In this Run and Reinvent podcast, I chat with Simon Eldon, Head of Support at Euromonitor International about how BMC Helix Remedyforce has transformed the company’s IT Service Management (ITSM). Below is a condensed transcript of our conversation.

John Fulton: Tell us a little bit about Euromonitor, what they do, and how you support them.

Simon Eldon: Euromonitor’s business is really all about providing market intelligence to our clients. The value that we add is to help and support them in making decisions about their own business operations. Various platforms enable our customers to access syndicated market research and analysis on different industries, economies, countries, and consumer markets across the world.

We also have a really strong consulting team that can answer specific bespoke questions for clients. We’re a pretty broad base for a lot of different types of business operations [like] manufacturing, banks, academic institutions, and agencies. People primarily come to us as a proxy for their own market research function. They can get that content and analysis and insight when they need it and not have to pay for it 12 months a year.

John: You’re are a global company [that’s] continually growing in terms of getting not only reporting in different markets and regions, but also an internal employee perspective.

Simon: We have expanded our physical presence and we’re now 15 offices [and] we have quite a lot of people that work for us on a freelance basis. We probably have Euromonitor representatives in at least 100 countries by now.

John: When I hear 100 countries, I can imagine that the more dispersed you are, the more challenges you are facing as you’re growing.

Simon: The challenges are quite complex. Given that that we are focused on adding value to our clients through up-to-date insight and information, there’s a clear challenge to be relevant, leading those conversations, and offer clients up-to-date, quick information around the topics of the day.

As we expand  geographically, we have to support more people, and more colleagues as they come online. And we have to offer them the same service that we do in other offices. [We] really strive to provide a high-quality support service across the organization and [to] our customers.

John: [Talk about your] challenges of timeliness that put added pressure on your organization and the IT group to support both your customers and maintain [your] systems.

Simon: That definitely pulls us in two directions. We need to answer people’s questions and solve [their] problems, but we also have to deliver quality service. And that also means being able to transform our own technology to take advantage of some of the more scalable and easily managed capabilities, like the cloud.

Euromonitor has been around [since] 1973.There’s been a revolution in the way that we deliver service, first [with] on-premise delivery of digital systems, which has now migrated…to cloud capabilities and taking advantage of scalability around all of that.

As a support service delivery unit, we have to be aligned. We have to understand that [and] answer questions that people have about the technology and how they get the most out of it. So [there’s a] customer service element [and we] have to be up to speed on all the tech changes, too. And that’s what makes a job interesting.

John: [In terms of] digital transformation, can you characterize some of those key business challenges that you’re facing today?

Simon: Customer expectations are number one. Customers expect so much more now in terms of speed of response. And that’s not just about…systems. It’s also about speed of response as an organization to their changing needs. We’ve definitely seen that increase over the last few years.

That’s changed our relationship with clients [and the] way that we work with people. I think what we’re seeing is a gradual evolution from a client-customer-provider relationship, toward a partnership relationship with a lot more people because it’s the only way that we can practically deliver what we need to deliver to people.

John: [Talk about] your role as head of support and service delivery.

Simon: I look after a team of 30 people globally. [There are] two main strands: traditional tech support, which is the desktop services, and all those kinds of things; and the business application side of things and our product support. We have a need internally for our colleagues to be able to understand and use all of our products efficiently and effectively so they can be good at sales and research and whatever their role is within the business. We provide that internal support. We also provide external support to our clients…for issues with the system [or] logging in. We’re very much trying to focus also on a new idea of continual service improvement.

John: What challenges, pain points, and business goals prompted you to look for an ITSM solution prior to selecting Remedyforce?

Simon: When I first joined the business in the support team, there were two of us. As the business changed, we grew. We made a decision to develop something to help us to support that increasing support workload [so] resources could be used for more effective business and value-add elsewhere. Around that time, we were talking about adopting more industry-standard practices so that we could align ourselves with some of the fundamentals of ITIL^® and all that’s within that framework.

John: What were the challenges or pain points that were impacting that decision?

Simon: The delay. Incidents might sit in a queue for a while. There was very little way of differentiating between staff and clients. And it wasn’t so easy to report on stuff and track things, so the visibility of the work was not great. And it just wasn’t efficient. We had no way of planning the service improvements and changes around processes without a lot of time, cost, and investment.

John: What were your key criteria for why you chose BMC Helix Remedyforce?

Simon: We wanted something that was fit for purpose, but not overblown. Our requirements were not enterprise-level at the time, but we wanted something that would be flexible enough to meet our changing needs. Three [to] three and a half years ago, it was obvious that we were coming up to a point where a lot of things were going to change. We wanted to have a system that would meet the requirements of that time, but also adapt with us and be reasonably future-proof.

One of the key decision elements around Remedyforce was the fact that it is integrated with Salesforce. We’d had Salesforce in the business for around a year at that point. As an existing Salesforce customer, it really helps with integration of the new system into the business around being able to demonstrate back to sales which of their clients had logged tickets and things like that, or just easy wins.

Everybody in the business has a Salesforce account of some kind, and it just made sense. It also meant that we didn’t have to buy into any on-premise infrastructure to maintain anything. For us, there was a zero gain of responsibility in terms of that maintenance.

Remedyforce [also aligns] with ITIL^® processes and the ability to look at what we wanted to do as a service improvement project. I like the flexibility of it, too. The fact that we’ve been able to start with the incident management planning, and work on improving that, and then look at service requests, and then move on to something else.

I’ve got confidence that I know Remedyforce can accommodate all of this stuff and help us to improve things without having to go back to the board and [ask for more investment]. That flexibility and the scalability is really key as far as getting value out of the system.

We can [also] talk to the Customer Success Team at BMC and get some really good added value out of that with recommendations and advice. That relationship has been [a] good foundation for being able to go through this journey. I never wanted to be stuck with a system where [for] every single change, I had to call a consultant and pay him $1,000 a day to change two labels.

John: You mentioned incident service requests. Is there anything beyond that, that you’re currently using or planning to use in the future?

Simon: Incident service goes to the heart of what we do. One of the big benefits that we’ve taken advantage of is putting [product] incidents from clients directly into the service desk queue. We use a mail relay to do that and that works well for us.

John: So, you’re managing both your internal customers and your external clients within Remedyforce.

Simon: Absolutely. On our product pages, we have a technical support link and they can click on that, fill out their information, and behind the scenes, it will send an e-mail in and that will get logged as a ticket onto the system. It gives us visibility quickly of what clients want. That’s been a great benefit for us.

Other business functions use the system as well. We do most of the work on the system, but HR service requests get logged on Remedyforce, and the finance team uses it. They can log those tickets and deal with that directly. We never see them. It’s something that I think we’re likely to scale out in the future.

John: You’ve been using Remedyforce for three and a half years. What have been the outcomes?

Simon: The key benefit has really been about the manageability and visibility. There’s a real challenge for us as a team in terms of being able to service information in a timely way when we’re spread out geographically from Chicago to Shanghai.

The ability for us to update notes and pass information between team members [in different regions] has been hugely beneficial, so that [the] status of everything is visible to everyone at all times. And wherever you log on, you can see what’s gone on and what needs to happen next and so the management of that is easier. Internally, it’s been hugely beneficial to the team and has provided benefit back to our colleagues so they can get a more consistent and reliable service from us. [We’ve] been able to deal with clients much more effectively.

From a management perspective, [having] all of this stuff in one place [helps me] put together reports and go back to my boss and have conversations about resource requirements and workloads. From the bottom to the top, is it’s been beneficial.

John: This podcast is called the Run and Reinvent Podcast. Can you highlight or comment on how Remedyforce has allowed you to shift your focus from less running to more reinventing?

Simon: It’s really provided us with that baseline where we can now deal with the day-to-day much more reliably and easily and spend more time on things which are more helpful [and] have the resources to focus on those high-value projects…because we’ve got Remedyforce in place. That allows us really to concentrate on the improvement efforts.

John: What do you see as the next steps in terms of where you’re headed with [the] solution?

Simon: We are looking to improve our operational processes and change management. I want to look at our problem management process. We need to realign that with some of the other processes that are going on with technology at the moment. We’re looking at reviewing our KPIs for team members, and Remedyforce will be able to help us with that.

Remedyforce has enabled us to modernize our support service from what was quite a low and manual beginning. It’s allowed us to respond to a lot of organizational change in a timely manner. We’ve got a system which will scale and help us quickly. I’m really confident that it will continue to be that solution as we move forward with our journey to service management improvements. It’s been a lot of fun, as well. If it’s not fun, what’s the point?

Listen to the full episode on SoundCloud or Apple Podcasts.

In this Run and Reinvent podcast I chat with Erica Dean, IT Governance System Administrator for Pernod Ricard about how her company is leveraging BMC Helix Remedyforce to create a globally connected organization. Pernod Ricard is headquartered in Paris and is a leading premium wine and spirits company with 19,000 employees worldwide. Below is a condensed transcript of our conversation.

John Fulton: For those not familiar with Pernod Ricard, can you give a little bit of background on your organization?

Erica Dean: Absolutely. So, Pernod Ricard is a leading premium wine and spirits company. It’s known for having the most comprehensive portfolio in the industry. Pernod Ricard supports its consumer-centric strategy with a decentralized model that enables each market to focus on their own consumers, based on cultural preferences and local ways of working.

John: The one thing you mentioned about the customer-centric strategy – Could you maybe give a little bit more background on that? The reason I ask is I’m seeing more and more organizations really focus on customer-centric. And it’s not to say that organizations didn’t focus on customers in the past. But it just seems to be, to have been elevated, and a much bigger focus. Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

Erica: I think that today’s consumer has access to so much more information, to so many more products, and so, ultimately, what we can’t rely on as an organization is someone knowing what product we provide, and just kind of sticking with them. Not just from a loyalty point of view, but from an information point of view.

And so, by focusing our business strategies on the consumer, we’re focusing on what it is that they need, so that we’re creating that relationship between the consumer themselves and our product. And creating a kind of, more of a meaningful connection to the product, versus one, I think, that’s established just because it’s a brand, or it’s a particular type of product, that they’re generally aware of, without being aware of the other options that are available to them.

John: No, that makes perfect sense. You think of, in today’s world, customers have more options, right? And it’s obviously important to have that differentiation, and have that connection. So, that’s interesting. In terms of Pernod Ricard, and the business challenges, can you maybe highlight some of the challenges at a higher level that you guys are facing today, in terms of sort of growth and competition?

Erica: Yes, so, Pernod Ricard is well known for its decentralized model. Just about any time you hear Alexandre Ricard speak, he talks about the fact that we focused on a noncentralized model that allows our individual markets to cater to their base of consumers. Again, kind of reinforcing the notion that we’re centered around the consumers themselves.

However, from an IT point of view, it presented a little bit of a challenge, because in a decentralized model, which enabled people to work in, I guess, relative to their local preferences, and then their local ways of working, that decentralized model presents a little bit of a challenge to our IT organization, which is aimed at providing consistent and efficient support across the business itself.

We have 19,000 business employees worldwide, and ultimately, what we saw was the need for global processes and global ways of working, to establish that streamlined, seamlessness, and the efficiencies, but in such a way that we were able to still accommodate local processes, and be sure to continue to align with the decentralized approach that the organization as a whole, of course, is so focused on.

John: Yeah. That’s interesting, because, again, not being in this market, but I can see how this applies to other markets, where, especially as a global company as Pernod Ricard is, and the differences, right, in the different regions, with sort of interests and cultures, I think, obviously, it makes a lot of sense, sort of, the strategy of making those connections. And having this agility, right? We talk about agility a lot of times, more from a maybe development perspective, but also from an organizational perspective, and customer-facing perspective, to understand your customers and how to best interact with them. So, that sounds like a very strong approach that you guys are taking?

Erica: Yeah. And I always kind of say, when it comes to sales and marketing, of course, the way that you sell a product in the US versus the way that you sell a product in France, it absolutely makes sense to have a decentralized approach. But, when you kind of shift that concept into the IT world, the way that you fix a computer in the US, given it’s the same model, it’s the same way that you fix that same computer in France.

And so, that was kind of what we started to realize and recognize, and that kind of sent us into a little bit of this journey, to establish those global processes, again, while still maintaining the opportunity to localize where necessary.

John: Right. And to this point, we sort of kind of focused on the customer side, but now we talk about your organization from an IT perspective. Can you sort of characterize your team, and the IT group, across the globe?

Erica: Sure. So, as a global company, we do have fairly comprehensive IT environments, that supports both global and local applications. I think we’d be here all afternoon if I were to give an attempt to list all of them out. We have several different data centers, globally, of course, with 86 affiliates worldwide. We’re looking at different networks, all sorts of different localized components. And that environment ultimately supports our 19,000 employees across, as I mentioned, 86 affiliates, and we’re doing that with an internal IT staff of about 600 people.

In this Run and Reinvent podcast, I chat with Tony Ashby, senior Manager of front office solutions delivery, and Nicole Johnson, senior manager of business solutions analysis, at Aspect Software about how they’re reinventing the company’s IT service management practice. Aspect Software offers a suite of contact center and workforce optimization solutions that help companies keep agents engaged and help them provide exceptional customer service. Below is a condensed transcript of our conversation.

John Fulton: Can you describe a little bit about your current Remedyforce environment?

Tony Ashby: We’ve been Remedyforce users now for I guess it’s a little over four years. We started out initially implementing incidents primarily for help desk tickets for the IS organization. And when we went live, we also included a small measure of self-service so that people could utilize that to do their ticket submissions. We also have email services enabled to make it easier and so some automated routing. We’ve got some special mailboxes to do those routings, the cues, and things like that. We had such great adoption usage that really fit our environment very well that we continued to expand our footprint a little bit to where we began including change management initially for IS.

We extended that for our customer care organization then. They use that for change management for our actual customers as we’re doing upgrades and implementations. And we supplemented that with a small implementation of a knowledge base within Remedyforce. And we also have, again, a very small implementation today of CMBB that we use for physical asset tracking. Things like mice, keyboard, laptops, things like that. Most recently though, last year, we, again, substantially expanded our Remedyforce implementation in conjunction with our cloud service management project where we opened it up for our cloud operations team.

John: Interesting the cloud service management area that you guys have recently delivered in supporting your cloud ops team, can you elaborate a little bit more?

Nicole Johnson: The cloud operations team within Aspect really had several challenges that they were facing. We had lots of environments that they were monitoring. We had a ton of tools that they were using to do that monitoring. So, to keep our customers’ cloud environment up and running on a daily basis, they were monitoring 20-plus applications that they were using to just get their job done on any given day. Our goal really for them with this project was to reduce the number of interaction points that they had, to reduce the number of screens that they had to monitor, specifically when we were talking about alerting functionality.

When a system would call home and say, “I have a problem,” or call home and say, “I’m fine,” we needed to reduce the number of places they needed to go and look and find that information. We also needed to have a place to track all of this stuff. So, we had alerts that were coming in. We had dashboards that they could look at. In some instances, somebody could claim it and say, “I’m working on it,” but we really weren’t tracking what was happening, who was working on it, how long they had been working on it, what was wrong with it. We had to get that holistic what’s happening, who is doing it, what’s going on. And we needed a place to store all of that.

That’s kind of how we came about taking on this project, again, to just reduce all of the touch points that they had. Their job was way harder than it needed to be because of all of the interaction points that they had.

John: I’m trying to picture in the case here where I think you said there are over 20 different monitoring applications. I would assume the team would really have to be an expert to understand which application to go to in certain situations. What were the challenges there?

Nicole: Yes, there were a lot. And as you can imagine, all of that comes with a delay. I may see this thing. It came in via email, but I don’t really know where to go and look and get further information about it. Or I see this thing and it came on my dashboard. Or I forgot to look in one location or another and I didn’t see it in time. So, there was a lot of delay in just reacting to stuff that came in. And for the stuff that came in that somebody knew about, there was a delay in them being able to do anything about it. They didn’t know if it was real. They didn’t know what machine it was coming from and what have you, any number of things.

John: Can you characterize a little bit, it may be just an estimate, how many alerts a day are we talking about?

Tony: With the initial implementation of the project, that’s really when we got our first good barometer of what that looked like. And we were seeing in the ballpark on average about 12,000 individual alerts each day.

John: Can you talk a little bit about how you guys have implemented Remedyforce and your future plans?

Tony: I’d be happy to. Actually, it’s very exciting. It was a project that my team, including Nicole, everyone really enjoyed working on because we saw the significant value add that we could bring to our business team. The obvious thing that we implemented was incident tracking where we could actually take some of those alerts and turn them into incidents. And we could then build upon that and actually group those into problems. And then, we’ve also started implementing a knowledge base. And they had kind of a pseudo knowledge base so that’s a slow conversion process for us.

But it actually enables the team then without having to go to multiple applications to try to figure out what’s having a problem, what’s having an issue, how big is the issue, is it truly a problem. Are we seeing a big manifestation of it getting to the right procedures to help us go address that issue? And as Nicole mentioned, we had 20 different individual learning applications when we started the project. We were actually able to consolidate those down into one application. And that’s front end into Remedyforce. But that application actually kind of acts as a collector.

Then it will feed alerts into Salesforce. We created a custom object for that, which we then applied a rule extension so we can configure which things that we wanted to turn into incidents and/or take additional actions. We would post messages within Chatter groups, within Slack channels. Some of those integration points that you kind of culled out. Those were things that we added with the project. The ability to actually create incidents, actually post them to Chatter groups to be able to integrate with Slack channel, our R&D teams. That’s their primary means of engagement is through Slack as well as being able to use integration to another tool called Ops Genie.

And Ops Genie is a paging system so we could actually when a critical alert comes in, we could actually then identify that we needed to page somebody, wake them up, place a phone call all without leaving Remedyforce. Those were all within integrations that we provided with the tool. We also had a very light integration, if you will, for Jira, which is one of our defect tracking systems, where we can launch that from within Remedyforce as well. That wasn’t possible before.

Now we have the ability, in addition to being able to do all of these things without the “swivel chair” between many diverse applications, we can do that all within the Remedy Force console and we’ve collected a whole bunch of data points along the way. I can see when I actually posted a message in Chatter. I can see when I did a call out to Ops Genie to wake somebody up. I can see the activity that occurs back and forth between Slack and Remedy Force with all of that integration that we implemented.

John: Can you maybe elaborate a little bit on using the Sales Force cases and how that sort of fits in? What I see from other customers is sort of providing that 360-degree view for our customers for their customers.

Tony: It does. And it’s 360 degrees with a little bit of fuzz around the edges. What I mean by that is that, internally, yes, we absolutely have that 360-degree view now of our customers with the issues that we have when they come in, timed resolution, things like that. But we also have this cloud operations team as a separate group that, again, supports the infrastructure for our products where our customer care organization, their native application is Salesforce cases. We actually interact with our customers via Salesforce community. We have the ability now to see the information from incidents that’s appropriate for consumption by customer care. It’s at the right level. It’s not too detailed for them. But we also have automation already that we build upon within the case structure that we can take that information as we post that to these cases.

John: Providing all of that information at everyone’s fingertips definitely provides benefit.

Nicole: The key to all of the integrations that were built allows those users that work outside of native Remedyforce, even within the Salesforce ecosystem, they can still live in the applications that they’re most comfortable with and they do their day job in and still have all of the information that they need that’s applicable to anything that’s going on with the Remedy Force implementation and the cloud service management team and what they’re doing on any particular incident or problem or what have you. It shares that information out.

John: Can you talk a little bit about the subsequent phases that you guys are considering down the road with Remedyforce?

Tony: What we are planning to do is actually a full-on implementation of CMDB with auto discovery so that we have a better insight into all of the environments that constitute our various tenets that our products live on. As it is today, those are somewhat siloed. There are multiple teams that support those various pieces of infrastructure.

And it’s not really easy for us to see where within the respective environments that an issue or trouble may lay and/or see when it clears. So, we want to, again, build out our CMDB. We want to implement the device discovery.

And then, with Phase 3 that’s to extend the change management and add visualization, if you will, to the CMDB. So, when we see these incidents, just picture, if you will, the big war room with a big screen on the wall where you can see your environments. And then, you can see the connections at various layers. You can actually see the network connectivity layer. You can see socket layers between processes on multiple servers.

In this Run and Reinvent podcast, I chat with Andrew Dorsey, IT business analyst for Goodman Manufacturing, a Houston-based manufacturer of heating and cooling systems, about how the company is using BMC Remedyforce in unique ways to meet its IT service management and business needs. Below is a condensed transcript of the conversation.

John Fulton: Can you tell us a little bit about what you know your current environment?

Andrew Dorsey: In the IT department, we do most of our IT support in house from our security analysts, network engineers, desktop service technicians, we have developers, even the first-tier support, the first line of defense, I like to say, of the service desk analysts. Now, we do outsource some of our operations work, but I’d say well over 90 percent of our IT support is handled in-house supporting around 7,000 employees.

John: Can you give a little bit of sort of history of how you came to arrive with Remedyforce?

Andrew: I’ve been with the company for 15 years, and since I’ve been here, we’ve always been a BMC shop. We started using Support Magic. That’s when I started with the company. And from Magic, we upgraded to Service Desk Express. I think Magic was coming to end of life. So, we moved to Service Desk Express. Then we tried Footprints for a little bit and quickly discovered that Remedyforce was the best solution for us now.

John: What was your experience of the move to the cloud? Was there any sort of resistance to considering or what was your experience there?

Andrew: There was some resistance. Remedyforce is one of the first cloud-based solutions we started using an IT. So, it was a lot of apprehension at first, but we got over it. There was some concern about personally identifiable information. We got around that just about, you know, working with our policies and procedures. Worked with the auditors and we made them happy.

John: Can you describe how you guys are using Remedyforce today within a traditional method?

Andrew: Before we had Remedyforce, we had RFCs, just “request for change.” Our RFCs, believe it or not, was just a Word document that we passed around to get signatures, and it was a mess. So now that we have Remedyforce, I’d say the change requests module has been the biggest change for us and one of the biggest benefits, because we’re better able now to track approvals, then track history, add notes, all those types of functions. So, it’s been a big help for us.

John: We talked about how Remedyforce sits on the Salesforce platform, and it really opens up an endless opportunity for our customers to go beyond sort of the traditional IT service management. Let’s talk a little bit about the innovation you guys have leveraged with Remedyforce, specifically talking about project management and time tracking. Can you describe that?

Andrew: With the project management, the company before was using a Web-based application called dotProject to track its project management. The users weren’t happy with it. I wasn’t involved in, you know, getting all the complaints. But I heard there was a need within the department, and I said, “Wait, before you purchase anything, let me see what I can do for you using Remedyforce.” I went to work, and about a week or two, I was able to configure, just using Remedyforce, you know, out of the box, I was able to configure Remedyforce in a way that allows us to track our project management. So, what the users do, or the project managers when they’re ready to initiate a project, I created a self-service form, they answer the questions or we’re going in the project. For example, the project name, the sponsor, function leader, all the normal things you need to know to initiate a project. And then they submit the form, it automatically creates a ticket and a task for each deliverable. So, the deliverable would be like the charter or the cost benefit analysis, the support documentation, all the normal documentation that comes along with … the deliverables that comes along with executing a project. And so, the project manager manages the main incident and the task get … our major PMO, the guy who’s over the department, he keeps the incident, and the individual project managers are assigned the task for each of the deliverables. So once, for example, a Project Manager completes the charter, the project manager would load the charter into of the task, you know, just attach it. And then it would go through the approval process associated with that task.

John: You didn’t do any code and you just sort of configured the different categories and certain fields to be able to track this within Remedyforce?

Andrew: No coding at all. I couldn’t even code as if my life depended on it. The most I know about Java is coffee. So, there’s that. But yes, there was no coding, it is just configuring what’s already out of the box to do what I need to do and that’s what I did. The approval process is tied to certain tasks. I created approval process and used the process builder to trigger the approval process based on certain criterion in the task. When the task is created and the category, for example, is charter, then it initiates the approval process based on that.

John: Can you provide some outcomes and benefits that you’ve seen resulting using the solution?

Andrew: With Remedyforce one of the primary benefits I’ve noticed is this the mobility. In IT, any IT person in any company across the America or the world from probably attest that during lunch breaks or walking between jobs, we often get stopped in hall. “Hey, Andrew, can you give me an update on this ticket?” Or, “I have this new issue that’s going on, and I could really use your help with it.” And we’ve been taught, and it’s been enforced, that we need to have an incident for everything that we do. That’s the only way we quantify our work to help us keep track and be accountable for the customer’s request. So, between jobs, or on breaks, we’re often stopped in the hall to say, “Hey, Andrew, I need help with this. Can you give me an update?” With Remedyforce, because it has the app, we can quickly go on the app on our phone or tablet – any mobile device – and either give the customer an update on an existing incident or open a new incident and give that person the incident, and we can say, “You can call the help desk to follow up to get a update on the ticket or if you see me, you can reference the same ticket number again, and I can use the app on my phone to pull it up.” So, the mobility has been such a big help for us. That’s the biggest benefit.

Is One Really Enough?

In the first blog, we covered the common confusions and misperceptions regarding discovery tools and why, in many cases, multiple discovery tools are required. In this second blog, we provide prescriptive guidance, including lessons learned, to select and support a successful implementation of one or more discovery tools.

A brief recap

As covered in the previous blog, there are many different discovery tools in the market. Each tool has its strengths and limitations. In most cases, there isn’t a single discovery tool that can meet the needs of everyone within an organization. When assessing and evaluating discovery tools, you must first understand the origin which commonly exposes the core strengths and limitations. This first step helps start the discussions when identifying requirements across your organization.

Basic lessons learned

Based upon my years of working with organizations on a range of fronts including IT asset management, software asset management and IT service management, I’ve boiled the basic lessons learned regarding the assessment and evaluation of discovery tools down to four basic considerations:

1. Clarify and align the specific requirements
   
   Don’t assume. Be specific and ask “How?”, not “Can you?”
   
   Call me Captain Obvious but surprisingly, organizations often move too fast before understanding their specific discovery needs. In the case of a Software Asset Management (SAM) program, you must have clear understanding of the platforms, vendors, titles and license models that are in scope. Then you need to determine if the tool(s) support each of these requirements. Keep in mind, no tool supports all platforms, license models and software titles out of the box, particularly when it comes to software license compliance. However, there are tools which provide much more coverage than others. You should understand the tools and their coverage up front to ensure proper expectations are set. It is common for those who start a SAM program to assume the tools support these various areas only to find out they don’t, which commonly results, best case, in an increase in cost and effort and/or worst case, program failure. Please refer to the What is Software Asset Management? blog for more details on the fundamental truths of SAM.
2. Don’t try to fit a square peg into a round hole.
   
   Don’t force it.
   
   In other words, don’t try to force an existing discovery tool to deliver what it was not intended to do. I have seen numerous organizations try to extend (i.e. code for customization) a discovery tool to do more than the core capabilities. This approach may be more practical in the early (less mature) stages, but as an organization grows and matures, the risk increases. In many cases, the cost and effort also increases to where the organization is forced to revisit their discovery strategy and look for another tool – or additional tools. This is a very common scenario for those trying to leverage existing discovery tools for software asset management (SAM). If a discovery tool is not designed for SAM, particularly software compliance, most organizations quickly run into limitations (e.g. multi-platform, multi-vendor, complex licensing) resulting in an increase in costs and efforts to achieve their goals – which in turn forces them to revisit their approach and current tools. A common example is when the data center team is looking for a discovery tool and they start using a discovery tool which originated from the distributed side. In many cases, the data center team will eventually expose limitations on key requirements including application dependency mapping and server software discovery. The distributed discovery tool may have these capabilities, but when you dig into them, the effort needed to configure and create the content becomes impractical.
3. Think strategically, but implement tactically.
   
   Plan for the future now.
   
   With any program (notice I didn’t call this a project, nor a discovery project, because discovery needs span many disciplines), one must balance the needs of today with the future. It is not always easy to confidently anticipate future needs, especially with the velocity of innovation and platforms, but if you continually prioritize and plan your roadmap, you can make more informed decisions on your discovery path including tools, process, people and data. My point here is to put some weight into your future needs when deciding on solutions today. There are many discovery tools in the market with a wide range of capabilities. For example, with my focus on ITSM and ITAM, it is common for organizations to start with more traditional discovery tools which may find most (if not all) devices and at their core are “informational” – providing key information about each device. Then move to the next level, which includes more actionable discovery capabilities including “Client Management” and “End Point Management” tools. These types of tools typically go beyond discovering devices and provide management capabilities (e.g. remote control, software delivery, patch management) for devices ideally across supported platforms. Another common area of focus is the data center, which typically requires more in-depth details on data center devices including their components (e.g. clusters), relationships and services. Application dependency mapping is a common need and capability in this area.
4. Rationalize and align.
   
   Remove redundancy and align tools, data, teams and process.
   
   Due to the likelihood of multiple tools, groups and processes, one should step back and evaluate the “bigger picture” to expose opportunities to consolidate and simplify across the organization. First, one must understand the capabilities across the discovery tools and the roles they support. This too can expose an opportunity to rationalize and consolidate data and capabilities across solutions. Second, from a data perspective, there is the risk of data duplication, which should drive one towards developing a set of rules/priorities to support data consolidation, avoiding data conflict. This applies to discovery tools which accept other sources, or a CMDB and/or asset repository designed to consolidate data from many sources. And lastly, with the consolidation of tools and data, one exposes the opportunity across the teams (including processes) to remove duplicate efforts to streamline and align teams to work more efficiently.

In Summary

A wide range of discovery tools exist in the market today, which can be a source of confusion for organizations, and typically no single discovery tool can meet the needs across an organization. The rapid rate of innovation will continue to drive the evolution of discovery tools (think cloud, IoT, virtualization, APIs, etc.) requiring organizations to continually assess requirements to align and optimize for your business. This is a journey, not a destination.

As a first step, understanding the origin of a tool can sometimes expose a solutions strengths and limitations. It is essential that organizations evaluate their discovery needs across the company to expose current solutions, redundancies and needs. From this consolidated view, there are 4 basic rules of thumb to consider when building out a consolidated discovery plan: (1) Don’t assume – understand the requirements and be specific; (2) Don’t force the tool to do more than it was designed to do; (3) Plan for the future now; (4) Rationalize and align. Keeping these concepts in mind when building or maturing your discovery solution will increase your chances for success.

For more information on the range of BMC’s discovery capabilities, please refer to:

BMC Helix Remedyforce Asset and Client Management

BMC Helix Discovery

See John’s other blogs on asset and discovery management.

Why the Confusion? (Part 1)

This is the first of two blogs covering the common challenges in selecting the right discovery tool(s), why there can be confusion, and where to start with your own evaluation or assessment. The subsequent blog will provide more prescriptive guidance around evaluating and selecting discovery tools along with a pragmatic approach for peaceful co-existence when multiple tools are involved.

Just like an opinion, everyone’s got one

Some organizations collect them like individuals who collect bobbleheads or PEZ dispensers. Often, they arrive with high expectations (picture an ‘easy’ button) spreading across your environment and sometimes they have a love-hate relationship with your network and security teams. I’m not talking about IT personnel. I’m talking about discovery tools. As a former ITSM consultant and current product manager, I frequently meet with organizations to assess their challenges and requirements to help them find ways to mature their service management and/or asset management programs to drive success. A common question I ask during the initial stages of an assessment is “Do you have a discovery tool (or tools)?”. Typically, the standard response is “yes”, but there is always much more to the story. Depending on the individual and their role and responsibilities, the discovery tool(s) may address that individual’s specific needs, but someone in another role or department may have another discovery tool or tools which deliver a much different set of capabilities. In other words, the view of a “discovery tool” can be much different from one individual to another depending on their perspective.

Not all are created equal

So why is there confusion around discovery tools? Not all discovery tools are created equal. One discovery tool typically cannot meet the needs of everyone especially if your organization covers a wide range of environments and devices. Looking at the origin of a discovery tool can often identify its strengths and differences with other discovery tools. For example, some discovery tools originally emerged to manage traditional devices (e.g. desktops, laptops, servers) in distributed environments (e.g. Microsoft SCCM, formerly SMS), while others originated from the data center (e.g. BMC Helix Discovery, formerly ADDM) focusing on the intricacies and complexities of data center environments, discovering more in-depth components (e.g. databases, applications, clusters, etc.) and their associated relationships. Other discovery tools may focus on the security aspect, or a specific platform or device (e.g. mobile device management (MDM)). They may discover some of the same devices and core device information, but that typically is where the commonality ends. The key differences go beyond the core discovery to more in-depth discovery details including components, software details, configurations, and relationships along with management capabilities.

Know the origin

Below is a sample of different discovery origins and solutions. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list, but to get you thinking about the range of different discovery tools along with their potential strengths and weaknesses to frame your needs and evaluation:

Where to start?

Whether you are about to begin the process of selecting a discovery tool(s) or evaluating your existing tools, you must understand the origin, the strengths, and the weaknesses of each. Like many tools in IT, each has their own strengths and weaknesses. A vendor’s web page or data sheet never provides the full story as the devil is always in the details. As mentioned above, some tools may have originated in one group, but expanded into others. This is where you need to dive in and perform your due diligence to ensure the tool’s origin is not the only strength of the solution.

In conclusion for this first blog, understand that there are many different discovery tools and most organizations have multiple ones. Start your evaluation by understanding their origin to frame their capabilities – exposing the strengths and limitations.

Now that we have outlined the variety of discovery tools and the needs that they address, the next blog in next week will provide prescriptive guidance to help you evaluate and select the discovery tool that is right for your organization.

For more information on the range of BMC’s discovery capabilities, please refer to:

BMC Helix Remedyforce Asset and Client Management

BMC Helix Discovery

See John’s other blogs on asset and discovery management.

Over the years, I’ve worked with many organizations at various states of maturity and success with their IT Asset Management (ITAM) programs. In this blog, I will share with you the seven common practices that I’ve observed from organizations who have built and maintained successful ITAM programs.

1. “Give Them What They Want” (Executive Support/Alignment) – IT Asset Management can be very political because it requires that multiple groups work together with some level of alignment to achieve common ends and produce mutual value.  An ITAM program cannot be successful in isolation. Executive support is essential to influence the team
   s to gain alignment, share information and work towards a common goal. Without executive support, there is little chance an organization will be able to establish and maintain a successful ITAM program. Depending on the initial scope and approach, teams can experience some minor success upfront without executive support, but it will fade fast as the scope of the full ITAM program increases in subsequent phases, exposing the lack of alignment across the teams. Ideally, with executive support you will have “executive sponsor” to not only support and influence behavior, but sometimes serve as the mediator if any conflict arises. I’ve seen cases where there was limited executive support and direct involvement that negatively impacted the ITAM program resulting in delays.
2. “What’s in it for me?” (Engage and Align) – Because of the cross functional dependency, a successful ITAM program requires alignment across the teams which may vary depending how your company is organized (ex. IT/Support, Finance, Legal, etc…).  Alignment is required on several fronts including the definition of asset management, goals, processes, policies, outcomes, etc…  You must weave the needs of your executive sponsor into the aligned plans, but you must also ensure everyone involved receives benefits for their efforts. I have seen organizations who take the initiative to form a cross-functional team and/or steering team/committee experience improved alignment and success.
3. “Don’t Boil the Ocean” (Take a Phased Approach) – Another key to establishing and maintaining a successful ITAM program is getting the momentum going with an approach that ensures early success and iterative additional delivered value. To ensure success early in the program, you must make sure you don’t boil the ocean. You must test the waters with a limited scope to “work out the kinks” across people, processes and technologies. This critical success factor is tied into all the other factors. In terms of executive support, you must ensure your scope aligns to the executive’s needs in some way (ex. reducing costs, mitigating risk) and within the executive’s needs, you should focus on a subset of attainable goals for each phase. For example, you may know that the majority of hardware costs come from one or a few asset classes (ex. servers and laptops). Focus on these classes before expanding to others. This will enable you to work out the kinks and give you a higher likelihood of momentum-building success. These gains will breed further success as other teams share in the benefits. You want to think strategically, but implement tactically. In other words, develop a long term plan, but be tactical in your delivery to ensure iterative goal attainment in order to continue onto the next phase/scope.  The BMC Remedyforce Onboarding Team has developed an agile-hybrid implementation methodology to deliver quick value.
4. “Quality In, Quality Out” (Justify the Data) – Only capture and manage data which is justified. I’ve seen organizations capture a tremendous amount of data because they can.  This is made possible through a vast array of discovery tools and/or other systems.   The questions you need to ask for every “object” and field is “what” and “why.” If there is value and the effort to capture, maintain and manage the data to ensure accuracy is justified, then include it.  Many organizations will define a pricing threshold to clearly define types of records (ex. high monitors over $500). The other dimension here is data quality. The old adage is “garbage in, garbage out”.  You must ensure the data source is accurate and the integrations, processes, and people are in place to maintain the data. This also ties back to the phased approach and class types. Don’t manage a class just because it can be discovered. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
5. “Technology is Not the Only Answer” (Process, Process, Process) – When speaking to organizations about ITAM, especially those who are just beginning to build a program, I commonly state that “ITAM is 80% process, 20% technology.” I make this statement not to downplay the significance of the technologies, but to stress that process is essential for a successful ITAM program, and tools should not be the primary focus. Organizations must also ensure their processes and policies are well defined, communicated and enforced.
6. “Rinse and Repeat” (Baseline and Measure) – I’ve seen many organizations focus on most of these other critical success factors, but ignore or not spend as much effort on baselining and measuring; however, they are critical to success. Baselining is important because you must know where you started. How do you know where to go when you don’t know where you are? Organizations must use baselines to track their progress. These can be qualitative, but must also be quantitative. There are several frameworks to leverage including Gartner’s high-level ITAM Maturity Model. The International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers (IAITAM) also has a very good tool called ITAM 360 Assessment Model which provides a more detailed assessment covering 12 key process areas (Note: For those not familiar with IAITAM, I encourage you to take a look at this organization. They have a lot of great real world, practical content and educational material).

Once you baseline, you must measure your progress on a consistent basis. The ongoing measurement and comparison enables organizations to track progress and expose opportunities for improvement.  The principles around continuous process improvement are key here. The continuous measurement and assessment of progress exposes strengths and weaknesses, helping identify the opportunities to take your program to the next level.

7. “Be Transparent” (Share the Results) – Once you measure, it’s important to share results with executive management and the other teams sponsoring and supporting the program. This is one of the most critical aspects, especially when early in establishing the program. With the right alignment and focused scope, you significantly increase your chances of successful if you communicate those quick (and iterative) wins early and often. Shout your success from the rooftops and you’ll attract other interested parties that you can draw on for support and help you expand the scope and success of your ITAM project.

In summary, all seven factors are essential to build and maintain a successful ITAM program. Over the years, I have seen organizations focus on a few of these factors and initially deliver some level of success, but as they mature, expand scope, and require other teams to get involved, the climb becomes more difficult and they falter. Once you lose momentum, it’s is much harder to get back on track. If you consider and balance each of these critical success factors, you will have a much higher likelihood for success.

The call to action is to insert (for those planning) or assess (for those already with asset management activities) these seven critical success factors. Then continuously measure and evaluate to become a champion within your organization.  For those looking for assistance, the BMC Remedyforce Onboarding Team  has developed an agile-hybrid methodology that helps organizations get quick value with their ITAM activities.  BMC Remedyforce also has certified implementation partners that can assist you as well.

About BMC and BMC Remedyforce

BMC is a global leader in software solutions that help IT transform traditional businesses into digital enterprises for the ultimate competitive advantage. Our Digital Enterprise Management set of IT solutions is designed to make digital business fast, seamless, and optimized. From mainframe to mobile to cloud and beyond, we pair high-speed digital innovation with robust IT industrialization—allowing our customers to provide intuitive user experiences with optimized performance, cost, compliance, and productivity. BMC solutions serve more than 15,000 customers worldwide including 92 of the Forbes Global 100.

BMC Remedyforce is built on the Salesforce Force.com platform—the world’s most widely used cloud platform—to deliver high-speed IT and business service management. Intuitive and powerful, Remedyforce enables enterprises to deliver innovative digital services that accelerate business success and drive increased customer satisfaction. Leveraging industry-leading ITSM tools and practices as well as robust cloud functionality, Remedyforce frees IT and business units to provide faster service support at a much lower cost. Remedyforce delivers a modern, consumerized experience that empowers users and accelerates the business.

To learn about BMC Remedyforce and the innovative Service and Asset Management capabilities, check out our web site which contains a wealth of information including videos, personalized automated demos, whitepapers, customer testimonials and self-guided trials.