In a managed service provider (MSP)-centric environment, managing the diverse needs of multiple end users within a single tenant environment can be challenging. However, the benefits of personalized dashboards for these end users are significant. Each end user brings unique requirements and preferences for visualizing their information technology (IT) infrastructure within this domain. This is where the multi-tenancy dashboard becomes invaluable. Using tools like BMC Helix Access Controls, MSPs can now seamlessly create personalized dashboard views for individual end users, revolutionizing how data is accessed, analyzed, and utilized within a unified framework.

We’ve had inquiries regarding the feasibility and logistics of implementing personalized dashboards within a multi-tenant environment; one resounding question echoes: “Can it truly be done?” How do you navigate the process of setting up and managing dashboards tailored to multiple end users’ individual roles and preferences?

This blog is designed to address your concerns. We will guide you through the practical application of creating and managing dashboards with distinct users. The answer to the question is a resounding “Yes, it can be done!” We will equip you with the necessary steps and insights to make this process a reality in your multi-tenant environment.

Creating a User Group

Let’s start by creating a User group. For this blog, we will create a User group for the end customer, “XYZ Manufacturing.” In the next steps, you’ll discover how easy it is to create personalized dashboards based on your end user, empowering you to tailor the experience to their unique needs.

Here is a screenshot showing the group creation. As the BMC Helix tenant administrator, you will first go into the portal:

Figure 1. Main screen.

As the administrator for the XYZ Manufacturing company, you will then click on Add group and create the specific User group. The image below shows the administrator creating TestGroup1.

Figure 2. User groups.

Now that the administrator has created a new User group, they will need to add the permissions. The administrator simply clicks on Actions -> Assigned, and assigns the User to the Group:

Figure 3. User directory.

Next, the administrator will want to check the User’s role. This is easily done by going to the BMC Helix portal landing page, clicking the User access tab, going to the Users and keys page, and searching for the User.

Figure 4: Users and keys.

Now that the administrator sees the User, they can simply click on Actions -> User options to see which User groups and Roles are assigned to them. By selecting either the Groups or Roles assignment area, the administrator can quickly validate that they are assigned correctly.

Figure 5: User options.

Creating an Authorization Profile

One of the next things you will want to do as the administrator is to create an authorization profile for this User group (TestGroup1). By creating this authorization profile, you ensure that the Users in this Group only have access to the appropriate XYZ Manufacturing company information.

Here’s how you do this: Launch the BMC Helix Operations Management console from the BMC Helix portal landing page. Then, navigate to the Administration Authorization profile, and you will see the Authorization Profile Test_AutoProf1, which we have created for User group TestGroup1. In your case, this needs to be created using the “Create” button option.

Figure 6. Authorization profiles.

The next step is to add and associate the User group we created.

Figure 7. Profile details.

In this case, we have selected Microsoft Windows Servers as the PATROL Solutions and then assigned a specific Device and Group. The Device name and Group name will vary depending on customer requirements.

Figure 8. Administration.

Figure 9. Administration detail.

Here we are showing the selection of the Group Windows Servers.

Figure 9a.Windows Servers.

Setup Complete

As you’ve seen so far, this has all been straightforward to implement. Let’s now log into the BMC Helix portal as the user and see how it shows up. Here’s the dashboard, with all the devices that the user has available to them displayed.

Figure 10. Main dashboard.

Based on the rules the administrator has put in place, this user can only see the two devices that were assigned.

The user can see deeper insights from the dashboard by clicking on one of the servers (for this example, we’ve clicked into the vl-pun-dombl107 server).

Figure 11. Deeper insights.

Once on the Device Details page, the user can click on the three dots beside the Device Name and then click on the  “Launch Dashboard” pop-up to delve into all of the performance details:

Figure 12. Launching dashboard.

Detailed Dashboard View

Once the user has clicked on Launch Dashboard, the system will default to the same device and show the CPU utilization, Memory usage, Disk usage, Network bandwidth utilization, and related events for this device.

Figure 13. Performance details.

Conclusion

As you can see, creating and managing multiple end users with personalized dashboards is quite simple. Using BMC Helix User group and Authorization profiles, the administrator can easily create the views needed to support personalized dashboards based on the user profiles. We hope this process walk-through will provide you with the guidance you have been asking for as you create your dashboards in your environment.

We are also here to answer any questions you might have; please feel free to reach out to us:

• sayan_banerjee@bmc.com
• anmol_rastogi@bmc.com

The service desk is a valuable ITSM function that ensures efficient and effective IT service delivery. A variety of metrics are available to help you better manage and achieve these goals. These metrics often identify business constraints and quantify the impact of IT incidents. Of course, the vast, complex nature of IT infrastructure and assets generate a deluge of information that describe system performance and issues at every network node. The challenge for service desk? Identifying the metrics that best describe the true system performance and guide toward optimal issue resolution.

We’ve talked before about service desk metrics, such as the cost per ticket. Another service desk metric is mean time to resolve, which quantifies the time needed for a system to regain normal operation performance after a failure occurrence. In this article, we’ll explore mean time to resolve (sometimes abbreviated MTTR), including defining and calculating mean time to resolve and showing how it supports a DevOps environment.

Check out a product that can help reduce mean time to respond by leveraging generative AI and observability >

What is mean time to resolve?

Beyond the service desk, it’s is a popular and easy-to-understand metric:

• DevOps professionals discuss mean time to resolve to understand potential impact of delivering a risky build iteration in production environment.
• Business executives and financial stakeholders question downtime in context of financial losses incurred due to an IT incident.
• Customers of online retail stores complain about unresponsive or poorly available websites.

In each case, the popular discussion topic is the time spent between failure and issue resolution. So, let’s define mean time to resolve.

‘Mean time to recovery’ is the average time duration to fix a failed component and return to an operational state. This metric includes the time spent during the alert and diagnostic processes, before repair activities are initiated. (The average time solely spent on the repair process is called ‘mean time to repair’, also shortened to MTTR.) It can be mathematically defined in terms of maintenance or the downtime duration:

In other words, MTTR describes both the reliability and availability of a system:

• Reliability refers to the probability that a service will remain operational over its lifecycle. It can be described as an exponentially decaying function with the maximum value in the beginning and gradually reducing toward the end of its life.
• Availability refers to the probability that the system will be operational at any specific instantaneous point in time.

The shorter the mean time to resolve, the higher the reliability and availability of the system. From a practical service desk perspective, this concept makes MTTR the metric valuable: users of IT services expect services to perform optimally for significant durations as well as at specific instances. For example, Amazon Prime customers expect the website to remain fast and responsive for the entire duration of their purchase cycle, especially during the holiday season. If the website is down several times per day but only for a millisecond, a regular user may not experience the impact.

Find out which predictive intelligence tool companies are using to continuously optimize their IT environments >

Mean time to resolve encourages DevOps

It’s a valuable metric for service desks on its own, but it also encourages DevOps culture and practices in a variety of ways:

• Low impact of incidents. The primary objective of mean time to resolve is to reduce the impact of IT incidents on end users. If an issue is resolved before a customer’s online activity is disrupted, the service will be accepted as efficient and effectively delivered.
• Resilient system design. The service desk goals associated with this metric are achieved by developing a resilient system or code. For example, a website feature could be developed as a separate code with web service called independently from other features. Any repairs or changes to a specific feature may not impact the performance of other website features. This would make the entire website resilient, with each feature easy to repair.
• Feedback loop. Any improvement to the software build requires a fast feedback mechanism that informs developers early during the SDLC pipeline. MTTR can be reduced when the bugs are small in scope, easy to fix, and identified during the early development stages.
• Reduced dependencies. Mean time to resolve increases when fixing a single issue requires the fix of multiple functions and systems tightly integrated and dependent to each other. By reducing such dependencies, the performance of this metric is improved. From a service desk perspective, the services are carefully evaluated to ensure low dependencies.
• Active monitoring. The resolution process can only begin after a fault is identified. Actively monitor the infrastructure logs to identify patterns of anomalous behavior and the underlying problem root cause. With this information, the service desk can perform appropriate problem management or incident response actions, thereby reducing downtime.
• Rapid iterations. Any fix applied to a system can have negative consequences. The focus on reducing meant time to resolve encourages small and fast fixes that can be easily deployed—and rolled back—in response to a negative outcome.
• Designing for failure. Reducing mean time to resolve encourages the service desk to design for, prepare for, and embrace failure. Downtime and service outages are inevitable, but the success of the service desk depends on how well it can respond and mitigate the impact of fast-fail product development and service delivery initiatives.
• Velocity, quality and performance. The DevOps goals of velocity, quality, and performance are achieved when build iterations are released rapidly at high quality, reducing waste processes. Incidentally, this is also the purpose of reducing issue resolution time for service desk activities and processes including incident and problem management.
• Continuous improvement. Repetitive issues downgrade overall system performance and any possibility of resolving issues in a timely manner. Finding the problem’s root cause and reducing repetitive issue resolution requests is a sign of continuous improvement.
• Automation and intelligence. To resolve issues quickly, service desk must gain end-to-end visibility and control into the IT network and assets. Advanced AI capabilities to eliminate alert noise and proactively identify problem root cause help reduce the issue resolution time, among other ITSM objectives.

By following the DevOps philosophy, service desk can achieve the wider ITSM objectives of efficiently and effectively delivering IT services. Mean time to resolve is one among many other service desk metrics that companies can use to evaluate for deeper insights into IT service management and operations activities. With any technology or metrics, however, remember that there is no ‘one size fits all’: you’ll want to determine which metrics are useful for your organization’s unique needs, and build your ITSM practice to achieve real-world business goals.

What’s next?

Dive into more about a closely related concept: Mean time to repair (MTTR) >

Most service providers understand the need for service level agreements (SLAs) with their partners and customers. But creating one might feel daunting because you don’t know where to start or what to include. In this article, we share some SLA examples and templates to help you create SLAs.

What is an SLA?

An SLA is a documented agreement between a service provider and a customer that defines: (i) the level of service a customer should expect, while laying out the metrics by which service is measured, as well as (ii) remedies or penalties should agreed-upon service levels not be achieved. It is a critical component of any technology vendor contract.

Before subscribing to an IT service, the SLA should be carefully evaluated and designed to realize maximum service value from an end-user and business perspective. Service providers should pay attention to the differences between internal outputs and customer-facing outcomes, as these can help define the service expectations.

Take IT Service Management to the next level with BMC Helix ITSM.›

Writing SLAs: An SLA template

Let’s examine a sample SLA that you can use as a template for creating your own SLAs. Remember that these documents are flexible and unique. Make changes as necessary, and ensure that you correctly identify and include the relevant parties. Also, consider additional topics that you may want to add to your agreement(s) to enhance them, such as:

• Review or monitoring period. How often the service provider and customer may review the terms of the SLA; perhaps, annually.
• Service credits. Something the service provider may offer in case your SLA is not achieved.
• A rider. Used when amendments to an SLA occur.
• End-of-contract or liquidation terms. This defines how and when customer or service provider can opt out of the SLA.

There are several ways to write an SLA. Below is a mock table of contents that you can leverage to start writing your own SLAs.

Now, I’ll break down each section with a few details and examples.

1.0  SLA

The first page of your document is simple, yet important. It should include:

• Version details
• Document change history, including last reviewed date and next scheduled review
• Document approvals

Last Review: MM/DD/YYYY

Next Scheduled Review: MM/DD/YYYY

2.0. Agreement overview

In the next section, the agreement overview should include four components:

1. The SLA introduction
2. Definitions, convention, acronyms, and abbreviations (a glossary)
3. Purpose
4. Contractual parameters

2.1. SLA introduction

Include a brief introduction of the agreement, relevant parties, service scope, and contract duration. For instance:

This is a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between [Customer] and [Service Provider]. This document identifies the services required and the expected level of services between MM/DD/YYYY to MM/DD/YYYY.

Subject to review and renewal scheduled by MM/DD/YYYY.

Signatories:

2.2. Definitions, conventions, acronyms, and abbreviations

Include a definition and brief description of terms used to represent services, roles, metrics, scope, parameters, and other contractual details that may be interpreted subjectively in different contexts. This information may also be distributed across appropriate sections of this document instead of collated into a single section.

2.3. Purpose

This section defines the goals of this agreement, such as:

The purpose of this SLA is to specify the requirements of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution as defined herein with regards to:

• Requirements for SaaS service that will be provisioned to [Customer]
• Agreed service targets
• Criteria for target fulfilment evaluation
• Roles and responsibilities of [Service Provider]
• Duration, scope, and renewal of this SLA contract
• Supporting processes, limitations, exclusions, and deviations.

2.4. Contractual parameters

In this section, you’ll want to define the policies and scope of this contract related to application, renewal, modification, exclusion, limitations, and termination of the agreement.

This section specifies the contractual parameters of this agreement:

1. Contract renewal must be requested by [Customer] at least 30 days prior to expiration date of this agreement.
2. Modifications, amendments, extension, and early termination of this SLA must be agreed by both signatory parties.
3. [Customer] requires a minimum of 60 days’ notice for early termination of this SLA.
4. …

3.0. Service agreement

This section can include a variety of components and subsections, including:

1. KPIs and metrics
2. Service levels, rankings, and priority
3. Service response
4. Exceptions and limitations
5. Responses and responsibilities
6. Service management

3.1. KPIs and metrics

Key performance indicators (KPIs) and other related metrics can and should support your SLA, but the achievement of these alone does not necessarily result in the desired outcome for the customer.

3.2. Service levels, rankings, and priority

3.3. Service response

3.4. Exceptions and limitations

Include any exceptions to the SLA conditions, scope, and application, such as:

This SLA is subject to the following exceptions and special conditions:

• [Service Provider] must ensure cloud service availability of 99.9999% during holiday season dated MM/DD/YYYY to MM/DD/YYYY.
• [Service Provider] may not be liable to credit reimbursement for service impact to data centers in Region A and Region B due to natural disasters.
• Response to requests of severity level 6 or below by [Customer] can be delayed up to 24 hours during the aforementioned holiday season.
• Requests for special arrangements by [Customer] may be expedited as per pricing structure specified in Appendix A.1.

3.5. Responses and responsibilities

Here, you’ll define the responsibilities of both the service provider and the customer.

[Customer] responsibilities:

• [Customer] should provide all necessary information and assistance related to service performance that allows the [Service Provider] to meet the performance standards as outlined in this document.
• [Customer] shall inform [Service Provider] regarding changing business requirements that may necessitate a review, modification, or amendment of the SLA.
• …

[Service Provider] responsibilities

• [Service Provider] will act as primary support provider of the services herein identified, except when third-party vendors are employed, who shall assume appropriate service support responsibilities accordingly.
• [Service Provider] will inform [Customer] regarding scheduled and unscheduled service outages due to maintenance, troubleshooting, or disruptions, or as otherwise necessary.
• …

3.6. Service management

Include service management and support details applicable to the service provider in this section.

3.6.1. Service availability

Service coverage by the [Service Provider] as outlined in this agreement follows the schedule specified below:

• On-site support: 9 AM to 6 PM, Monday to Friday, from January 5, 2023 to December 20, 2023.
• Phone support: 24 hours as per Section 3.2. of this agreement.
• Email support: 24 hours as per Section 3.2. of this agreement.
• …

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References and glossary

Include reference agreements, policy documents, glossary, and relevant details in this section. This might include terms and conditions for both the service provider and the customer, and any additional reference material, such as third-party vendor contracts.

Appendix

The appendix is a good place to include relevant information that doesn’t seem to fit elsewhere, such as pricing models and charges. The following section is an example of information that you may want to append to your SLA.

A.1. Pricing models and charges

Include the pricing models for each service type with detailed specifications.

SLA best practices

Though your SLA is intended to be a legally binding agreement, it doesn’t need to be incredibly lengthy or overly complicated. It can further be a malleable document that is improved upon over time, with the consent of all relevant parties. Our advice: Begin building an SLA using the template above and the examples found herein and consult with your customers for any perceived gaps. As unforeseen circumstances are often inevitable, you can always revisit and tweak the SLA, if needed.

Additional resources

Additional SLA templates and examples are available here:

• Columbia University IT (PDF)
• Giva (PDF)
• PandaDoc
• SLA Template

When it comes to security incident response, the saying “failure to plan is planning to fail” resonates deeply. We often get consumed with the latest tactics to prevent attacks but overlook the importance of a robust approach to security incident handling. Without a well-defined and comprehensive incident response plan in place, organizations are ill-prepared to handle security breaches, leaving them vulnerable to extensive damage and prolonged disruptions.

According to the Cyber security skills in the UK labour market 2023 report, a quarter of businesses don’t regard incident response skills as essential. Almost half said they weren’t confident they could put together an incident response plan (IRP), which led to 41 percent saying they were not very or not at all confident that they would be able to deal with a cybersecurity breach or attack.

When an incident occurs, time is of the essence

Ensuring that organizations have a strong process for security incident handling is important for several reasons. First and foremost, it helps an organization minimize the impact of security incidents, which can include data breaches, network intrusions, malware infections, and other cyberattacks. By having a well-defined incident response plan in place, an organization can detect and respond in a timely manner, potentially reducing the amount of damage caused and the associated costs.

While not all cases of a data breach will lead to fraud or identity theft, compromised data is still an expensive business for companies. The repercussions stretch further to impact consumer trust and brand reputation, not to mention the mental health of customers and the financial health of the business.

Building a culture of trust

As hackers are now using artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools for increasingly sophisticated attacks, IT and security teams are striving more than ever to keep ahead of cybercriminals. The need for adequate staff training, as well as creating an atmosphere of trust to report any issues has never been greater. Rigorous training of staff to help recognize phishing emails and malicious activity—and understand how to report them—is a must. Employees who feel trusted they will be more likely to report an incident without fear of reprisals instead of ignoring it.

The quicker an organization can respond to a security incident, the better. That means effectively containing the damage to prevent further compromise and minimize the risk of an incident escalating and causing widespread disruption, financial loss, or reputational damage.

Preserve evidence and comply with industry regulations

A well-executed incident response plan can help restore affected systems and services to normal operation as quickly as possible, minimizing disruption to business operations and maintaining customer trust. Incident response plans also help organizations demonstrate their commitment to safeguarding sensitive information and complying with relevant laws and regulations by preserving evidence related to the security incident, which may be crucial for investigating and prosecuting cybercriminals. Properly collecting and preserving evidence can also support an organization’s efforts to understand an incident and improve its security posture to reduce the likelihood of it happening again.

Identifying the right solutions for security incident handing

Security teams must often rely on an IT service management (ITSM) tool that has a “security” category under “IT incident.” But this is not fit for purpose because it provides little flexibility and does not enable teams to create standard processes for handling different types of security incidents. It is also difficult to collaborate across teams as needed.

Leverage BMC Helix for security incident handling

BMC Helix has worked hand in hand with key customers to design a pre-built security incident handing solution based on industry best practices and customer feedback. The solution aligns tightly with industry and government standards such as NIST 800-61 and ISO 27001, so that each phase of the incident management lifecycle—identification, investigation, response, and remediation—is methodically addressed. Preconfigured runbooks are provided to address common security scenarios, help standardize the activities in each phase, and provide collaboration and integrations to ensure all essential areas and teams are part of the activities.

The solution is the missing piece in many organizations’ security operations (SecOps) posture and solutions, bringing together prevent-and-respond processes and associated teams while also providing regulatory audit and evidence constructs and key lessons learned, which then become part of the prevention activities.

Extending Service Management Across the Enterprise

BMC’s security incident handling solutions is part of a suite of preconfigured out-of-the box workflow solutions which enable organizations to extend the value of BMC Helix for Service Management beyond IT and across their enterprise.

Learn more: BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management – BMC Software

Watch Video: BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management – Security Incident Handling – YouTube

Today is BMC Connect London, the final in a series of global events designed to bring together and empower our customers and partners to fully leverage the power of BMC for service management.

We were the first vendor to embed GPT across our AI-driven service and operations management portfolio, and today we are proud to announce new innovations within our BMC Helix Service Management solution. They include generative AI, low-code/no-code development, and automated workflow solutions to help enterprise customers strengthen their security posture and deliver elevated employee journeys.

With BMC Helix, seeing is believing, so I would encourage you to watch these videos, which are powerful illustrations of our new innovations in action:

• Resolution insights, conversational chat, and search capabilities with generative AI. Harness the power of BMC HelixGPT to isolate incidents and recommend the best action to agents to reduce the risk of business disruptions. This can improve the quality and accuracy of chatbot experiences while minimizing administrative overhead.

Watch the video: BMC HelixGPT-Powered Situation Explainability with Causal AI
Watch the video: BMC HelixGPT-Powered Conversational Engagement and Search

• Security Incident Handling. The BMC Helix for Security Incident Handling solution strengthens the ability to prevent or respond against threats. It elevates the importance of enterprise security handling and provides a system of record for these processes. The solution integrates bi-directionally with leading third-party SIEM security incident solutions for accelerated post-threat detection response.

Watch the video: BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management Security Incident Handling

• Asset and ticket management consoles. These consoles provide more contextual, user-configurable experiences with single-screen visibility and simplified communication. These new, modern consoles significantly improve agent experiences and efficiency.

Watch the video: Asset Console in BMC Helix ITSM
Watch the video: New Shared Ticket Console in BMC Helix ITSM

• Industry vertical sector templates. BMC Helix Digital Workplace Studio provides complimentary, out-of-the-box templates that offer modern user interfaces uniquely tailored for the employee experience across the automotive, entertainment, fashion, finance, healthcare, retail, and telecom industries.

Watch the video: BMC Helix Digital Workplace Out-of-the-Box Content

• Employee offboarding and alumni services. New capabilities in the BMC Helix for HR Service Management solution offer cross-departmental, out-of-the-box HR workflows for a more positive and seamless employee transition experience. This improves efficiency, ensures compliance, and preserves the security of assets, data, and intellectual property.

Watch the video: HR Service Management Offboarding Workflows and Alumni Services

• Workplace service management. The BMC Helix for Workplace Service Management solution offers automated workflows to handle a range of workplace issues and manage the scheduling of preventive maintenance work for individual assets or groups of assets.

Watch the webinar replay: Delivering a Safe, Sustainable Workplace

These innovations across enterprise service management highlight the continued focus on driving meaningful customer value across the entire BMC Helix portfolio. I am extremely proud of our achievements this year especially our recognition as a leader in enterprise service management and AIOps.

Learn more about BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management here.

Additional Resources

• BMC Recognized as a Leader in Enterprise Service Management and AIOps
• BMC Helix: Leading the charge in Generative AI-driven enterprise service management article on CIO.com
• The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Management, Q4 2023 report
• Simplify Complexity with BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management e-book
• Smooth Transitions: Managing the Employee Lifecycle with BMC Helix e-book

Experience is everything in today’s digital world. End users expect fast, accurate responses to their requests and questions—or they will move on to another source of information or services. Delivering an exceptional experience is especially critical for IT service desk teams supporting employees and partners who need reliable access to resources and applications to remain productive.

IT service desks often become burdened with too many tickets and requests, which quickly become difficult to manage with manual approaches. For current customers using Remedy, BMC’s legacy ITSM solution, there is a better way to resolve issues and empower end users with faster, more accurate problem resolution. BMC Helix ITSM transforms and modernizes the ITSM lifecycle by bringing teams together and leveraging intelligent automation to accelerate problem identification and resolution.

BMC Helix ITSM can help IT and business users prioritize and resolve incidents by using artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to quickly determine the root cause of a problem, identify events related to the incident, and reduce recovery times for multiple end users.

BMC Helix ITSM does this by automatically collecting topology data using BMC Helix Discovery, which populates the configuration management database, BMC Helix CMDB, with infrastructure, software, server, and other relevant configuration items. With this level of detail about the environment, the solution can pinpoint issues and understand which services and users will be impacted.

Here are examples of how BMC Helix ITSM empowers users across the enterprise to resolve issues and enables greater team collaboration.

Site reliability engineer (SRE)

An SRE is responsible for maintaining and improving the reliability of systems in production, fixing issues, and responding to incidents. Without proper tools to monitor service health, SREs often struggle to understand the root cause of a problem and cannot gain visibility into its impact.

BMC Helix ITSM’s service-centric monitoring console provides SREs with a clear view of any problems. When the solution receives hundreds of events impacting different components of a service, it uses AI/ML to identify the causal nodes behind an event. BMC Helix ITSM can trigger actions to automatically or manually remediate incidents, such as restarting a server or extending a file system that’s full; it will then automatically close related events once the situation is resolved.

Line of business (LoB) users

BMC Helix ITSM can also help business users who rely on applications to help them perform their day-to-day operations efficiently. Typically, when there is an issue, business users request support, but they lack an intuitive reporting and support platform and often experience long wait times, which leads to a negative user experience.

The solution empowers business users to handle issues directly, with access to a knowledge base and self-service tools, or by opening a ticket, if needed. And it communicates known issues to business users, helping minimize ticket duplication, which helps reduce the stress on IT service desk agents.

IT service desk agents

Service desk agents serve as the point of contact for customers, end users, and DevOps change requests. They are often challenged by a lack of real-time incident correlation, reactive problem resolution, and working with multiple, siloed teams.

With BMC Helix ITSM, service desk agents can manage a problem in an agile manner using real-time incident correlation and proactive problem management. The solution’s ML capabilities perform analysis based on the history of incidents and create problem management clusters, which reduce the likelihood that this same issue will cause performance incidents in the future.

DevOps engineers

DevOps engineers drive small feature releases based on feedback to help ensure fewer software failures. DevOps teams receive change requests from service desk agents and integrate changes seamlessly across the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) lifecycle. DevOps engineers want to ensure that feature releases or updated software changes do not impact service and application performance, but they can often experience a lack of coordination across an ecosystem.

With BMC Helix ITSM, a service desk agent can request that DevOps restore the previous configuration, which requires a manual approval of the change. The SRE can now see on the solution’s dashboard that the service is restored and performing as expected. Related issues are closed, and business is back to normal. BMC Helix ITSM delivers actionable information relevant to each of the roles above, providing the necessary context and information about how to resolve a problem by initiating a request for action or launching an automated action.

Take a Closer Look at BMC Helix ITSM

The real payoff for BMC Helix ITSM happens when the solution enables deeper collaboration and gives end users access to insights so they can resolve their own issues, get relevant information for their day-to-day jobs, and remain productive without waiting for a response to their ticket.

Are you ready to transform your approach to IT service management, speed problem resolution, elevate the employee experience, and improve IT productivity? Take the BMC Helix ITSM Guided Tour to see the solution in action.

A company is only as good as the people it keeps. Amid tough economic conditions, business leaders see the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to revolutionize HR and make businesses more efficient. In fact, according to Fortune Business Insights the global HR technology market is projected to grow from $24.04 billion in 2021 to $35.68 billion in 2028[1]. Those investments will likely include AI to optimize business processes and reduce costs.

AI is set to transform both traditional HR shared services (HRSS) administration and HR business partner (HRBP) work, which will happen faster than most HR teams can anticipate, with benefits including:

• Reduced manual workload and improved cost efficiency: By using virtual assistants to answer FAQs, process requests, and provide information, HR teams can be reallocated to focus on more complex and strategic activities that add value.
• Improved accessibility and responsiveness: By providing round-the-clock support to employees, AI can assist with inquiries, troubleshoot issues, and offer 24×7 self-service options.
• Consistent and accurate responses: By leveraging AI systems that have the most up-to-date information and processes, HR teams can reduce errors and inconsistencies from manual processes and interactions.
• Better support for simultaneous, large-volume inquiries: As HR demands fluctuate, AI can efficiently manage spikes in activity without compromising service quality or response times.
• Analytics and insights: Using AI technology to gather and analyze data from HR interactions can provide insights into common issues, bottlenecks, preferences, and service trends to help shared service teams identify areas for improvement, optimize processes, and make informed decisions.
• Personalization: By tailoring systems to individual preferences and providing personalized support and recommendations, HR can enhance the customer experience and make interactions more seamless and effective.
• Knowledge management: By capturing and organizing information from HR interactions, AI can be used to create a centralized, easily accessible knowledge base for employees or customers to improve information sharing and problem solving.

As we integrate AI into the HR process, it’s important to decide what should be done by a human being and when it is better to automate it. Get it wrong and the impact on productivity is massive.

While artificial intelligence (AI) can enhance efficiency, it is crucial to not overlook the essential human aspect of HR. HR professionals possess empathy, emotional intelligence, and the ability to understand complex human dynamics. These qualities are valuable when handling sensitive matters like employee grievances, conflicts, or career development. Human interaction is irreplaceable when it comes to building trust, providing emotional support, and fostering a positive work culture. As you introduce AI into the mix to improve more process-oriented HR tasks, it’s important to keep several strategies in mind to maintain harmony between the humans and the technology.

1. Strategic task allocation: Identify task where AI can deliver effective results. This frees up HR professionals to focus on more strategic, people-centric responsibilities that require their human touch.
2. Augment instead of replace: AI should act as an augmentation tool rather than a replacement for human professionals. It assists HR professionals by providing data-driven insights and recommendations and streamlining processes to help them make better-informed decisions about employee development, retention, and engagement.
3. Empathy-Driven AI: Develop AI systems that are designed to understand and respond empathetically to employee needs. By incorporating sentiment analysis and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, AI-powered chats bots can provide personalized and compassionate support to employees and augment the human aspect of HR.
4. Continuous learning: Encourage HR professionals to embrace AI as a learning opportunity. Provide training and resources to enhance their AI literacy, enabling them to leverage technology effectively and adapt to changing HR landscapes.
5. Transparent communications: Clearly communicate to employees how AI is being used in processes, emphasizing that is it is a tool to improve efficiency while preserving the human element. Address any concerns or misconceptions that may arise and ensure that employees feel valued and heard.

As AI continues to reshape the HR landscape, ensuring the right balance where AI augments human interactions and supports human excellence is essential. By leveraging the strengths of both AI and human professionals, HR service management can achieve efficiency without compromising empathy and understanding, resulting in more enhanced employee experiences, and ultimately a thriving work environment.

In the search for talent, first impressions matter

As organizations compete for talent, the onboarding experience can have a significant bearing on someone’s decision to join an organization and stay long-term. But many organizations struggle to deliver a good onboarding experience. That’s because onboarding processes aren’t organized around the new hire, and due to a lack of standards, experiences can vary depending on role and location. With the total cost to hire a new employee equaling up to three to four times the position’s salary, more needs to be done to deliver an onboarding experience that sets up new hires for success. So, what’s going wrong with onboarding, and, more importantly, how can you fix it?

It’s not just the responsibility of HR

Onboarding involves multiple departments, from the IT team who organize hardware configurations and system access to facilities for building access to finance for payroll and benefits and more. Onboarding requires close cooperation between the different functions, which are often using their own departmental systems. When steps are missed, this can result in delays, leaving the new hire anxious and frustrated.

Inconsistent onboarding experiences

Additionally, the new hire’s experiences can often be inconsistent throughout the preboarding stage and into their first days, weeks, and months. The submission of preboarding verification documentation isn’t always straightforward; it may be difficult for new hires to get the answers they need in those early weeks and months. This can leave them with a negative perception of the brand, impacting their productivity and increasing the risk of new hire attrition.

No single version of the truth

Often there is no one place for HR or the hiring manager to receive updates on the status of the hiring process, which can be especially cumbersome when you are handling multiple new joiners with different start dates. HR operations also face too many manual processes and must repeatedly enter information and data into multiple systems. The hiring manager doesn’t have a true understanding of what is going on, either, or is unable to provide input into the process. The handoff of tasks between siloed departments can also be difficult as they follow their own processes.

Building a seamless onboarding experience with BMC Helix

It’s our goal to provide BMC Helix customers with a way to address these onboarding challenges, and accelerate the time to value of their investment, without building everything from the ground up. Out-of-the-box, pre-configured onboarding workflows are available to orchestrate the management of tasks for key lines of business such as facilities and finance, as well as IT, HR, and the new hire. The workflows can vary based on employee persona information like location, employment type, role, etc., and configured using drag-and-drop capabilities that make the process repeatable and easy to scale.

Standardize interdepartmental workflows

HR systems of record play a vital role in maintaining the integrity of personal data and employment information. The BMC Helix onboarding solution is not designed to replace your human capital management (HCM) solution. Instead, we offer a way to standardize interdepartmental processes for onboarding employees, streamlining communications, and ensuring compliance with HR policies and procedures.

Make your new hire feel part of the team before day one

With our integrated new hire portal, you can make your new hire feel part of the team before their first day. You can avoid the frustrations of disjointed emails to manage pre-boarding communications and instead provide them with a portal, customized in your company branding, where they can log in with their own personal email account and submit documentation and complete pre-hire tasks. This enhances their experience and fosters a feeling of organizational belonging even before their first day, helping to set them up for success.

Empower your hiring manager with better visibility

Give the hiring manager and HR a single-pane-of-glass view of the onboarding status of their new hires so they can keep track of all their related onboarding tasks. They can also use the portal to make any equipment or software requests and communicate with fulfillment teams by updating tasks with comments.

Building a culture of effective and consistent onboarding

An employee’s job satisfaction begins from the moment they are hired. Adequate training, mentorship, and feedback are necessary to ensure that new hires can quickly acclimate and become valuable contributors to the organization, as well as enthusiastic stewards of the company’s brand. This requires a culture of effective and consistent onboarding.

BMC extends the value of BMC Helix with an onboarding workflow that supports the successful integration of new employees throughout the company, removes friction, standardizes processes, and supports the new hire journey from the moment they accept their offer to day one and beyond. To learn more, visit bmc.com/onboarding.

Does your current IT service management (ITSM) solution align with your enterprise goals for business transformation today and tomorrow? If you’re currently using Remedy, BMC’s legacy ITSM solution you’re already familiar with the benefits of these powerful ITSM solutions. However, if your service desk is on a Remedy solution, now is the perfect time to explore migrating to BMC’s latest offering, BMC Helix ITSM, a SaaS platform delivering capabilities above and beyond what Remedy can deliver today.

With BMC Helix ITSM, your business can simplify complexity and fuel productivity through integrated intelligent automation, cloud-scale capacity, predictive case management, personalized user experiences, and self-service acceleration. And BMC is here to help you at every phase of the migration.

Let’s delve into how BMC Helix ITSM takes service management even further than Remedy and how BMC can help make the journey more seamless.

Embrace intelligent automation and workflows

Traditional ITSM processes often involve manual tasks that consume valuable time and resources. With BMC Helix ITSM and its embedded intelligent automation, your teams can automate routine and repetitive tasks, enabling your team to focus on more strategic initiatives. Here are a few use cases for simplifying complexity:

• Intelligent auto-routing of cases. Leverage historical case data, machine learning (ML), and robotic process automation (RPA) algorithms to automatically assign and route incidents, requests, and changes to the most suitable IT team without manual intervention. This streamlines workflows, optimizes resource allocation, and saves valuable time.
• Predictive analytics and root cause analysis. Get access to data-driven insights to anticipate and prevent potential service disruptions. This proactive approach to problem management notifies IT teams so they can predict and isolate the root cause before the problem escalates. Deep integrations across BMC Helix ITSM, BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps, and BMC Helix Discovery further optimize resources, time, and capacity.
• AI-powered chatbots and virtual agents at your disposal. These capabilities are pre-integrated within the BMC Helix ITSM solution. By activating BMC Helix Virtual Agent, your teams can harness knowledge swarming with ChatOps for faster case resolution and automate responses to resolve more routine cases.

Improve service velocity and economics

The scalability and flexibility of your ITSM infrastructure are critical as your organization grows. BMC Helix ITSM harnesses the power of cloud computing, providing cloud-scale capacity that can adapt to your changing needs. By migrating to BMC Helix ITSM, you unlock the following advantages:

• An elastic ITSM infrastructure. Scale up or down based on demand with embedded scalability that ensures optimal performance and cost efficiency, eliminating the need for costly CapEx infrastructure investments.
• High availability and resiliency. Built-in redundancy and disaster recovery capabilities delivered by SaaS offer continuous availability of your ITSM data, applications, and services—even in the face of unexpected events. BMC Helix ITSM delivers a recovery point objective (RPO) of less than 15 minutes and a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than four hours.
• Simplified, automated maintenance and upgrades. Eliminate the burden of managing infrastructure and manual integrations every time there is a new software release with automatic maintenance and upgrades that allow your IT teams to redirect their focus on innovation, strategic initiatives, and delivering new services, features, and enhancements faster to keep pace with the evolving needs of users.

Delight users with new service experiences

When employees face difficult-to-navigate internal support channels or cumbersome task requisition processes, their everyday experience is diminished. By moving from Remedy to BMC Helix ITSM, your business can delight employees with an improved digital employee experience (DEX) that works with BMC Helix Employee Experience solutions, enabling teams within and beyond IT to:

• Build new work hubs embedding visual collaboration, content services, and work management across the business and IT departments with BMC Helix Digital Workplace
• Create custom experiences, microsites, and persona-driven journeys and improve employee engagement, productivity, and resolution times with BMC Helix Digital Workplace Studio
• Activate multichannel self-service by integrating KCS® v6 verified BMC Helix Knowledge Management, BMC Helix Virtual Agent with live chat crossover, and natural language processing (NLP)-powered search

Our proven migration success approach

The migration journey from Remedy to BMC Helix ITSM may seem daunting, but we have successfully partnered with many of our customers on their journey to modernize their service management solutions by migrating to BMC Helix ITSM. We are committed to your success and offer comprehensive customer success and professional services offerings programs tailored to your needs.

The dedicated BMC Customer Success team is ready to assist you at every step. They work closely with you to understand your specific requirements, provide guidance on best practices, and ensure a smooth transition to BMC Helix ITSM. We have developed a five-phase process flow to accelerate the migration, as follows:

1. Assessment. We assess your existing environment to understand your current architecture and identify items such as customizations, integrations, and reports.
2. Configuration. With this information collected and analyzed, we configure the BMC Helix Data Manager (HDM) tool and begin migrating your data to BMC Helix ITSM.
3. Review. Once the data migration is complete, we will review the output from the tool and ensure that configurations and integrations are successfully migrated.  If there are issues, we will review them with you and resolve them as required.
4. Testing. Next, we execute a series of internal validation and performance testing before you begin user acceptance testing to confirm that your use cases are operating as expected.
5. Go live. Finally, we go live with BMC Helix ITSM.

Customer Success programs

BMC Customer Success is just one of our many programs. BMC also offers Professional Success subscriptions that integrate expert customer success consultants, premier support, and training and education to help your IT teams throughout the migration to BMC Helix ITSM, including:

• BMC Helix ITSM Migration Service for transitioning from BMC Remedy ITSM on-premises to BMC Helix ITSM SaaS
• BMC Helix ITSM Starter Service for initial configuration and administrator training

Making the move from Remedy  to BMC Helix ITSM opens up a world of possibilities for your ITSM by empowering your organization to streamline processes, enhance efficiency, and deliver exceptional customer experiences. As you embark on this journey, BMC stands by your side, offering dedicated support programs, professional services, and a wealth of knowledge to ensure your successful migration. It’s time to unlock the full potential of your ITSM capabilities and embrace the future with BMC Helix ITSM.