Dick Stark's Blog

By Dick Stark

Note: the following article was from last Friday’s internal Weekly Star company newsletter.  As such, it is intended for RightStar employees, but I’m posting it on my Blog for anyone else to read.

I visited a RightStar SDE customer this week.  For many reasons, mostly due to customer budget cuts, customer project staff turnover, and customer delays, the project has not gone well and work still remains to finish the project.  The customer has also informed us that internal budget cuts mean they will not be able to spend any more money at this time.  With five to ten days of work remaining should we abandon the project and walk away, or salvage what we can by providing free services to complete the job?

Customer satisfaction, or “every customer a reference,” is a RightStar customer motto and a critical success factor for RightStar.  Why is it sometimes so difficult?  What can we learn from satisfied and dissatisfied customers? 

Every customer a reference may be a slight stretch, since some customers may never be fully satisfied, no matter how hard we try, but thanks to social media, we have what’s now referred to by internet marketing expert Gary Vaynerchuk, as the Thank You Economy.  According to Gary, “The Internet has given consumers back their voice, and the tremendous power of their opinions via social media means that companies and brands have to compete on a whole different level than they used to.”   As a result, most customers now feel entitled to excellent service and select vendors, on the basis of good service, not product or price. Here are ten customer loyalty ideas (thanks in part to Shep Hyken).

1. Deliver great customer service.  It’s expected.
2. Always do what you say you will do. 
3. Don’t be late.
4. Don’t make excuses or blame others – be accountable.
5. Help solve their problems. Differentiate between customer requirements and specifications.  The customer specification (or SOW) is what the customer has asked for.  The customer requirements are those that remove obstacles to customer satisfaction.  Work hard to deliver the customer specifications first and try to reserve some time for the actual customer requirements. 
6. If you catch a problem, call them before they call you. No surprises, ever!  Keep your customer informed throughout the entire job.  A short daily email informing the customer of your daily activity is required.  Remember, if it isn’t written down, it didn’t happen.
7. Trust them, if you want them to trust you. Learn as much as you can about the customer’s business.  If it is a service desk, ask to spend some time in the call center. If it is an asset tracking requirement, make sure you get a tour of the warehouse.
8. Be accessible and easy to reach.
9. Return phone calls, emails and social media comments quickly.
10. Create confidence.  (Do all of the above and we will be off to a good project start)

By Dick Stark

In memory of Steve Jobs who died on Wednesday, please read or view his commencement address that he gave at Stanford University on June 12, 2005 as he was recovering from cancer. It is the most popular commencement address ever on YouTube. Some of you know that I was so enamored by Steve’s talk, that his “Stay hungry, stay foolish” tag line became RightStar’s motto for 2006.

I won’t attempt to try to paraphrase, summarize, or translate what “Stay hungry, stay foolish,” means to me or RightStar.  Instead, please take the time and watch for yourself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

By Dick Stark

BMC’s Monitor and Operate (aka Service Assurance) product line is one of its fastest growing product areas.  With the recent Coradiant and Neptuny acquisitions, BMC significantly strengthens its offering in the APM and Capacity Optimization spaces. The synergies between Coradiant’s TrueSight technology and BMC’s ProactiveNet Performance Management’s (BPPM’s) behavior learning engine, coupled with the possibility of eventually integrating technology derived from BMC BladeLogic Application Release Automation, will significantly differentiate BMC from its closest Monitor and Operate competitors.

RightStar currently has four on-going Monitor and Operate jobs, all of which center around BMC’s Atrium CMDB/Remedy as the application centerpiece.  For those of you that don’t know, Monitor and Operate make up one-fourth of the BMC “product wheel.” It is a set of products from BMC that provide predictive intelligence for IT operations. According to BMC, this route to value “integrates service impact management with event processing automation to build a service model that maps IT components to the business services they support, consolidates, enriches, and correlates events, and determines root causes and the impact of events on business services.” In other words, BMC Service Assurance helps predict events and automate their resolution before they disrupt the business.

Monitor and Operate is also known as service impact and event management. These products have been around for years—better known by their old name, BMC Patrol. Most companies of more than 2,500 employees already have some form of Service Assurance products, like HP Operations Manager, CA-Spectrum, IBM Tivoli, Microsoft SCOM, or EMC Smarts.

RightStar is authorized to sell and provide L1 support for the entire BMC Monitor and Operate product line, including APM, Capacity Optimization, Enterprise Scheduling, Event and Impact Management, and ProactiveNet Performance Management.

Now that we are BMC Monitor and Operate authorized, and have in-house expertise, how should we sell these product solutions? My view is that we need to offer Monitor and Operate to our existing Remedy customer base.  Accounts like the four previously mentioned are good prospects because they understand the BSM message and the value an integrated Monitor and Operate solution can provide.

As always it will be up to us to sell the value—improved IT efficiency, better root cause analysis, decreased time to repair, reduced service desk volume, and improved customer satisfaction. It is up to us to make sure that all our customers understand how Monitor and Operate fits with their overall event-to-incident/problem resolution processes, including workflow, escalation and integration with service desk tools.

By Dick Stark

I just returned from the INC 500 Conference which I’ve attended every year for the last four years.  This year RightStar came in at #1975 on the list, after hitting #’s 1264, 454, and 892 in years 2010, 2009, and 2008 respectively. This list ranks private company growth rates over the preceding four years.  Of course, as we get bigger, it will be harder and harder to sustain the growth rates that RightStar has experienced in the past.

This year’s conference was the best ever. I enjoyed listening to General Stanley McChrystal, former commander, US and International Forces in Afghanistan, Barbara Corcoran, Real Estate Mogul and Star of ABC TV Show, Shark Tank, Gary Vaynerchuk, author of Crush It!, and Scott Harrison, Founder and CEO of Charity: Water. Each presented a compelling success story of their own with underlying themes of leadership, happiness, social media, and corporate responsibility.

Plywood Leadership. In Afghanistan, General McChrystal described the Plywood Palace that his men build as a command center out of two by fours and plywood. This palace could be easily modified to convert to almost anything and very quickly.  It was a symbol of strength, flexibility, and versatility.  General McChrystal concluded that his troops were like plywood, which although composed of thin sheaths, were at their best when glued together.  It is this leadership glue that provides the winning difference.

The Thank You Economy.  Gary Vaynerchuk, author of The Thank You Economy and Crush IT! is a social media guru.  Gary proclaimed that the Internet has given consumers back their voice, and the tremendous power of their opinions via social media means that companies and brands have to compete on a whole different level than they used to.  He concluded that those companies without social media will be left behind.

Shark Tank.  Barbara Cocoran, star of Shark Tank, described her rise to fame and fortune in the competitive New York real estate market.  Her formula?  Perception creates reality. She was able to grow through shrewd marketing and hard work.

Charity:Water.  Scott Harrison, CEO and Founder of Charity:Water presented the most remarkable rags to riches story, not just because of his rapid growth, but because his charity is designed to give 100% of the donations to clean water projects. In just five years he has provided clean water for two million people in developing nations around the world.  The bottom line: every $1 invested in improved water access and sanitation yields an average of $12 in economic returns, depending on the project.

What other INC 500 company can make that kind of claim?

By Dick Stark

Does the old adage, “you have to spend money to make money,” apply to IT?  If it does, what are the most compelling IT investments today for both commercial organizations and government agencies bent on cost reduction? And specifically, what really matters in the Business Service Management (BSM) space?

Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson in the classic Harvard Business Review article, “Investing in IT That Makes a Competitive Difference,” argue that those firms with the best processes (order fulfillment, field installations, job closing) win.  They recommend a three step strategy, which I’ve applied towards BSM IT investments.

1. Deploy a consistent technology platform, rather than stitching together a jumble of legacy systems. At a local commercial organization, RightStar is implementing BMC Capacity Optimization, BladeLogic Server Automation (BBSA), ProactiveNet application performance management with Remedy OnDemand (RoD) as the Service Management toolset. This is a perfect example of an integrated BMC BSM solution, which BMC also markets as its Cloud Lifecycle Management suite.  While not every customer wants to “rip and replace” with BMC, the benefits of an integrated “ERP for IT” are significant.

Last week I visited a large BMC account. They utilize BMC (BBSA, RoD), HP (RealOps, LoadRunner) and IBM (Netcool) BSM products.  The IT Vice President understood the value of a consistent technology and promised over time to consider consolidating to more BMC products.

2. Innovate better ways of working. Last week, we also met with a large asset/property management prospect.  There we presented MagicWand, RightStar’s asset management barcode add-on to SDE as a better way of reconciling what they “think they have,” with what they actually have.  Money was leaking out of the organization and the annual inventory “find percentage,” while getting better, still had room for improvement.  With MagicWand, RightStar has six years of technology innovations and improvements under its belt, and last week another suggestion was offered up:  use MagicWand as a document management tool by barcoding and tracking case folders.

3. Propagate these process innovations wildly throughout your company. One of the first questions asked during the asset management sales call, was, “does your organization have Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for Asset Management.” And it was the same answer that we’ve heard time and time again, “yes, but they are a work-in-progress.”  The ITIL framework makes these SOPs easy to propagate, yet hardly any organization places process SOPs high on the to-do list. Process innovations if properly adopted, represent the absolute highest return on any investment in IT and the biggest difference in performance improvements. 

We all know that it is not easy to successfully deploy BSM.  The toolsets are somewhat complicated to configure, and getting users to adopt new software and processes is even more challenging.  RightStar can assist with both technology and process, thereby assuring a profitable return on investment.