Addressing your ITSM needs

We’ve been very busy in recent months finding innovative cost-cutting ways to help customers derive more value from their IT Service Management processes and disciplines.

Some key (and probably very obvious) drivers for our customers have been:

1. Reduce direct vendor costs (software licenses and maintenance costs)
2. Faster time-to-market for new features and benefits
3. Reduce implementation time & cost
4. Improve service quality
5. Improve alignment of Service Delivery team to the Business

To achieve these we’ve had to overcome a few key challenges:

Legacy Challenge #1: Cost & Complexity

The legacy ITSM solutions are about as cumbersome and complex as the typical organizational specific ITSM processes and workflows themselves.   Granted the legacy vendors are trying really hard to re-invent the front-end usability, ease of implementation, etc, but there’s no way they can just overhaul a complex ITSM product overnight.  It’s a bit like trying to change the wheels on a moving vehicle.   The challenge with using these legacy solutions [as powerful as they may be] is that the license, maintenance and implementation costs are prohibitive for smaller organizations.  Even large organizations – especially in the current economic climate – are desperately looking for innovative ways to reduce costs while improving their service delivery capability and quality.

Our Solution:  Change the underlying technology.   Service-now.com is a web2.0 [modern] solution, built from the ground up, is cloud based [no more operational babysitting and system administration nightmares], and was designed with ease of use and implementation as a fundamental guiding principle.  This means we can design, build and test the ITSM solution in third of the time of what we traditionally could and did.

The Benefit:  Reduced cost and complexity – and significantly so.  Our Service-now.com customers are ecstatic with their choice of technology and our ability to deliver.  Once delivered, the administrative overheads are substantially reduced and the fact that Service-now.com is offered through the cloud, means that the painful and costly exercise of upgrading and remaining current evaporates into thin air [excuse the pun].   I always used to maintain that technology is “just technology” and no one technology can make a huge difference… well I’ve been proven wrong.  I was actually astonished as to how big an impact the changing of an underlying technology can have on the key drivers listed above.

 

Legacy Challenge #2:  Engineers & Consultants

We “grew up” in an industry where organizations relied on consultants to help define their ITSM processes (and requirements) while an independent reseller or systems integrated implemented the ITSM solution.  There appears to be increasing frustration with misalignment between the perfect [often over-engineered] ITSM processes, the business needs and what the technology is able to deliver within a reasonable time.  To avoid this misalignment, a more inclusive consultancy approach to solution delivery has become paramount.

Our Solution:   Our delivery teams increasingly rely on experienced ITSM solution experts, business analysts and consultants that understands the underlying solution capabilities.  This means we guide the customer through a design process using a far more pragmatic approach.   Our experienced business analysts and consultants work together to engage [interrogate] the business users and capture the true business requirements.   They either design or assist in the design of the customer’s processes and ensure that the user and business requirements are converted into well defined technical delivery requirements.

The Benefit:  Our customers are now getting more value from the process design through to implementation.  Our pragmatic approach means the processes are designed to bring simplicity, ease of use, achievable results and are quick to implement, directly achieving many of the key drivers identified above.

 

When next faced with questions on your improvement strategy, you should be considering a lot more than simply how to improve current processes.  By using an innovative solution like  Service-now.com and an agile implementation/consultancy partner such as Marutech, you’d be surprised how easily you can swop out the underlying legacy technology AND improve your processes for less than what you would have spent on your next big upgrade.

CERN Delivers People-Centric Service Management Using Service-now.com

CERN, being one of the world’s most respected centres for scientific research, and now also a Service-now.com success story represents the essence of what we see Service-now.com as being.  A solution that drives people-centric service management through improved efficiency, effectiveness and innovation.

As with our own implementation, CERN are benefiting from the hugely beneficial service-culture that a Service-now.com solution is able to create.

Read the full press release here…

Going Cloud… Thinking App Integration (part 1)

As many new and upcoming markets are drifting away from the norm of IT, Cloud based services are continuing to grow and grow fairly quickly in the market place, according to IDC’s Cloud Services Overview Report “Sales of Cloud-related technologies are growing at an average of 26 percent a year”.

That is roughly six times the rate of IT spending overall, the report goes on to state that in 2009 estimated spending on cloud technologies was just over US $17 billion and will grow to a whopping US$44 billion by 2013.

So as you start to review your future IT budget and prepare for the move to cloud based services, there are 4 critical elements to understanding the true value of the service being offered – Application Integration, Security, Storage and Virtual I/O.

In today’s article – we touch on Application Integration.

A number of companies have already invested a considerable amount of money into solutions that can assist in managing their network and platform infrastructure, these solutions are an integral part of your business and should not be ignored when moving to a Cloud based Solution.

The complexities involved in implementing a solution and ensuring that your current products’ potential is maximized requires integration.  We spend considerable effort in ensuring that our cloud based offerings, like Service-now.com can support the integrations required to tap this potential, and as leading systems integrators in our field, we provide the necessary skills and resources to make the integration between systems seamless.

Integration means more than just batch-processing chunks of data being traded between applications once or twice per day the way that was done on mainframes, according to Tom Fisher, vice president of cloud computing at SuccessFactors.com, a business-application SaaS provider in San Mateo, California

Being able to provision and manage user identities from a single location across a range of applications is critical, especially for companies that have never been in the software-providing business before and don’t view their IT as a primary product, he says.

So remember you don’t want to lose the capex on that expensive software solution you bought a few years ago, find out if your existing solutions can work hand in hand with the cloud based offering. And will these solutions be able to communicate and forward information between the varying platforms successfully ?

In the next article, we’ll consider the underlying security required as basis of this service.

The direct benefits

So the technology is great and the concepts are fresh, but what are the direct benefits to our customers if they use our services/solutions?

Here’s a concise list of real benefits:

Benefit No 1:    Simplification, simplification, simplification…..

This is perhaps a bit of an abused cliche, but with our solutions – your life as a CIO or CTO, IT director, IT manager, IT Engineer, service desk administrator or operator or even just an IT user – becomes simpler, more efficient and easier on a daily basis.  The typical IT environment has become so complex and all the systems needed to monitor and manage the infrastructure and associated services associated – along with the governing processes (i.e. ITIL) have resulted in a huge jumble of integrated point solutions and complex software models and architectures.
We’ve taken a fresh approach that has enabled us to essentially replace the entire management layer (Enterprise Systems Management + IT Service Management) with a simple integration of two of the most innovative and practical solutions to enter the IT management space in decades.  (Service-now.com for ITSM and Monolith Software for ESM).   Add to the fresh technical approach the fact that these solutions are offered as a service, and a huge amount of effort and skills required for [essentially] non-core services are taken off your shoulders.

Benefit No 2:   Cost savings…

(I might as well say cliche no 2.)  As a direct result of the simplification explained above – huge cost savings can be had.  First of all, ALL of the solutions that we offer as Marutech fall into the category of:  “On Demand” or “Software as a Service” or “Cloud Computing” or “Managed Service” or “Subscriptions” or “Off Balance Sheet”  – choose your buzz-word (carefully, as there’s often strong internal resistance to over-used buzz-words in the market), but we do not sell you software licenses and hardware that you need to worry about.   Everything we do is focused on zero capital expenditure (CAPEX) while drastically optimizing your long-term operational costs (or OPEX).   But besides that, there’s the direct cost savings achieved due to lower operational overhead, fewer complexities, increased productivity and performance, lower maintenance costs, fewer contractors and specialist skills, etc…   These result in real cost savings…

Benefit No 3:  Improved Customer Service, Performance, Morale, Productivity, etc.
Quite incredibly – the customers that have migrated from their legacy systems to Service-now.com and/or Monolith-Software are experiencing such elation and enthusiasm with their decisions that the only people we see moaning and groaning about these technologies are the (non-customer) late adopters and bigots that can’t let go of the empires they’ve built using the legacy solutions…  Virtually every customer I know of that has made the move, have re-energized teams, staff and particular managers and of course improved customer service and productivity levels. They all seem to be in jovial moods with huge weights being lifted from their shoulders since ditching the legacy systems.   Every single one of them seems to be eager to share the great success stories…

I could ramble on and get into a lot of detail, but at a high level – these 3 benefits really stand out as the primary impacting benefits on customers that have adopted either of our 2 core solutions.

Cloud helps ITSM (ITWeb publicity)

The ITWeb Virtualization and Cloud Computing event in Jo’burg last week was a great success.

ITWeb published an online article highlighting our presentation’s key points…   read it here.

Features and more features!

Service-now.com just keeps getting better and better!  There are so many great new features in the latest Spring release that I felt inspired to write something!  To give an indication of how great this architecture is, 1,500 customer instances of Service-now.com were upgraded over the weekend and no customizations were broken - none – nada – zip!

WoW!  Now try that with a traditional service desk application!  Most can’t even upgrade a single instance in a week – never mind keeping customizations working!

Some new features in the summer release include:

• Project and Portfolio Management – now a very robust offering in Service-now.com
• Service Portfolio Management
• IT Cost Management
• Expansions to manage field service activities and shared services for HR and facilities management

You can register on Service-now.com to view some recorded webinars dealing with the new features of the June 4 Spring release.

Go check it out!
Bruce