Winning with BMC Discovery

BMC Discovery Map

By Dick Stark

BMC Discovery, formerly ADDM, continues to be one of BMC’s hottest software products. And for RightStar things are starting to heat up. We just received an order for new Discovery services which we will begin next week. Additionally, we just learned that BMC Discovery beat a competitive discovery tool in a proof of concept with a large municipality. That City has been a long time RightStar SDE account and is now considering a move to either Remedy or a competitive product, and a Discovery win is a strategic first step.

At the City, the priority for discovery overshadowed the need for new service desk software. Why? Because of an upcoming data center move and unplanned outages. So, how did BMC Discovery win? BMC set up the POC using real customer data. BMC has a more extensible library (by a factor of two), and uses a “start anywhere,” application mapping methodology, as opposed to the competition’s top down approach. A top down approach means the scan will just stop at a point due for example, to lack of credentials, and remain incomplete, leaving out valuable information. This gave BMC an impressive speed and scalability edge.

Interest in BMC Discovery remains high thanks to the growing complexity of the IT infrastructure like the cloud (multi-cloud and hybrid), and third platforms (social, mobile, IoT, and analytics). These third platform technologies often put undue stress on IT support groups. As a result, IT analysts often have little or no visibility into root cause analysis and cross dependencies, often hindering IT operational performance. BMC Discovery enables IT departments to better understand “how the pieces fit together,” to discover datacenter inventory, and configuration information and map business applications to underlying infrastructure.

At a RightStar government customer where we are now supporting Remedy, a former Lockheed employee had this to say in a technical brief about DTRA’s Discovery implementation, “BMC Discovery not only shows you the network you know: servers, network gear, even printers and storage. It also shows you your network’s secret life by mapping out communication patterns and groupings you never knew existed. These relationships can be invaluable in an operational environment for operational impact and configuration management.”

At a RightStar government intelligence customer where we have worked with BMC Discovery for more than five years, we are providing value in software license management and discovery. Microsoft’s licensing rules for SQL are so complex that by using BMC Discovery we can help ferret out the CPU Cores for the VM and the CPU Cores for the ESX/ESXi hosts to determine which is the best way to save money on licensing. We also help determine which PCs can handle an upgrade to Windows 10.

What’s even more impressive is the new Discovery features and upcoming enhancements. BMC Discovery as a Service will soon be available, and coming later this summer is public and multi-cloud awareness. Since most organizations now have a mix of public, private, and hybrid cloud solutions like Azure and Amazon, BMC Discovery will soon offer the ability to scan all environments, from a “single pane of glass.” This makes BMC Discovery uniquely positioned to help IT win by achieving the full benefits of multi-cloud ecosystems with its industry-leading, vendor agnostic discovery and dependency mapping solution.

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A Tale of Two Surveys

By Dick Stark

BMC released two ITSM surveys this past week. The first, published as a Forbes Insights Paper, “Delivering Value to Today’s Digital Enterprise,” surveyed 261 high level senior managers in mostly large enterprises. The second, a survey of BMC’s Remedyforce (Rf) customer base, shows that Rf is alive and well, that customers like the product, that they get good value from it, and that Rf is used at all types and sizes of customers. Both reports are are well worth a quick read. Here are a few highlights.

The Forbes Insights Paper

Effective ITSM is more important now in 2017 than ever before. According to the Forbes Paper, poorly done ITSM hurts competitiveness as a business, while well done ITSM plays a crucial role in key digital initiatives. Two examples spring to mind. The first, a digitalization service catalog project at a large government agency using BMC’s MyIT Service Broker will soon go-live. Remedy 9 in the underpinning ITSM platform, and the agency will soon start to move away from a paper/email based request management system. Additionally, at a local university, RightStar is moving a Remedy 9 on-premise system to Remedy-on-Demand, to meet their objectives of becoming an all cloud-based organization.

ITSM Benefits from 2017 Survey

Organizations have made excellent progress in improving overall ITSM maturity. Just several years ago, Gartner reported that 92% of IT organizations were operating at a maturity level of less than 3 (proactive/use automation tools). Today, the Forbes survey found that only 10% of organizations are basic or less developed, while 54% are advanced. “Advanced,” means service operations are automated, tied to analytics, and change management is highly collaborative and analytics driven. This is a significant increase in maturity levels and indicates that organizations are making excellent progress and receiving improved value from their ITSM investments.

For example, at another large government agency, RightStar has been involved in an agency wide knowledge project to ensure that employees, not just IT employees have a knowledge system to provide specific support for departmental issues. The objective is to “shift-left” by reducing calls to the service desk and making people more efficient.

Remedyforce Paper

The Rf report was distributed to all BMC Rf customers, with 326 respondents, a very good response. Takeaways are:

  • 91% of all respondents likely to renew
  • 82% said Rf helped them achieve their goals
  • 75% of SMBs implemented in 2 months or less

The real value of the survey was the versatility of Rf. It’s everywhere: large enterprises, SMB’s Telecoms, Finance and Banking, Computer Related, Government, and Healthcare. And although being an existing salesforce customer is important, approximately 50% of respondents do not use salesforce, implying that they chose Rf due to its cloud based nature, ease of implementation, and fast time to value. Even better: both surveys emphasized cost savings as an important ITSM value add. For copies of the surveys email us at sales.rightstar.com.

Posted in Business Management, Digital Engerprise Management (DEM, FootPrints, ITSM, Remedy, Technology Trends, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

What’s New in Remedy 9.1

By Dick Stark

In last week’s Weekly Star, I discussed BMC’s Innovation Suite, which is now available for partners and developers. Well, this week, RightStar held a What’s new in Remedy version 9.1, webinar led by Peter Adams, BMC Director of Product Management for Remedy. In addition to Innovation Suite, BMC has worked hard to deliver several new exciting capabilities. Here is an update.

As I mentioned last week, BMC is trying hard to maintain its status as the most innovative ITSM solution in the marketplace. With MyIT, SmartIT, Smart Reporting, and now the Innovation Suite, BMC has capabilities that are unmatched. What I didn’t realize is additional cool functionality added in version 9.1. Here are some of the highlights.

Data Compliance with Microsoft Office 365. This is a collaboration with Microsoft’s data loss prevention (DLP) module (included in Office 365). DLP allows users to define rules specifying what types of data users can put into emails, and into documents on SharePoint or in the cloud. For example, company policy may prohibit PII information such as social security numbers from being stored or emailed, and DLP can establish and enforce company PII rules. If a user violates this rule, then the DLP notifies the user of the policy breach, and corrective action, or an approval may be granted. Now, with the Remedy DLP integration, a better option is the creation of an incident in Remedy. With the power of Remedy incident management, the security issue can be better managed using escalations or reports to ensure data security compliance.

Asset Management on Every Device. With version 9.1, BMC added an extensive list of capabilities: more asset information (and views) on the Smart IT screens, a visible audit log, better drill down capabilities, and a new three stage bulk update capability. The new Smart IT user experience adds a new streamlined process making the asset management interaction more efficient and faster. In addition, MyIT now supports barcode scanning for viewing an asset, and also for bulk-receiving (like RightStar’s ScanStar).

MyIT Barcode

Knowledge Centered Support (KCS). Version 9.1 now has a KCS certified Smart IT based knowledge management system. Remedy’s KM s offers a quality assessment build into every offering to ensure the knowledge is current and accurate. And now knowledge author performance can be scored.

At a government agency, RightStar is implementing an agency-wide Knowledge project using Remedy KM. The objective is to use Remedy KM to “shift left,” that is reduce calls to the service desk. RightStar is doing the analysis, workshops, design, and implementation of Remedy KM to provide the users with easy access to knowledge related to their specific job function. At this agency, knowledge management is not just for the IT team. It also includes accounting/finance, HR, technology services, and the enterprise application departments. The end-result should be less calls to the service desk and improved customer satisfaction.

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BMC’s Innovation Suite

By Dick Stark

Innovation Suite

BMC held a webinar this past Wednesday to provide an update on its new Innovation Suite, which is now available for partners and developers. Innovation Suite allows partners to create modern applications and publish them in the BMC Marketplace for customer consumption.

Just like ServiceNow or Atlassian, BMC is looking to its partners and developers to help populate its Marketplace with applications that sit on-top of its ARS platform and make Remedy more attractive to new buyers. BMC has had a Marketplace (formerly Marketzone) for 15+ years as Remedy got its beginnings as a platform (ARS) and developers built connectors, plug-ins and entire applications on top of ARS. Today BMC’s MarketPlace has nearly 300 offerings ranging from RightStar’s ScanStar to a connector from MyIT to JIRA for bug submission. A healthy Marketplace helps sell the base software platform.

BMC first announced its Innovation Suite at Engage last September. There was some confusion that the Innovation Studio was actually Remedy v9.5, but that’s not the case. Innovation Studio is a separate cloud based (AWS) application optimized to develop digital service management based apps in a very rapid way. At Engage, several BMC partners showcased two new apps: a crowd sourcing funding app for companies to track their employees’ donations of time and money, and an employee visit request app to check visitors in and out. Both developers said that they finished these apps in less than two weeks thanks to the drag and drop Innovation Suite developer toolkit.

To sign up, RightStar (or any developer) simply requests a developer sandbox (more than 400 have already been requested), and then develops using the developer’s toolkit. The developer decides what part of the app is configurable and builds the app using codeless app definitions with visual drag and drop designs. A library stores reusable code definitions. Everything gets translated to Java code. Eventually this means that Remedy consultants will need some knowledge of Java and JavaScript.

It’s important to note that Innovation Suite is currently only available in the cloud on AWS. My speculation is that BMC will announce an ITSM suite, maybe Remedy 10 that also be available on AWS and tightly integrated with Innovation Suite. In the meantime, any apps developed in the cloud, must also be consumed in the cloud. During the webinar, BMC reported that they are working on a connector to Remedy on-premise, but until then Innovation Suite is targeted for new Remedy systems (or new standalone apps) only.

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How to Improve Your Golf Game, or Anything Else Using DevOps Principles

By Dick Stark

Recently RightStar presented a webinar, “How to Improve Your ITSM Processes in a DevOps World.” According to our presentor, and with apologies to Mark Twain, the reports of ITIL’s death are greatly exaggerated. ITIL is NOT dead and all the work required to implement ITIL best practices is NOT wasted! ITSM, your golf game, or anything else can be improved using DevOps principles.

We opened the webinar by discussing the role and importance of ITSM within an IT organization. ITSM (aka Digital Service Management) is the implementation and management of quality IT services that meet the needs of the business. ITSM is performed by an IT organization and consists of people, processes, and tools. All three are required to realize improvements in quality and customer sat. As a software tool consultancy, RightStar always stresses the importance of good processes. But often times our customers, frustrated with their current ITSM system or toolset, purchase a new toolset without making an investment in processes and are disappointed. It is like being frustrated with your golf game and buying new clubs thinking that will improve your game.

Software Development teams often make up a sizeable chunk of an IT organization. Their output is a software product and they often have a very defined process for designing, developing, testing, and releasing software into production, usually in an agile fashion.

DevOps is a movement that emphasizes collaboration and communications while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes. DevOps focus is on eliminating bottlenecks, duplicate work, and streamlining processes through feedback loops. How can DevOps principles improve ITSM processes? Here are a few suggestions from the webinar:

Incident Management: Look for ways to reduce waste, fix delays that reduce bottlenecks, document lessons learned (retrospectives), and provide incident metrics.

Change Management: Streamline Change Management processes, implement an automated approval process, e.g., use Puppet or Chef to automatically provision servers.

Release Management: Put controls in place to manage code changes, don’t implement ad-hoc code changes because the business requested it, do user acceptance testing in a pre-production environment.

golf technology

How to improve your golf game using DevOps practices: Make practice sessions on and off the course meaningful. Use real-time technology and tools to track your statistics such as 3D swing view, and all the data behind each swing. Set goals, map your progress, and do retrospectives to apply lessons learned and then test the fix, and re-test, based upon your feedback from the sensors attached to your clubs. Using this automated approach is a significant improvement over hitting ball after ball on the practice range expecting improved or different results.

Posted in DevOps, Digital Engerprise Management (DEM, ITIL, Technology Trends, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Atlassian at Pink17: The New Shape of IT

pink-17By Dick Stark

The 21st annual Pink Elephant Conference, held February 19 to23 in Las Vegas, is IT’s annual tribute and awards ceremony to all things ITIL. It’s fun and entertaining–words, not often found in the same sentence as ITIL. What’s new this year? Like other shows, DevOps now has its own track. The best news: Atlassian asked RightStar to help staff their booth. Here are a few things I learned.

Atlassian customers love Atlassian. We had a good booth attendee turnout during the exhibit hours, with many existing DevOps customers stopping by. What’s refreshing is the love and loyalty shown to Atlassian by its customers. One government customer, made a big point gushing to the Atlassian Product Marketing Manager for Confluence how much she appreciated Confluence’s design and ease of use.

DevOps does make a difference. George Spalding, Pink VP and longtime ITIL icon is clearly on the DevOps bandwagon. He discussed the two biggest issues of failed IT projects—poor communication and limited delivery of business value. George pointed out that about 65% of IT projects fail and this statistic has not changed for more than 20 years. His suggestions for improvement? Smaller is better, and agile projects are three times more likely to succeed than waterfall projects. With agile projects value is achieved in iterative “chunks” all the way along. Value is achieved instantly, rather than at the end of a large project.

Incrementalism is innovation’s worst enemy. Interestingly, in another session, “Leveling Up To Digital & Modern IT,” Enterprise Architect Jason Walker from Cargill had a different perspective. Jason said, “incrementalism is innovation’s worst enemy. Building a fourth of a project, doesn’t give you the whole project.” Indeed, at RightStar, when we’ve offered to break an ITSM project up into small pieces for a quick win, e.g., roll out Incident Management first, we’ve found it difficult to reengage the customer to do later phases. The end result is a system with limited functionality.

Build service roadmaps from customer feedback and data. At one large government customer, we are building a Service Catalog using BMC’s new MyIT Service Broker. Let’s make sure that we provide as much feedback to the customers there as possible—for example, wait status, who to contact, and job request status. Use the Domino Pizza Dashboard as an example. (Once a Pizza is ordered on-line, the customer sees a graphic that show the full pizza lifecycle—from order to delivery.)

pizza-tracker-cool-idea-dominos

The overarching trend, however is the importance of IT’s role of business value generation and business enablement. By bringing Dev and Ops under the same umbrella, Atlassian can help facilitate the new shape of IT.

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BMC DSM 2017 Update

By Dick Stark

BMC recently held two webinars. The first, BMC Client Management Integration with MyIT and Smart IT, and the second, Digital Service Management (DSM) given by Nayaki Nayyar, President, DSM at BMC. Both provided an excellent update of the progress BMC has made in the DSM and Remedy v9 space.

BCM Client Management (BCM), formerly Asset Core is BMC’s mid-market discovery tool for agent based inventory, software and patch deployment and endpoint compliance. BCM is a key focus and growth product for RightStar from a consulting, support and sales perspective. BMC, realizing that BCM is an “enterprise grade” solution, has fully integrated BCM with Remedy 9 and MyIT and Smart IT. Now from within Remedy9, users can request software and BCM will fulfill that request. Additionally, Service Desk agents now have an optimized, in-depth view of client inventory, allowing more responsive support. RightStar is currently organizing a campaign for customers and prospects to better understand the value BCM offers.

The second webinar was presented to the BMC partner community. It was led by Nayaki Nayyar who joined BMC in October as President of DSM and responsible for the Remedy, Remedyforce, FootPrints and Track-It! product lines. She opened by discussing the excellent progress BMC is making with Remedy 9.

Nayaki discussed the digital workplace:

Flexible User Experience. A transformative self-service experience to create anytime, anywhere access.

Single Service Catalog for the Enterprise. Like what RightStar is doing at a large government customer: a service catalog across IT, HR, Facilities with a consumer shopping experience.

Integration with existing apps and services. Integrate with the apps that users have and the systems that fulfill their needs.

Graceful journey to the Cloud. Hybrid deployment for Cloud Digital Workplace interoperating with On-Premise Core Remedy ITSM.

New Innovation Suite: for developers and partners. BMC Innovation Suite, part of the Remedy 9.5 release is an extremely flexible and open development environment. There are already 400+ developer sandboxes provisioned and in-use.

innovation-suite-platform-for-developers

Remedyforce and FootPrints: BMC’s solution for the mid-market. Nayaki pointed out that these solutions are alive and well, with Remedforce getting the most focus because of its cloud platform.

RightStar’s experience with Remedy 9 has been very positive and we look forward to learning more about the Remedy 9.5 Innovation Suite and continuing to improve our customers’ DSM experience.

 

 

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The DevOps Handbook, Part 2

By Dick Stark

Two weeks ago I looked at the DevOps Handbook, Part 1, which discusses the three main principles that form the foundation for DevOps organizations. Part 2 is all about how to start a DevOps movement within an organization.

Up until about two years ago, when we started our DevOps practice, RightStar had focused primarily on the Operations side of an organization: IT service, (now digital management), performance and application management (e.g., BMC TrueSight), and data center automation, (e.g., Blade Logic Server Automation).

RightStar has also been involved in transformative projects such restaurant’s move into the on-line food ordering business (a greenfield project). Our job was to upgrade their infrastructure by adding performance, capacity, and availability tools to support the added stress caused by new web-based order processing system (a brownfield project). This organization faced stiff competition from other digital businesses and had to make a digital investment in order to remain competitive.

Part 2 of the DevOps Handbook is filled with specific case studies of similar types of jobs: Nordstrom’s and Etsy’s transformation to more digitized e-commerce systems, IT infrastructure upgrades at LinkedIn and FaceBook, and API enablement at Target. All relied heavily on DevOps principles and systems to make successful digital transformations.

What can we at RightStar learn from Part 2 of the DevOps Handbook? Very simply, we can help guarantee project success, either on our own customer ITSM projects, or by using Atlassian tools to better manage our DevOps customer projects. A good place to start is to document the value stream using high level process blocks:

devops-handbook-part-2

Each process block includes the lead time (the total time starting when the request is made) and the process time (the actual work completed or VA). For example, in the Design and Analysis phase of the above value stream, the lead time is 2 weeks which may be due to delays getting a project workshop set up, which itself may only take two days. By understanding the value stream at every step it is possible to focus on specific areas of improvement.

The remainder of Part 2 focuses on getting Dev and Ops to work together by improving processes, such as upgrading and cross-training team members’ skill sets (deep expertise in a few areas is better), using automated self-service cloud based platforms (Operations becomes a service broker), and DevOps tools such as JIRA, Confluence, and HipChat. that will reinforce culture and accelerate desired behavior changes.

By getting Dev and Ops under the same roof and using JIRA and JIRA Service Desk to create a shared, instead of siloed work queue, work can be prioritized globally. Chat tools like HipChat also reinforce shared goals and can dramatically reduce the time to get help or needed information.

The end result in a reduction in time to value, especially as lead times shink and quality improves. This is why I continue to be excited about the impact DevOps can make as we undergo this digital transformation.

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The DevOps Handbook, Part 1

By Dick Stark

Last November, the DevOps Handbook, was released with much fanfare and excitement. Authored by Gene Kim, et.al., the book is about “how to create world class agility, reliability, and security in technology organizations.” Since this is what RightStar does, I strongly suggested that all RightStar consultants read this book. Even better, I promised I’d very briefly, summarize the six parts of the book separately. I’ll begin with Part 1.

Specifically, Part 1 is about the three ways, or underlying pricipals from which all of the observed DevOps behavior can be derived:three-ways

  1. The first way is about the left-to right flow of work from Development to IT Operations.
  2. The second is about the constant flow of fast feedback from right-to-left at all stages of the value stream.
  3. The third way is about creating a culture that fosters two things: continual experimentation, and understanding that repetition and practice is the prerequisite to mastery.

An important first step in the DevOps lifecycle is the focus on the technology value stream, which includes a heavy emphasis on reducing the deployment lead time to minutes instead of months. This brought to mind the difficulty we often have getting ITSM projects started with large government agencies. Due to security constraints, the lead time to provision servers, open-up firewalls and ports can be months, not days. The value stream may look something like this:

value-stream

An obvious “fix” is SaaS based security approved, e.g., FedRamp certified apps, that supply “dial-tone,” ready service. Reducing the deployment time by using a SaaS based app like BMC’s Remedyforce reduces the overall lead time and can significantly improve time to value.

The second way, the Principal of Feedback is also critically important. One common practice is swarming, or containing problems before they have a chance to spread, and to diagnose and treat the problem so it cannot reoccur.

This manifested itself during a BMC Service Broker (SB) install last week. Since SB is a brand new product, the accompanying installation documentation was incomplete. By “swarming,” contacting BMC support, BMC sales management and the BMC customer success office at the same time, enough attention was applied immediately to help get SB successfully installed. (Without SB installed, the project was at a complete standstill.) We were then moved to the next step: document the correct process, to ensure this won’t happen again.

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Every Customer a Reference

uspsBy Dick Stark

“The function of a business is to get and keep customers.”

–Dr. Ted Levitt, Harvard Business School

Thanks to social media and on-line business/retail evaluation and ratings sites, companies now compete on a completely different level than previously.   As a result, most customers feel entitled to excellent service and often select vendors, on the basis of good service, not just product or price. This means that customer satisfaction is more important than ever.

One recent excellent customer sat story that happened to me occurred on Christmas Eve. Since I spend the majority of my time in the office, I always have packages sent to my office, not to my home. And; like in previous years I waited too long to make my on-line gift purchases. Although most of my presents arrived in time, I knew that one was not scheduled to arrive until after Christmas—nothing I could do about that.

So, I was surprised when on Christmas Eve (last Saturday) the mailman pulled up in the driveway with the remaining gift. What made this so amazing was that it was delivered not to the office, but to my home. (Christmas Eve was not a day I planned on being in the office.). It turns out that our office mailman knows me, and knows where I live because he used to have my residential route. So, he asked the mailman that has his old route to deliver the package addressed to the office to my home. It worked and I received the gift in time for Christmas!

Customer satisfaction, or “every customer a reference,” is a RightStar customer motto and a critical success factor for RightStar. What other types of customer service stories do we have? When I visited BMC in Tampa, their Director of Technical and Customer Support, told us a story about a large customer we both share. He said that they ran out of disk space recently when working BCM (AssetCore). Without flinching, BMC ordered new servers and expressed shipped them to the customer for free.

Several years ago, we did something similar for a ScanStar customer. Once we began the project, we discovered that their scanners were not compatible with ScanStar. This was surprising since we make it a point to ensure that all ScanStar customers receive our list of certified scanners. Rather than argue about who was right, we rushed five new scanners to them overnight at no cost. This guaranteed an on-time delivery and a very satisfied customer.

Likewise, our consultants are often faced with situations where a software defect has slowed our implementation progress. Rather than push the customer for a change order to make up for our lost time, we will often work “for free” until the job is complete.

Every customer a reference may be a slight stretch, since some customers may never be fully satisfied, no matter how hard we try. But, those will be the exception, not the rule.

This means that we must continue to deliver excellent customer service. In 2017, we will set customer sat metrics and measure how we’re dong not just through frequent surveys, but also with more face-to-face visits and phone calls. For 2017, we’ll continue to work hard to ensure, “every customer is a reference!”

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