The stacks of catalogs shoved in my mailbox each day are a sign the holidays are fast approaching.  There’s something refreshingly simple about catalog shopping: it’s easy to see all of the options, family and friends can turn down the pages with the items they want, and you can quickly add up the total cost to see if it fits your holiday budget. 

In the office, a centralized  IT service catalog can bring the same simplicity and clarity for the business.  It gives the IT organization an opportunity to present users with a list of available services and options they can select from. This “friendly face of IT” helps to streamline the communication between users and IT and gives users the ability to select what they want while browsing through the catalog and submit requests.  IT can then seek required approvals/authorizations and the business unit can clearly compare the costs of their total IT requests with their actual budget. 

Think about a service catalog as a one stop-shop for all of the services you offer. The Amazon.com of IT, if you will.  Behind the scenes, the catalog links to the required approvals and work steps for each type of service. So as soon as a service is selected, all of the steps necessary to get it approved, purchased and completed automatically kick off through the integrated IT service management system.  And because it’s all captured in the system, activities and trends can be tracked to help you to further streamline workflow in the future.

A central service catalog can reduce a lot of frustration for customers and IT team members by letting them just open up a web page, see what services are offered, and click to “buy.”  Plus the automated workflow means IT’s response time will be faster, which will also make them happy “consumers”. Maybe most importantly, the service catalog increases efficiency and the transparency of service costs, helping IT to integrate with Financial Management and clearly demonstrate value back to the business.

So by taking a page out of the catalog, we IT professionals can better demonstrate our value to the business and streamline the service request process for internal and external customers.  Maybe now we’ll get home in time to do some shopping.

During October’s Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, we were all pleased to hear that the IT industry will return to growth in 2010, but it was also loud and clear that IT budgets will remain tight. The mood for next year seems to be “cautious optimism.”  As The Wall Street Journal summarized, “Companies have been holding back on IT spending as demand across the global economy slumped in late 2008 and early 2009. Despite signs that things have improved, many expect corporations to keep a tight leash on spending at least until they are convinced a sustainable economic recovery has taken hold.”

(You can watch Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president of research at Gartner, talk about IT spending at the Symposium on this CNET video.)

Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president of research
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

That means as IT professionals, we need to find ways to work with conservative budgets and the results of staffing and resource changes over the past year, while still setting the stage for future growth.  To do this CIOs and IT Managers are focusing on a few top priorities:

• Getting back to business: IT will begin to restart delayed projects, equipment investments, and upgrades, but with a reassessment of needs based on the impact of the down economy, as well as the impact to future business priorities.

• Automate and integrate: Analysts see automation as the next big trend to help IT organizations achieve the next wave of objectives and improve IT maturity and efficiency. Breakthrough technologies and techniques will enable them to significantly improve processes.  The key is not to automate processes in silos, but look for solutions that connect your workflows and integrate processes for full lifecycle management and connection across the business.  If you don’t, you’ll end up using valuable resources as bridges between your different automation solutions. Ease of administration and minimized consulting requirements for implementation will also be key criteria for solution investments.

• Standardize and consolidate: As IT organizations adopt new automation solutions, they will also look for ways to reduce the number of disparate tools that perform similar functions or don’t work well together, seeking more integrated solutions and striving to standardize and consolidate their tools.  Standardization drives down costs, because there are fewer tools to buy, maintain and train people to use, and combined solutions improve functions, such as desktop management and virtualization.

• Demonstrate cost savings: As I mentioned, there will be a continued focus on cost reduction, but more importantly, IT will need to demonstrate these savings and prove its value to the business.  This means there will be more focus on near real-time, comprehensive reporting. If IT groups can’t clearly show the value of certain tools with reporting and metrics, they may opt to replace the solution.

• Go green + save green: It seems like everyone is talking about making IT “lean and green,” but many U.S. organizations don’t have a handle on their power consumption now. It’s key to understand this first before pursuing a path to cost reduction, and it will enable you to get a better handle on the specific areas you need to focus on to reduce costs. Creating a baseline will give you the framework to set short-term and long-term cost savings plans and monitoring. Focus on generating reports to project cost savings and ROI to secure an investment in Green IT.  A good place to look for potential big savings in your organization is in powering computers and other hardware. Many computers are in use less than 20% of the time, wasting both energy and money when they’re “powered on.”  A good power management solution will help you understand your current usage and recoup the power costs consumed by idle devices.  It will also help IT ensure compliance with current and future regulatory requirements, publish progress reports, and enable a larger pursuit of green initiatives.

While spending in 2010-2011 will go up, kicking off both new and delayed projects, we will continue to see the lasting effects of the economic crisis. Project plans and requirements will be more closely scrutinized, projecting and providing comprehensive reports on cost savings will be mandatory for any project, and CIOs will be more involved in the details.

OK, so they won another world series and they paid the most money of any sports franchise to assemble their team. But they shell out that kind of dough every year. So what is different about this team, and the successful Yankee teams of the late 90s,  than the other Yankee teams that have failed? 

The difference isn’t money. The difference is the people. The one thing the successful Yankee teams have in common is that the winning teams are made up of players who are selfless and really work together as a team. When one player is off his game, another player picks it up, regardless of his position or salary.  Each player plays for the team, not for his personal gain.

Your service desk organization will have similar success if you build it around versatile players who don’t purely think about their silo, or their personal goals. They work together as a team.  When one help desk technician is off his game, another picks it up. The years of knowledge in the head of your network specialist helps the desktop support folks.  Your manager of service delivery goes out of their way to share best practices with your system administrator.  How can you harness all the experience you have among your team to build a world-class organization?  And how do you make sure there are not players on the team that ruin the chemistry?

It took the Yankees 9 years to get back to a World Series win.  And it wasn’t until guys like A-Rod became selfless players who were willing to contribute their talent at any level for the good of the team.  Don’t take 9 years to learn that lesson.

The team here had a great conversation with Mike Vizard of IT Business Edge the other week (check out his “One PC Management Tool to Rule them All” post) and he asked a question that got me thinking. It seems obvious that IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Asset Management (ITAM) go hand-in-hand; so why is our industry only now beginning to really integrate the two? 

It’s an important question.  While most ITSM and ITAM teams cooperate, more often than not the disciplines integrate only through shared data.  There have always been obvious benefits to converging ITSM and ITAM technologies and processes—cost savings, reduced complexity, more streamlined processes—so what current factors are triggering the convergence trend?  Why now?

Here’s a few of the things we’re seeing:

• Due to leaner budgets and increased service demands, IT help desk and service management people are being asked to take on more responsibilities.  This not only includes supporting a larger number of users with the same size service desk, but also taking a bigger role in managing hardware and software assets throughout their lifecycle.  It makes sense since the service staff has such proximity to these assets, and hardware and software performance is intrinsically linked to the demands on the service desk.  So the current economic downturn, and the resulting expansion in remaining employees’ roles, is the first factor. 
• The economic slump has also spurred a refocus on IT Asset Management (ITAM) as a whole.  Right now, IT needs to provide full visibility of their world and demonstrate that every penny is being spent effectively.  They must account for each asset, justify the contract or leasing agreements, and prove assets are being utilized efficiently.  The scrutinizing of assets has inevitably led to a more careful look at asset management process and systems, illuminating the benefits of integration with ITSM.  
• The third driver is the adoption of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) version 3, in which asset lifecycle management and service lifecycle management are more tightly linked.  ITIL v3 focuses on the services IT provides to the business, versus its predecessor, which centered on processes.  The integration point is that ITSM requires asset attributes and information to create, execute and measure these services throughout their lifecycle.  
• Today everyone is trying to be “green” while saving “green.”  By the time you factor in weekends, lunch, vacation and meetings, most computers are used less than 20% of the time.  But many companies are hesitant to automatically shut down PCs at night for fear of interrupting service updates and maintenance.  By integrating the PC asset’s power management schedules with IT service management, IT can easily add energy spend back to the bottom line while also being environmentally conscious.
• And finally, security and compliance demands, though not new, have become even more of a hot button for IT.  Service management staff must not only “find” the problems with IT assets, but also have the ability to fix and prevent these issues from happening again, while tracking everything along the way.

Based on these factors alone, it seems obvious to us that ITSM and ITAM will continue to converge over time.  Are you integrating your service management and asset management technologies and processes?  If so, what’s the driving force behind your decision? What results are you seeing from your efforts?

Last month, the ILX Group released findings that just over half of U.K. IT departments (51%) believe that having staff qualified in ITIL would give their business a competitive edge, but less than a quarter of IT staff were found to be trained in ITIL Version 2 or 3. Not surprisingly, the primary reasons cited for untrained staff were 1) management’s lack of understanding ITIL’s benefits, and 2) training and budget constraints. We know a lot of our customers on both sides of the pond are facing the same dilemma – they understand the benefits of implementing ITIL, but convincing their boss and securing funding is a whole different story. The added challenge of taking on process changes with limited resources and budget adds to the barriers.

We’ve always taken a “keep it practical” approach to ITIL, helping customers adopt ITIL in a flexible way that is affordable and quickly offers value by addressing their business challenges at hand.  If you’re struggling to figure out how you can build a compelling business case for ITIL, consider this:

• First, paint a clear picture of where your business truly needs to improve processes and identify which will have the most impact on improving business efficiency. What isn’t working? Where are your biggest gaps or recurring issues? With over 20 ITIL service lifecycle processes in version 3, it’s important to assess what your organization really needs to improve service delivery and become more efficient. By first focusing on those fundamental processes that will deliver the biggest impact for your business’s investment, you’ll demonstrate value quickly and have a better chance in securing funding for future ITIL projects.
• Don’t forget that change is often a tough pill for people to swallow. One of the benefits of ITIL is that you can standardize terminology and service and support processes across your organization. It’s important to adopt ITIL and roll-out the resulting process changes in a staged process.  By biting off more than IT can chew or overwhelming business users with new solutions and processes, you can quickly lose support for your initiative.  Many of our customers have overcome this by first starting with incident, problem and change management processes (and sometimes SLA management), then moving to the next stage with IT asset management, configuration management, and so on.  
• You may want to break it down even further and implement each process in stages as well – beginning with the fundamentals that address your business’s specific objectives and then moving on to the rest.  Stakeholders will be more likely to buy-in because you’re directly feeding their top-line goals.  Also, many of our customers have found that by monitoring and measuring successes, failures, and potential adjustments in the first process stage—and making modifications accordingly—the subsequent stages have been much smoother and effective.
• Lastly, you can shorten ramp up time by implementing easy-to-use and practical software that has ITIL-base workflow and templates built-in, which you can customize yourself without programming or deep consulting engagements.  This will allow you to adopt ITIL best practices, while lowering the costs of extensive ITIL training and long consulting engagements or dedicated staff to configure your technology.

Through conversations with our customers, we know there is a lot of apprehension around ITIL because the complexity and high costs can be prohibitive, especially with today’s tight budgets.Whether you’re diving in for the first time or revamping what you started, taking a staged approach, beginning  with the areas that will realize the most value now and using the right tools, can make the benefits of ITIL a reality for any organization.

You tell us. What are your biggest roadblocks to adopting ITIL?  Or, if you’re one of the success stories, what tips can you share?

Hi. I am Debbie Ingram, Senior Manager of Market Strategy for Numara® Software.  Part of my role is to represent the voice of our customers in the market. I talk to our customers constantly about the real world issues on their minds in managing their IT organizations and delivering services, including how they’re using automation and IT processes to solve these issues.  Like many of my colleagues at Numara Software, I have been in the b-to-b software market and working with customers for over 15 years.  My goal with this blog is to share with you some of the thoughts and insights I have learned from our customers, including where they’re finding both success and bumps in the road as they move forward in this challenging economic time.

The Change Management Balancing Act:                                                                    
Getting To It, Staying Current and Getting It Right    

Outages are up. Staff Members are tasked with more than what’s humanly possible. Your budget just got cut again. Communication is slipping. Users are not being reasonable and sometimes going maverick and doing their own things. Management is pushing for more controls on users, how resources are used, and status  reports. Sound familiar? The balancing act challenge…. What’s critical for the business yet feasible with the resources available today

Getting Back to Managing Change

The importance of change management processes and formalizing them in an organization seems to continue to increase as time goes on. Our economic constraints today could remain tight in the IT environment for quite a while. I hear our customers talk about their struggles with getting to implementing or advancing their change management processes as they’re working to deliver services with less than what they’re used to. They also have the added challenge of pressure over them to find new ways to continue cost reductions and demonstrate their value to the business in ways they never had to before. At the same time, unexpected changes are causing them added pain as they’re faced with the clean up and answering to management at times about why they didn’t know about them. Staying on top of it all is an increasingly difficult situation and they’re turning to automation to help them when it’s possible.

How Will You Know If You’ve Done Too Much or Too Little?

I’ve been hearing about the need to really spend the time to understand what changes are the most critical around the business, not just in IT, and understand initiatives or projects coming up in other parts of the business that could directly or indirectly cause a change impact to IT. It seems that, in some cases, not enough time is spent on this key element of the process to make change management align with the overall business. What’s happening around you in the business outside of IT that could potentially cause unforeseen gaps, outages, or unplanned costs?   If thinking about this is not done up front, it will get done later and cause delays and frustration.

I’ve also heard stories recently from customers around “lessons learned in implementing change management processes”. Some customers have implemented baseline change and approval processes and found that things are still missing – forcing them to reassess their process after a few months. Then, they have implemented additional changes and controls to expand a wider net of control. I’ve also talked to customers who have implemented aggressive, complex change processes upfront and had to regroup shortly after they have seen that it was just too much for the business to bear. Some have found that with the reality of our economy today and reduced resources around the business, in and beyond IT, they can’t sustain these deep processes now, the business goals have changed, and they have to regroup.

Compliance: Turning Up the Heat on IT

Compliance with internal and external governance requirements has driven many customers to build automated audit trails and reporting to demonstrate compliance and help show their value in minimizing risk to the business. Audit requirements seem to be getting more complex as senior management and financial groups are more involved in IT and creating strong tracking has become increasingly critical.

The Path to Better Control

Start with identifying what’s changing without you – now - and what’s impacting your ability to do your job. From there, determine what’s impacting the business the most – especially what’s causing increased or unexpected costs or slowing down operations in some way within the business.

Some customers are turning to the ITIL® service lifecycle approach to ensure that they are implementing a standardized set of change processes with their incident and problem management, even IT asset management in some cases. They like to process value that ITIL brings with a standard set of terminology and processes for full a full change management lifecycle.

The take away I’ve gained from these discussions is that managing change is a constant, evolving process which can be daunting, but it can be done effectively and there is hope. It seems that the most successful implementations are the ones where change processes are implemented in stages, with constant checks on the results of the current stage, measurement on what’s working and what’s not through reports and auditing the results, and rechecking the business needs before moving to the next stage.

For More Information About Managing Change:

• “Six Strategies for Managing Change”: Change Management Tips Article from Numara Software
• ITSM 101: Change Management Processes article on SearchCIO.com by George Spafford, an industry expert and principal consultant on business and IT operations.  Posted: Jul 14, 2009

Hey there,

I am Matt Dircks, VP of Product Strategy for Numara® Software.  My team and I are responsible for surveying the market, meeting with customers, assessing competitors, and turning all of that input into an actionable product strategy.   I have been fortunate to be in the business-to-business technology market for over 22 years and always find the process of determining what customers want, need, and find valuable both intellectually interesting & extremely challenging.   It is equal parts art, science, intuition, compromise, sooth-saying, and common sense.

One of the interesting aspects of product strategy is that you get exposed to a lot of software vendors at industry conferences, analyst reports, trade shows, blogs, press releases etc.   While I am usually able to learn something, there are always some vendors that can easily be characterized as “overstating the obvious as revolutionary” or “confusing spin with substance.”   Recently, I began seeing & hearing references from a number of vendors across different markets referring to how the “economic conditions”  has been a revelation with respect to how do business or treat customers.  Being a bit of a smart-aleck & a tad bit sarcastic, I thought I would share my  “Top 3 Homer Simpson “Doh’s”  when it comes to software vendors & the economy

• Doh #1   “…with the economic downturn, customers are really looking for high value software solutions” – Really, no you’re kidding right?    The strange thing I have always found in talking with customers is that they are ALWAYS looking for value & practicality from their business software.   Whenever my team & I get into discussions regarding product strategy at Numara Software, most of the time we settle the debate by asking ourselves if it solves a real problem for customers in a practical manner or is it just really cool technology that we are essentially doing because we can.   Technology vendors should really understand that a customer’s desire for value is not limited to whenever the economy is down or when budgets are tight, and  should not forget that basic truism when the economy invariably improves. 
• Doh #2 “…with the economic downturn, customers can’t afford expensive deployments or lengthy implementations …” – You usually hear this one from larger software companies that generate as much or more revenue from the implementation & deployment of their software as the software itself. In  theory, this sound bite always plays well, but in reality it often-times means that the vendor is reducing consulting rates to keep their services people busy rather than reducing complexity or increasing the underlying usability of the product.   While we do have implementation consultants here at Numara Software,   we feel strongly that customers should be able to get value out of our products without requiring services.  That means continuously looking at ways to reduce complexity and improve user experience - without limiting the power and flexibility of the software.   Focusing on improving usability and reducing complexity isn’t something new or unique for Numara Software, and I don’t think it is something that you only do when the economy is down or when business is tight.
• Doh #3 “… with the economic downturn, we are seeing increasing pressure to better align IT with the needs of the business…”  - Another illuminating insight here, right?  I see this one a lot in press releases and new product announcements from various software vendors.  Maybe these organizations are recent start-ups or forgot the lessons from the internet boom/bust when the IT function had a lot of latitude in defining projects and had a bit more budget autonomy.   Businesses today rely upon technology to varying degrees, but doesn’t it straddle the “naïve/obvious line” to think that businesses haven’t been working to align IT in support of the business goals for some time.

The reality is that customers are always looking for ways to solve real problems in a practical, flexible and cost-effective manner.  Those needs didn’t magically appear due to the economic downturn, and that desire will not disappear into the ether when the economy improves.

While it is always poking fun at other technology providers,  I also know there are always many things that we can improve upon at Numara Software and we strive to keep getting better.  I look forward to developing an ongoing dialogue here, so please post any questions, concerns, suggestions, or  email me directly at matt.dircks@numarasoftware.com.

Suggestions for future blog topics?  You can use the “Comments Section” below, or email me at matt.dircks@numarasoftware.com.

Hi. My name is Michele McFadden and I am the Director of Product Management for the IT service management solutions, including Numara® FootPrints® and Numara Track-It®,! at Numara® Software.  I’ve been working with our customers around the world and product development for about 10 years. My team and I  work with customers, sales, marketing, development and prospects to gather and prioritize requirements and define product vision to provide the best customer experience for service management.

Service Management Product Management Team Blog:

Inside Service Management – Where the Numara Software Product ManagementTeam shares insights  into the product management process for Numara FootPrints  and  Numara Track-It! , what we’ve learned from our customers, and our thoughts on the IT Service Management industry.

The “Use What You Have” Consolidated Service Desk

Welcome to our first blog entry! My team and I are excited to share our insights into the product management process here at Numara Software with you. Our chief goal as product managers is to understand our customers’ needs and translate them into better products. Over the coming months we’ll discuss our product planning process, what we’ve learned from our customers, our thoughts on the pragmatic and practical approach to ITIL® service lifecycle management, and much more.

One of the clearest messages we are hearing from our customers and prospects is that they are looking for value in their service management tools and processes. Now more than ever, we are faced with having to do more with less, both as individuals and as organizations. Whether it’s a family taking a relaxing “staycation” at home this summer, or an organization auditing their tool licenses to see what is really being used, the mantra of the day is to “use what you have”.  So how does that translate into service management?

Most organizations have an IT service desk tool for tracking incidents, problems and service requests from their employees. But can a service desk tool be repurposed to track the same kinds of requests for other departments? The ITIL® (IT Infrastructure Library) set of best practices for IT Service Management defines a service desk as the single point of contact for all IT-related requests. The same benefits of a service desk for  IT – centralization, automation, self-service, reporting – could be applied to lots of other departments that receive requests: Human Resources, Compliance, Customer Complaints, Training, Facilities Management, etc.

Here at Numara Software, we have the good fortune to work with thousands of customers who are amazingly creative in configuring their service desk products. Both of our flagship service desk solutions, Numara ®FootPrints® and Numara® Track-It!® ,   offer the opportunity to track different types of requests: Numara FootPrints through the "project" concept – discreet workspaces for different functions that all tie together, and Numara Track-It! with easy customization of the category fields and security policies. We have everything from biomedical companies using our products to track clinical engineering projects to townships tracking parking permits. Here’s a video case study from one of our ingenious customers on his creative uses of Numara FootPrints throughout the organization.

There are obvious benefits to using one tool for multiple purposes. The IT department typically has to evaluate products for different departments on a regular basis. By recommending a tool that’s already in-house, the organization can save time, effort and the cost of evaluation, implementation, additional hardware, etc.  And by sharing the same tool, it’s easy to automate workflow between related processes and get consolidated reporting.  Over on ITSMWatch.com, George Spafford recently published an article on this topic with more detail on the benefits of a "shared services desk" and tips for success.

Of course, if the tool is too hard to configure, then IT becomes the "configurer" (and potential bottleneck) for every new implementation. But if business managers can be empowered to manage their own process with minimal training and no programming, then the burden on IT is reduced, allowing them to focus on maintaining the infrastructure that keeps the business humming.

Not every process lends itself to automation with a flexible service desk tool.  Sometimes purpose-built tools are a better fit, and offer a substantial enough increase to productivity to make them worth the investment. What many of our “power” customers do is to automate a few high visibility processes for different areas of the business, and then allow other departments to request a new project when a need arises. Often they find if they can automate at least 80% of what was once a manual or multi-step process without custom programming , then the implementation has a high chance of success.

Have you had success with a consolidated service desk? Do you have other ideas for doing more with less in IT? Suggestions for future blog topics? We’d love to hear from you! You can use the “Comments Section” below, or email me at michele.mcfadden@numarasoftware.com.