not sell ITSM software.  We improve efficiency and reduce the overall cost of service management.

SCIPAB explained:

  • Situation is “person chained to a railroad track.”
  • Complication is a challenge, “train is coming.”
  • Implication is the result, “she is going to die.”
  • Position is our solution, “free her before the train arrives.”
  • Action is “run to get the bolt cutter.”
  • Benefit is “a life saved and no cleanup required.”

SCIPAB applied to a Remedy 8 upgrade. I understand that you have Remedy version 7.1.  I further understand that Remedy is heavily customized, cumbersome, expensive to maintain and doesn’t really meet your needs anymore. What’s complicating the situation is the mix of contractors and consultants that have worked or attempted to work with Remedy over the years. As a result, your users are not happy with the slow response times and it is clear that Remedy is not meeting all your requirements.

Remedy is like a Ferrari parked in the garage, and by upgrading to version 8.1 you can get your Ferrari out of the garage and onto the super-highway. Let’s make this demo session is interactive—RightStar will show you how the new Remedy can better meet your needs with the end result — lower cost, improved efficiency, and excellent customer satisfaction.

What I learned. During the two day class we each gave seven presentations, each one videotaped.  It’s amazing what we learned by watching ourselves and listening to feedback from others.  For example, I’m working to improve my eye contact.  I’ve found that, especially in a small group, it’s important to look everyone in the eye, not just the key decision makers. (Look at each person for a thought, three seconds or so, and then move on to someone else.).  I’m also trying to improve how I work a room.  (The actual process is look, move, and plant.)  This takes practice, especially if you’re like me and  have trouble walking and chewing gum.

One of the best ways to practice is to join a Toastmasters International chapter. This is a professional speaking organization with thousands of chapters all over the world. Meetings are normally every other week and there is a nominal fee to join. I’m proud to say that I’m a certified Toastmaster, having successfully completed ten speeches. If Toastmasters won’t work for you, then invest in a video camera with a stand.

Of course, watch out for clutter words like and, um, ah, so, you know.  And don’t talk to the audience when your back is turned…

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