Changing to a new software provider is a notoriously difficult process. Especially at enterprise scale, changing providers is thought to be expensive, time-consuming, filled with headaches, and perhaps worst of all, not always worth the effort.

Sometimes that perception is valid. Most times, it’s not.

When done for the right reasons, switching software providers can be overwhelmingly beneficial. In fact, a recent study found that 80 percent of organizations are more satisfied after switching software vendors, with over half of respondents being at least 60 percent satisfied after the change. In other words, not only was it worth it, it was really worth it.

This is particularly true because most companies that plan to remain with their current vendor aren’t satisfied. The same study revealed that 95.6 percent of organizations plan to renew their IT service management platform, yet only 42.5 percent would recommend their incumbent vendor. Why? The perceived cost in time and dollars is simply too high.

How can you tell if the benefits outweigh the risks?

• You’re not getting what you signed up for. This sounds simple, but can come in many flavors. Perhaps your existing vendor was bought out, such as Ivanti’s acquisition of Cherwell, and your expectations for the support/maintenance/vision/future of your product have diminished or are uncertain. You don’t even know if you will have a product to renew next year, let alone whether the feature that you asked for will finally be released.

(Speaking of Cherwell, its new owner published a blog after the acquisition advocating that organizations move off their current ITSM solution and look to better solutions. If that’s not a clear message that the original Cherwell platform is no longer a priority, I’m not sure what is.)

Dissatisfaction doesn’t only result from an acquisition, of course. Maybe nothing organizationally has changed, but the vendor didn’t deliver on their promises. Maybe customer support is subpar, issues take weeks to get resolved, or you are experiencing more software bugs and outages than you expected (or is acceptable).

No matter the nuance, if your experience doesn’t match what you were sold, it’s time to reconsider.

• The software doesn’t meet your needs. You’re paying for software to do specific things that meet particular business requirements. If it isn’t doing those things or meeting those requirements, you’re ready to switch.

Maybe your requirements may have changed since you signed up with your current vendor. You may be evolving your goals and processes to keep up with the modern pace of business, and you need your software provider to keep up as well. If they aren’t willing to help you grow and innovate and/or the changes required aren’t technically possible, it’s not a good fit.

• It’s clunky. Okay, this may be a subset of the previous bullet, but it’s worth calling out. Business today simply moves too fast for clunky software. Whether it’s inadequate reporting, a hard-to-use (or hard-to-learn) interface, limited or challenging integrations, or processes that require duplicate effort and wasted time, clunky software brings significant opportunity cost. All the time that your team spends creating workarounds and building connectors and navigating workflows can and should be spent on more high-value activities.

With the BMC Helix solution, not only can you replace your existing solution, you can improve on core functionality and add new capabilities. It combines cutting-edge features that support automation, DevOps, Agile, and more with a UX and flexibility that help you deliver business outcomes, reduce risk, and drive innovation.

Switching can be intimidating. Trust BMC Helix to make it streamlined, successful, and always 100% worth it. Let us help you with your customized migration path.

As leading businesses continue their evolution to becoming an Autonomous Digital Enterprise, they must learn to be fast, agile, and constantly innovating. By deploying BMC Helix, these companies not only realize the benefits of intelligent automation but also other critical KPIs like improving cost efficiencies, mean time to repair (MTTR), and overall productivity. BMC recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to help enterprise companies evaluate the potential financial impact of BMC Helix on their organizations.

To better understand the benefits, costs, risks, and flexibility associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed 14 decision-makers from 11 current BMC Helix customers. Forrester’s financial analysis found that by adopting BMC Helix for IT and enterprise service desk needs, customers could potentially realize a three-year, risk-adjusted net present value (NPV) of $10.6 million and a return on investment (ROI) of 361 percent. When customers added intelligent DevOps capabilities, benefits included 33 percent greater operational resource efficiencies.

Modernize with BMC Helix

BMC Helix empowers enterprise services, IT service desks, IT operations (ITOps), DevOps, and end users to be more agile, efficient, and effective so organizations can refocus on innovation, maximizing productivity, and growing the business. Five key business drivers were identified by customers as their impetus for investing in BMC Helix, including:

• Enhance the user experience with a consolidated, easy-to-use IT and enterprise service desk
• Reduce the cost of service delivery
• Shift-left service resources for added business value and improved employee experience (EX)
• Accelerate the business
• Enable flexibility, scalability, and modernization

Put AI service management to work

By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) along with orchestration, multi-cloud, and third-party vendor integration and brokering capabilities, BMC Helix can provide mostly or fully automated service fulfillment to save time and improve EX for service desk resources and end users. In the study, Forrester cites customers who have used BMC Helix, Digital Workplace, and BMC Helix Chatbot to automate:

• Provisioning and shutting down environments
• Accessing accounts
• Resetting passwords
• Gaining access to services
• Ordering equipment

In one use case—the full study has many more—a global telco saved an estimated $300,000 USD a year just with the end-to-end automation of password resets. Customers also shared that BMC Helix has boosted service desk agent productivity by using AI to:

• Improve data capture
• Automatically categorize and route tickets to the correct resources or teams
• Identify interdependencies, impact, and root causes
• Prevent and mitigate incidents
• Enhance UX and performance
• Allow agents to update, monitor, and resolve tickets from mobile devices
• Power service desk analytics to improve decision-making for process enhancements

Embrace the power of DevOps

When you add full intelligent automation capabilities to BMC Helix, the solution can help both service, ITOps, and DevOps teams dramatically reduce the friction caused by IT governance competing against the speed and agility of DevOps. The integrations, automated analyses, and orchestrations can:

• Eliminate significant swivel-chair data entry
• Decrease wasted DevOps labor
• Avoid slowed DevOps timelines imposed by IT processes
• Assess changes for risks to allow faster release
• Ensure compliance, security, and dependability
• Address risks before they become issues

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) are now pervasive throughout our consumer and business lives. It’s important to understand, however, that not all AI/ML solutions are “equal.” AI/ML is actually a comprehensive term for solutions that intelligently analyze content, derive appropriate actions, and help organizations streamline and run with maximum efficiency and impact.

With the right tool set, your service desk can deliver service operational excellence, streamline IT and business processes across the organization, and mitigate risks before they happen. Intelligent ticket tracking, routing, and email notifications help teams resolve issues and requests efficiently, while self-service options help users find answers to common problems quickly and alleviate service requests.

Additionally, embracing ITIL^® 4 helps organizations use IT to realize business transformation and growth. Incident management is closely tied to other service management processes, including problem and change management. Change management is the process designed to understand and minimize risks while making IT changes. By automating those workflows, businesses can improve resolution times and prevent future incidents.

Intelligent service management solutions are fast, accurate, and cost effective, whether your organization wants to operate in the cloud, a hybrid model, or a data center. This automated approach allows you to see all assets across the entire architecture, not just one system at a time, so you can identify and address problems before they impact the business.

BMC can empower your organization with industry-leading intelligent automation solutions that accelerate business outcomes. Read more about BMC and how your organization can realize these benefits here.

Organizations are constantly seeking new opportunities to enhance their service and operations management offering with the modern functionality that aligns with the ever-increasing business requirements. Seamless integration with operations enables service-focused organizations to improve their overall service and delivery capabilities that increase speed, agility and organizational efficiency.

Adding automation to address the low-level, repetitive tasks, processing of large data volumes, and optimization of self-service tools, frees up IT resources to shift focus to on-going modernization initiatives. With IT resources able to focus their energy on more strategic transformational initiatives, improves customer satisfaction and customer experience.

Key capabilities that drive business outcomes:

1. Automation of Repetitive Tasks
   • Layering intelligent automation to help scale and increase service efficacy is a must for the modern enterprise. By automating repetitive tasks organizations reduce mistakes, increase productivity and free up resources to work on more innovations to help the business to reach their success goals.
2. Process Large Volumes of Structured and Unstructured Data
   • With enormous amount of data being generated each day, any attempts to sort and gain service and operational understandings can only be done with AI assistance. AI can help derive deep analytical findings as well as provide the right data at the right time.  This helps organizations to identify new opportunities, drive innovation, optimize resources and reduce costs all while uncovering new opportunities that drive competitive advantages.
3. Evolution to Self-Service Assistants
   • To improve overall customer experience and customer satisfaction, self-service solutions must have intelligent virtual assistance and assistants with omni-channel capabilities to not only to increase productivity but also deliver compelling experiences. To successfully accomplish this, organizations need an intelligent knowledge base and a single way to find everything they need coupled with a scalable and flexible way to incorporate the latest innovations to continually update and expand the compelling experiences. These help enable the optimizations required to reduce costs, improve efficiency and increase customer satisfaction.
4. Flexibility and Agility
   • By utilizing a scalable, modular foundation that enables easy and efficient adoption of new innovations, organizations are able to respond more quickly and with an agility required to respond to customer demands as intelligently and as quickly as possible. It’s key that your platform enable this holistic view of data and assets across the entire ecosystem.

Is your platform of choice able to handle your organization’s business success requirements?

With BMC, organizations are able to realize the benefits that an enterprise-class service and operations management solutions provide. This solution enables organizations to achieve service and operational excellence with the agility required to drive innovation and actionable business insights. By enabling intelligent automation, scalability and flexibility empowers organizations to respond to the demands for the customer while providing a transcendent customer experience.

See for yourself how BMC can help your organization unlock the power of intelligent automation to drive service and operations management excellence.

As organizations evolve towards being an Autonomous Digital Enterprise, efficient service, especially self-service, is required in order to achieve success.  Employees need to find the right information they need to maximize their productivity.  Deploying virtual assistants has become essential in order to helping the organization meet efficiency and customer satisfaction (CSAT) goals.  However, it is critical to have a comprehensive knowledge strategy both in terms of providing the right information as well as overall curation of content.

“Knowledge is like a garden: if it is not cultivated, it cannot be harvested.”  — Proverb

Knowledge-Centered Service is an effective knowledge management strategy that can transform both your organization’s customer experience and employee loyalty.  Working with KCS^® (Knowledge-Centered Service) can make the difference between being just above average and greatness. KCS is a simple idea that creates profound benefits. The idea is that you should integrate the creation and maintenance of knowledge into the daily problem-solving process.

Let’s take a look at 4 ways Intelligent-Knowledge Management services can impact organizations:

1. Operational Efficiency

The first benefit your organization can take advantage from after implementing Knowledge-Centered Serivce is operational efficiency. When agents understand the importance of integrating the use of knowledge into their daily workflow, they’ll realize that working with a structured problem-solving process will help them produce better, more effective solutions. Integrating the use of a knowledge base into the workflow enables agents to benefit from the collective experience of the organization. This will be recognized as both increased capacity, and the ability to introduce both new people and new work into the organization with a lot less effort and time. The collective experience will always be more precise and complete than any individual’s contribution.

2. Self-Service Success

Agents are producing structured knowledge by integrating the reuse of existing knowledge, improving it when needed, and capturing new knowledge in their workflow. The outcome is that the organization will within a short time (usually somewhere between 4-6 months) have a knowledge base filled with structured content in the customer context, which is developed on demand. As a result, this knowledge is both findable and usable for both agents and customer. And, since the goal is to provide knowledge that is available for those who need it, when they need it, we need to push out as much knowledge as possible for self-service.

This greatly reduced the time and effort it takes customers to find relevant information, or having to figure out when and where to contact for help. An effective self-service solution helps giving answers to customers for known problems, giving agents the opportunity to focus on solving new challenges and opportunities.

3. Organizational Improvement

This may be most valuable benefit from KCS- the identification and prioritization of opportunities to improve our processes, policies, products and services. Because AI/ML depends upon set processes and rules, intelligent automation results can be maximized and optimized for ultimate impacts.  Patterns and trends that arise from our collective experience in the knowledge base ease the investigation of possible actions. Root cause analysis is for example a very powerful way of assessing which curative actions we should prioritize for achieving the best possible impact on our effectiveness and improvement in productivity, as well as a healthier customer-centric experience.

4. Organizational Learning

The final benefit is how we as an organization can learn from each other. With KCS, knowledge is captured and made available for reuse during the resolution process, simplifying the documentation process and creating value articles that are searchable and readable. Agents can rely on their knowledge base content and learn from every interaction. By adding an article to their incident, the agents are also confirming that they understand and believe in the resolution. Knowledge is continually gained through interactions and experience. As we acquire more experience, we supplement, improve, and correct our knowledge. Therefore, our knowledge constantly evolves, although it never is perfect or truly complete. We all know our individual knowledge is power. But a group’s shared knowledge is even more powerful.

Intelligent knowledge management service is, not only a key area organizations are heavily investing in, but also is a key differentiator in helping employees, groups and the entire enterprise for competitive market success.  It’s not enough to create knowledge and present the information.  Instead, curated, effective knowledge is the only way to meet self-service and service efficiency goals.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution represents a fundamental shift in the way we live, work, and connect with each other. It makes sense that enterprise organizations are adopting the cloud to not only meet the needs of business in today’s digital economy, but to be able to respond to the changes they know can arise at any moment. Doing so demands a new approach: modernization.

Modernization requires a strategy that sets the right pieces of the puzzle in place, from technology to people. Many organizations are well down the path to modernization already, and their journeys can help others minimize negative impacts and realize the true benefits of cloud quickly and efficiently.

As our customers have explored how to modernize their IT environments, we’ve seen several common themes.

1. All or nothing

Some organizations choose to move everything to the cloud without a full understanding of their infrastructure and the applications and services being migrated. This “all-in” approach often moves things that should be left behind, like zombie servers chewing up resources or bloated applications using more resources than they should. One organization that successfully modernized all of their infrastructure in almost record time got their first month’s cloud provider bill and was stunned to see that it was nearly 13x higher than they anticipated. When they retraced their steps, they found applications and servers which should not have been moved. They adjusted their approach and felt the financial impact almost immediately.

In the modern digital economy, the organizations that have succeeded have taken a methodical yet streamlined approach to both technology selection and process implementation.

2. Plan for success

The old saying that “Those who fail to plan, plan to fail” has never been more true than in the context of IT modernization. Without a concrete plan, you will struggle. The first step of planning requires an audit of what is in place, with services and providers.  Then, address the need for scalability and flexibility for the growth and expansion needed to serve the organization’s business needs.

3. Flexibility and scalability

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said it best: “The only constant in technology is change.” Okay, maybe he didn’t mention technology directly, but it applies more today than ever before. Customers who neglect to consider the intricacies of flexibility and scalability have had a harder time achieving their long-term goals.

One of the key components of modernization success is making sure the environment supports not only today’s needs, but is easily adaptable to meet tomorrow’s requirements. This means that it’s crucial to really think through how to optimize processes and workflows as well as ensuring that technology solutions are agile enough to elastically expand without breaking.

4. All together now

The days when decisions were made in a vacuum, especially for ITSM and ITOM teams, are thankfully long gone. While a modernizing solution may be the best business decision, without leadership buy-in and business support, the best products can and will fail.

While it goes without saying that executive support is critical, just as acute is the support of the people who will actually be using the new technology. Is the interface intuitive and easy to use? How much training is required? Will they have to use multiple systems, and does it make their job more efficient?

Gaining the support of those impacted by the change and building on their excitement can help get a project over any rough spots and increase the time to adoption. Again, this comes back to the initial planning by defining the scope of the project, identifying who is impacted, and including them in the process early.

To wrap up, the initiative to modernize isn’t one to be taken lightly. It’s complex, with many moving pieces. It may seem like an impossible challenge, but by identifying the risks, planning mitigation paths, and preparing to adapt and change, you can maximize the success of your modernization journey.