Blog

Oranges and ITSM. Huh?

Thu, 24 May 2012 09:13:00 GMT

I just finished reading Juicing the Orange, by Pat Fallon and Fred Senn. Why didn’t I read this book sooner! As a marketeer, I think this book is a must-read. It reviews, in my opinion, several fantastic and creative advertising campaigns by Fallon Worldwide, an advertising agency based in mid-west USA.

For me, the key takeaway, the one theme that runs through each outlined campaign, is the agency’s ability to get to the heart of the audience it’s trying to reach. What are their needs? What challenges them? What makes them tick? What are their hopes, dreams and frustrations? Once known, the agency created targeted campaigns that struck a very strong chord. This is the golden rule of marketing – know your audience.

So, I hear you asking, ‘How and why does this relate to a Service Desk?’ Well, this relates to practically ever organisation and every department that delivers a service. To do a good job, a great job, you need to know your audience.

For a Service Desk, one of the easiest ways to do this is through the creation and management of a Service Catalog. A Service Catalog defines the types of support customers can expect, but first, you need a realistic view of the type of support -- and for what products -- customers require. Host a workshop and start the conversation. Yes, get to know your customers...your audience. With this information, you're better positioned to strike a chord with your audience...to better meet their expections. It's a win for everyone.

If you need some help getting started with a Service Catalogue, have a look at a Guide to Service Catalogs – Part 1 or this webinar Service Catalog – A Practical Approach to Design & Definition.

Election Fever...is Social Media’s Temperature Rising?

Tue, 01 May 2012 15:46:00 GMT

Not only will the US elect a President this November, but France will elect one on May 6. Londoners will elect a Mayor on May 3.

Campaigners are ramping up their activities as voters head to the ballot boxes. Shaking hands, kissing babies, engaging in debates, using Social Media tools to connect with voters and generate support.

I’m reminded of a really good report by Edelman -- The Social Pulpit, Barak Obama’s Social Media Toolkit’ -- that highlights how Social Media tools are successfully used to engage and empower voters and supporters.

Now, if Social Media can help to elect a President and/or a Mayor, how can it help a Service Desk?

Tell us how your Service Desk is using Social Media to gain supporters. And, if you’re looking for tips, have a look at Simon Kent’s Service Desk Transition: Delivery of Tomorrow's Business Services webinar. Simon heads-up Cherwell’s Technical Business Services group in EMEA.

Turning Bad Into Good the Old Fashion Way…Sort Of

Tue, 01 May 2012 15:41:00 GMT

The other day, Mack Collier posted a good example of how you can use Social Media to turn a bad into a good. There was a FedEx delivery mishap. The customer video-d the mishap and posted the video to YouTube. FedEx however took the bad and turned it into a good, a really good good. It responded quickly with a solid apology blog – Absolutely, Positively Unacceptable. And it did this in a very, very public way – it posted a video blog apology. In doing so, FedEx won over (again) their customers and the public in general. Just look at all the fantastic, positive comments to the video blog and the passionate feedback from FedEx employees who take their jobs and responsibilities seriously.

Now, many companies would not embrace Social Media for this type of situation. But FedEx rightly grabbed it and used Social Media to turn a bad into a good, and everyone should learn from this. Hats off to you FedEx!

At Cherwell, we place a high importance on customer care, listening to our customers and delivering on their requests. We’ve incorporated Social Media tools into Cherwell Service Management^TM to help Help Desks be more proactive, to be where their customers are and to participate with their customers in conversations that yes, are going on.

Help Desks and IT departments have a brand within their organisation, and your customers and users have a view on that brand. With Social Media, you can demonstrate your brand and protect it, just like FedEx did. In January, our own Simon Kent gave a webinar on the role of Social Media in ITSM.

Are you a brand that delivers service excellence or wants to deliver service excellence? We hope so. That’s what we aim to help our customers deliver. Tell us how you’re using Social Media tools to deliver service excellence and by doing so, are demonstrating and protecting your brand.

The Marketing Four Ps – Promotion Gets My Attention Every Time

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 12:16:00 GMT

Every marketeer…and every business school graduate…knows the ‘four Ps’, the traditional marketing mix – pre 2000 and the explosion of digital marketing and Social Media – that leads all marketing strategy: Product, Price, Packing and Promotion. The Four Ps still stand tall and proud in the marketing world, but as a marketeer, promotion is the P that most gets my attention.

Yes, of course, promotion is the act – or art – of sharing information about your product or service with the goal of winning over your target audience – making a sale, creating a customer. What’s your unique value proposition? How do you differ from your competitors? What’s your elevator pitch? Why should a prospect choose you…and once they have, how do you deliver on your brand promise? Promotion takes many, many forms that have now become part of our daily lives, both personal and professional.

This leads me to question how Help Desks/Service Desks are promoting themselves to their target audience whether its internal clients or external ones. How are you doing this? And, if you’re not, you should be! You are selling your service…your offering…your expertise...your contributions to the bottom line. Just as marketing needs to promote its value to the organisation it serves so does a Help Desk.

My mother likes to say, ‘Sometimes, you need to toot your own horn because no one else will.’

Are you tooting your horn? Are you leaning on it? Are you horn-less?

Let us know, and let us know the impact your horn is having on the Help Desk’s profile and position within your organisation.

The Truth Behind Hassle-Free Portability: Are They Just a Big Tease?

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 14:16:00 GMT

I've finally had it with my landline carrier. My family decided to go with one of these new VOIP carriers. The website was very straightforward; even porting my number over was going to be a breeze. I was thrilled. The last thing we wanted was to hand out a new phone number. So you can imagine my frustration when I entered our phone number and received the following message:

"Unfortunately, we can't transfer that number to our service. How about we give you a brand new one?"

No, I don't want a new one! I want a new way of calling, I want better rates…but I don't want a new number and all the hassle that come with it!!

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but my frustration is what many IT departments will feel when they try to change how their current service desk solution is deployed or paid for.

Kudos to ServiceNow. They made customers/vendors realize that the traditional purchase license, hosted on premise was not the only option that existed. As they have surged ahead in this space, the rest of us were left scrambling to figure out how to compete. I applaud them.

Vendors have varied in how they responded to offer both deployment options, by:

Taking their application and sticking it in the cloud and calling it SaaS.
Building a completely separate solution.
Purchasing/Acquiring a competitor to incorporate into their offerings.

It's exciting! Finally the playing field has been leveled and IT no longer has to worry about moving back and forth between deployment and purchasing options! After all, vendors state on their website that porting back and forth between deployment/licensing is a breeze… until you try it.

Now you get the response:

"Unfortunately you personally cannot transfer your data from a hosted environment to an on premise environment or vice versa. If you want to subscribe, it has to be hosted. How about we charge you a lot of money to do all that work for you? How about we give you brand new software solution, written on a completely different code base?”

That is a big fat fail! Here is what true portability means:

You do not gain less or more features/functionality by taking one option over the other
Moving between on premise and hosted is as simple as downloading/uploading the data to your data center/the hosted data center
How you pay for the license is (subscription vs. purchase) is irrelevant in respect to deployment
There is no difference in the code base, i.e. you are not doing a rip and replace
You, as the customer, have freedom of choice in terms of how you pay for it, where it is deployed and is not affected by the software, because it is identical.

At Cherwell Software:

You have choice to subscribe or purchase the licenses.
You have choice where you deploy the software.
You are free to change your mind on purchase or deployment.
There are no differences (i.e. code base) in the features/ functionality the software provides.
Rip and replace does not exist. Period.

Ultimately our family went with a carrier that was able to port my landline number to their VOIP without any effort on my part and without any additional fees or hassles. Shouldn't the same apply to portability when it comes to your ITSM service management solution?

You tell me.

Winning... but at what cost?

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 22:29:00 GMT

I admit it, I like to win. Even coming in second place is not much of a consolation. Here in the United States we are currently in the midst of the Republican nomination race. I was particularly intrigued by the primaries held in Michigan on Tuesday. It came down to Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum competing for the delegates. What intrigued me was not the actual primary but the side stories. Rick accused Mitt of running negative ad campaign against him. Mitt on the other hand, accused Rick of doing robo-calls to Democrats to build up support for him. Both accused each other of competing in at less than honorable way.

And that's what I found intriguing: both trying to win…but at what cost? Neither of the men, or really anyone running for the Republican nomination, is doing anything illegal, immoral, or technically unethical. Which brings me to my topic – I get that it's about winning… but at what cost?

As I said, I get it. I want to win; and earlier on in my life I was going to do it at all costs. What I didn't realize was that cost can be incredibly high. To be very honest with you, it cost me my previous career, and almost cost me my family.

That's why joining a company like Cherwell Software has been so good for me. If you read the history behind the name, you'll see that this company is built on yesterday's values. Vance Brown, our CEO, constantly focuses on the fact that culture trumps strategy. Here at Cherwell we are building a culture that while is highly competitive, is not willing to do it at any cost.

Our competition is just as concerned about winning as we are. However, my personal belief is that the path they have chosen to win comes at a cost.

Consider their approach:

One has had no less than six CEOs within the last 10 years.
Many were very competitive in our space… Until they were purchased.
One was purchased by a larger competitor, who now has to decide whether they want to carry multiple lines of product, sunset one, or try to merge them.
Many of our competitors have chosen to be run, and owned by venture capitalists.

Just like the nomination process, they are not doing anything illegal, immoral, or unethical. In fact someone applauded the good business decisions. But winning at a cost?

Consider the results:

Of those that were competitive up until they were purchased: two of them saw the sun set and three of them are just a shell of what they used to be, leaving customers scrambling to find alternatives.
The competitor who has gone through six CEOs used to be a market leader, but few would believe that now

The ultimate outcome for those who took VC money, have been recently acquired or merged, remains to be seen. I wish them the best – competition is always good. My belief is that winning at any cost will always lead to a costly ending.
I want to win in our industry. I want to beat all of our competitors. I want Cherwell Software to one day be the market leader, and I believe our differences will allow us to achieve that dream.

I still desperately want to win, but I no longer want to win at any cost!

Proactive Problem Management…anyone…anyone?

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:16:00 GMT

The other week, I attended an itSMF event focused on Proactive Problem Management.

Problem Management – Proactive Problem Management – is the one area within ITSM I think could be greatly improved. A majority of the people at this event indicated that they don’t have the right processes and tools in place to manage Problem Management well…not to mention proactively.

If you manage Problem Management correctly, you will significantly reduce the number of incidents coming into the Service Desk. It’s that simple.

Think about it, if you tell your community about a problem before they know about it or if you can stop things from happening before your user community has a problem, you will cut down on unnecessary incidents being created. A lot of organisations spend a great deal of time and resources fire fighting…being reactive rather than proactive.

To manage Problem Management effectively and to do so proactively, you need the correct people, processes and tools. You also need a Problem Manager...not a Change Manager or an Incident Manger but a Problem Manager.

How many of you have someone with a Problem Manager job title in your organisation?

Social IT - Link to Known Tools or Introduce New Ones

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:47:00 GMT

Jarod Greene of Gartner did this great webinar the other week on Social IT, and I took away a couple of ideas I’m interested to explore:

Collaborative IT: Jarod explained that by using Social tools, it’s possible to capture the noise that happens between the cracks of a formalised process. People have informal chats and post/share comments via Social tools, and these chats/comments/threads can actually influence a decision being taken during a process (e.g. whether to approve a change or not).
The challenge for ITSM software users is that tools without Social Media integration miss this noise…so are these tools only doing part of the job?
What Social Medium is the appropriate one to use? Is it appropriate that some ITSM tools provide a proprietary Social Media tool within the offering or should ITSM software provide interfaces and integration points to standard Social Media tools currently available?

I guess the answer is whichever is appropriate for the need, but it makes me wonder…is it better to link to a common and known tool or to introduce a new one?

BYOD - Too Busy Fighting Fires

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:37:00 GMT

If you've been following along with my series on BYOD, you know that we kicked things off with my opinion that BYOD is just a fad, but that mobile device support is the future for IT in organizations. As I stated in my original blog, I think the correct term should be "Bring Your Work to Your Device" or, if we want to get real fancy, BYW2YD…Or maybe not.

From there we began to explore five different ways to deal with the issues that arise when our employees bring and use their personal devices at work. We are also operating out of the mindset that our employees really do want to do their work and are using their device to increase productivity to accomplish their tasks for the day.

First issue is what I termed "Same Game, Different Playing Field." In that blog we addressed the issue of productivity when it comes to BYOD.

Second issue we explored what I termed "Can't Have Your Cake and Eat it Too." We discussed the issue of security and how different employees will react based on their need for security.

Third issue as you can see from the heading is "Too Busy Fighting Fires.” In short we are talking about mobile device support.

Typically the scenario plays itself out this way:

IT says, "Sure let's go ahead and incorporate a BYOD policy.” Everybody shows up with their mobile device set up to be used for e-mail VPN, WebEx, and just about anything you can imagine. Two days later, or a month, these exact same people are contacting the service desk and saying:

"My e-mail doesn't work on my phone.”
"I can get my WebEx to launch from my tablet.”
"When I try to connect to the network from my android, it doesn't connect.”

Now what? Most likely, IT goes ahead supports it. Only problem is now they're doing this for hundreds of employees.

Soon the end of the month comes, or the end of the quarter. The CIO is sitting with the CFO and other C- levels at the meeting, and questions are being asked.

"What are your IT support people doing?"
"Who really needs all these people in IT; it doesn't look like they're doing very much...”

Suddenly proof of all those “little fires” IT has been handling don’t exist. IT has no way to track support for personal devices that are brought into the work. They are either locked into a category of other or simply not tracked at all.

Bottom line – IT is right back where it started – fighting fires, i.e. being pulled into fixing emergency situations or dealing with an issue but never getting the recognition that they deserve. And why is this; because your hard work is not being tracked anywhere within your service management solution.

In my opinion that's just wrong.

What IT needs, and only a few vendors, including Cherwell, provide, is a way for IT to track mobile devices within the CMDB so that when an end-user/employee contacts the service desk an incident or service request can be logged against that CI/asset. Now, when employees bring their devices to IT to register them or have software installed, IT can quickly register the mobile device within the CMDB. Within the CMDB, there’s a checkbox that says it's a personal device, killing two birds with one stone. Now the end-user is getting the support they need and the CIO can accurately show how much time is being spent providing mobile device support for personal devices; which, from what I hear... is quite a bit.

Any thoughts?

Yes! IT Can Support the Working Style Revolution

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:42:00 GMT

Google Enterprise VP Sebastien Marotte just gave his take – to the BBC – about how the way we work is going to change. Marotte highlights many of the ideas we – and our peers such as Gartner’s Jarod Greene – believe will become the norm.

In my recent webinar about Social IT, I introduced the following challenge: customers of IT have an increasingly high expectation for IT to deliver the same level of rich content, collaboration, mobility and social interaction they use every day outside of work.

I was pleased to see this view echoed in Marotte’s article. Marotte states that for most of us, using social media tools to organise our personal lives has become the norm, but using social media tools for our professional lives is a different story. Marotte goes on to say that this will change. ..these tools are now available in the workplace, and they will change our traditional ways of working.

Can IT rise to this challenge and provide services to support this revolutionary change? I say, ‘Yes!’

The Service Desk and Business Relationship Management

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:43:00 GMT

Adam Holtby, a research analyst with Ovum, recently wrote a blog about how the service desk can help improve business relationship management.

This is a very interesting topic and having had a background in Customer Relationship Management and ITSM, the blend of these two management principals and frameworks into what is now termed Business Relationship Management makes compete sense.

In much the same way that people working in customer contact centres need intelligent software tools to support CRM, the service desk and service management software users need such capabilities in the ITSM tools of today. Whether that takes the form of easily seeing the transaction history of a supported business customer or simply being able to instigate any process based on information obtained from the customer.

They also need to be able to spot trends -- what customers are requesting and knowledge gained from outside of the organisation -- that can help to identify the potential to grow the service catalogue offerings. It should be possible for business customer to register their own devices with the BYOD model so that when the customer places a service request or incident with the service desk, the service desk is aware the device exists.

The Business Relationship Manager should be able to easily extract meaningful data, KPIs and trending from the system and use that to drive real time course corrections in the service delivery strategy.

In short, the ITSM tools of today should give service management organisations and Business Relationship Managers agility and the ability to deliver exactly what the business customers need today and moving forward.

BYOD: Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat it Too

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:22:00 GMT

Last week we talked about how BYOD wouldn’t inhibit productivity, and employees actually benefit from using their own devices for work. However, the more important question is will employees mind when the tables are turned and work has power/control over their personal device?

I’ve read several articles where BYOD policies seem to come from a place of distrust: I don’t trust you; therefore, you can’t have access to the information.

What if we approached it differently?

I believe the issue is more in regards to security than trust. The policy would allow employees the freedom to use their personal device for work, however, it would also give IT the appropriate control they need for security precautions. Employees would have to bring their device to the IT department to be registered in the Service Management Solution, allowing them to provide Mobile Device Support. Also, a security device would be installed enabling IT to remotely wipe it in the chance that it’s lost.

Employees will probably have different reactions. Some will not want to allow IT control since it is their personal device; others will concede. However, this gives the employee the choice and still creates a process as well security for the company. Understandably, there are still some companies that legally can’t allow information outside their walls. For the most part safety measures can be handled with a security wipe.

Let’s trust our employees and create a process to enable them to work more productively while still keeping the security needs of the company in mind.

What do you think?

IT Service Management is Getting Social

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:34:00 GMT

I recently gained some interesting factoids from my peers in the Service Desk world that support the notion that ITSM is getting social with social media.

During my recent webinar, I asked:

How important do you think Social Media data feeds are to IT service delivery?

Of the 30 people who responded:

52% said ‘important and relevant’
41% said ‘interesting/being considered’

That’s great news!

People get it. I’m not saying you should Tweet rather than send a company-wide email. It’s all about supplementing email and offering choices in regards to receiving information from your IT department. Ultimately, it’s all about extending the value of the service desk and providing increased levels of customer service.

BYOD: Same Game, Different Playing Field

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 19:59:00 GMT

We discussed the general idea of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in my last post, so today we’ll start looking at the first of my 5 points concerning BYOD: Productivity.

As I mentioned earlier, coming up with a policy and deciding whether we can have BYOD is not the issue. People are bringing their own devices in whether we approve or not; so the main focus needs to be how to support and keep up with the changing technology.

Many are concerned that when employees combine their personal devices with their work phones this could potentially cloud their productivity since they’ll have access to their games, and Apps. This isn’t anything new; remember back when Solitaire was on Windows? People have had access to distractions since the dawn of time. People already bring their devices to work, so it doesn’t matter if they use their phone for work as well. Here at Cherwell Service Management, I have an Android and my assistant has an iPhone, no one can tell which one has Mobile Device Support from Cherwell, and we use them equally. We’re spending energy and resources worrying about if we allow BYOD, when we need to be deciding how to support it with mobile management systems.

The big question is that people don’t mind using their personal devices for work, but will they mind when work has control and power over their personal device?

BYOD – Just a fad; Mobile Device Support – the future

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:45:00 GMT

I know people find that statement to be a little shocking. We just barely started talking about Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy and I’m already stating it’s a fad. My reasoning behind this is that the premise of BYOD, according to the articles I’ve read, is that IT will somehow be able to control it.

Raymond Ray, in Five Rules for ‘Bring Your Own Device’ Teams, does a great job highlighting rules that are important for organizations to consider, but the issue I have is that it assumes you can actually KEEP your employees from bringing their own devices to work. This will not work especially on the managerial lever or with owners. I have a friend who works in IT at a law firm and shortly after Christmas the upper echelon brought in their iPad’s to the service desk for them to be set up. Are you really going to tell a Partner that they can’t BYOD? Or say, “Our help desk doesn’t offer mobile device support”?

I think the question we should be asking isn’t: do we allow our employees to BYOD, but more so: how do we enable our employees to properly use their devices at work. I think the correct term: Bring Your Work to Your Device is what we should be focusing on (BYW2YD). You’ll be hearing a lot about mobile management systems this year; my personal opinion is that mobile management systems will be obsolete before you can even implement them. I know our competitors are taunting their mobile management systems, but if they think they can keep up then good luck!

Over the next five posts I’ll be proposing 5 different ways to deal with BYW2YD programs. My feeling is that it’s important for corporations to develop policies to enable employees instead of blocking them out. Also, IT needs a way to track the metrics in their service management solution of the amount of time they spend helping people with their personal devices. That way when people are in power and using it, we get more out of that usage.

Ultimately I am proposing that our employees really want to work and don’t mind using their devices to accomplish their tasks for the day!

What are your thoughts on BYOD? Does your company have any BYOD programs in place? Do you think that is really containable? I’d like to know.

For those of you that are HDI members, HDI is taking a survey concerning BYOD. Fill out this survey and receive the resulting report in March.