One of the most important aspects of instantiating any business processes, measurement and change into an organization is organizational change management, or OCM. This is often an aspect of ITSM programs that is the least addressed and invested in, and unfortunately, the reason many initiatives fail. If the “people” component of people, process, and technology is not addressed, the chances of achieving value, quality, innovation or compliance goals from just processes and technology will be very limited – this is true in any process improvement inside or outside of the IT department.
As OCM has been key to the success of business process improvement efforts outside of the IT department, models (architectural, process, etc) have evolved to address many of the aspects of an OCM plan. They have effectively been used in the business world to document, analyze and most importantly, allow the organization to understand all of the aspects of an improvement program that add to or limit its success. Quite often, it is the complexity of the relationships and inter-dependencies that derail organizational changes, because it is often difficult to conceptualize the entire change and what it means, and why it is being done.
(Recently posted on ITSMPortal; http://bit.ly/cYFhry)
Tags: OCM Organizational Change BPMS
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London, Mar 03, 2010 – ICCM Solutions today announced that they have won a Wiltshire Business of the Year Award, under the category ‘Innovation and Growth’. These awards are the most prestigious Business awards in the county.
James Gay, Director, Sales & Marketing for ICCM explained; “ICCM is delighted to receive the news that we have won this award. The prestige that comes with this announcement acknowledges the growth that ICCM has experienced over the past few years. ICCM has beaten World Leaders in the
IT Service Management field with huge investment into our product from many global brands, including, Tesco, BBC Worldwide, Qualcomm, DHL and The British Transport Police.
The Wiltshire Business of the Year Awards recognises companies that have demonstrated outstanding level of business excellence in their particular Award category. Previous winners range from very small companies with just a few employees to large multinational corporations with thousands of staff.
ICCM’s Innovation has resulted in our Growth:
Jason Gardiner, ICCM’s Technical Director Comments: “Companies are looking for a software solution that offers great Return on Investment and also solutions that do not require a huge amount of effort to tailor to their requirements and maintain.” Jason continues: Our revolutionary process based solution offers improvements in returns and efficiencies that are leaps ahead of technology offered by other stock vendors, which is exactly why companies such as Tesco have selected us.”
Tags: BPM, ICCM, ITIL, ITSM, Wiltshire Business Awards
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Vendors selected as a ‘Cool Vendor’ for 2010 report are innovative, impactful and intriguing
London, Baltimore, Cincinnati, April 13th, 2010 – ICCM Solutions, a globally recognized IT Service Management software company has been named in the 2010 Gartner ‘Cool Vendor in BPM’ report. Gartner, Inc., is among the world’s leading information technology research and advisory companies. The report, written by Michele Cantara, Vice President in Gartner Research, identifies Vendors who are innovative, impactful and intriguing.
James Gay, Director, Sales & Marketing for ICCM explained; “The Gartner Report is renowned for its independent opinions and recognition of cool vendors. The fact that ICCM is acknowledged as a ‘Cool Vendor’ in this report makes us particularly proud. We believe it reconfirms the benefits to our very unique approach to Service Management in what is an especially crowded market.”
James Gay continues: “We feel the report allows companies to stay ahead of the IT technology curve by examining pioneering technologies that enable great business and investment opportunities. With this information companies can make more informed strategic business decisions to provide a competitive advantage thereby ensuring market leadership. ICCM’s customers including: Tesco, BBC Worldwide, Qualcomm, DHL and The British Transport Police are already realizing these competitive
advantages by delivering more value from their IT Service Management initiative.”
ICCM’s e-Service Desk has been recognized under the BPM report thanks in part to its underpinning Metastorm® BPM platform, which is also recognized by Gartner in the Leaders Quadrant of the Business Process Analysis Tools2 and other industry analysts as a leading process improvement platform. e-Service Desk seamlessly enables continual improvements in process efficiencies that are leaps ahead of applications offered by the other stock vendors, as it allows IT Service Management
processes to be mapped in alignment with business goals and objectives. These processes can be quickly and effectively modified internally as needed, assuring they are an exact fit with other in-house business systems.
According to Gartner, “Organizations should consider a BPMS-based ITSM solution in the following situations:
- An end-to-end view of ITSM processes across multiple pre-existing ITSM solutions is needed
- Service-level objectives (SLOs) for IT processes need to be directly linked to business process key performance indicators (KPIs)
- processes change frequently or need to be continuously improved
- process models, rule sets, user interfaces and dashboards need to be easily customizable
- When “To be” processes need to be simulated prior to deployment”
About Gartner’s Cool Vendors Selection Process Gartner’s listing does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but
rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness of a particular purpose. Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are: Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn’t do before; Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology); Intriguing, have caught Gartner’s interest or curiosity in
approximately the past six months.
About Gartner’s Magic Quadrant
The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2010 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant.
The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Tags: BPM, ITIL, ITSM
Posted in Current Blogs, General | 1 Comment »
One of the themes of the 2010 Metastorm Global User Conference was “Unexpected Value”. The concept is that customers who have leveraged Metastorm solutions and services into their environment have realized unexpected or unanticipated value from their investment… Many customers were highlighting this theme throughout the show in their presentations.
I had to chuckle as with so many traditional ITIL/ITSM process projects, there always seem to be “Unexpected Costs” and “Unanticipated Outcomes”. And these are becoming more and more talked about at conferences as well…
Much of this “unexpected” value comes from the process DNA that a BPM process orchestration technology such as Metastorm inherently provides throughout their solutions. Oddly enough, Metastorm’s partner program is called the Metastorm Partner DNA program. Thanks to a core process engine, core modeling and architecture technology, and various other solutions, it’s virtually impossible to create disharmonious solutions. Why would ICCM be at this conference as not only a contributor and sponsor? Simple – e-Service Desk, our industry recognized and ITIL v3 “Certified” solution is built on the Metastorm BPM platform.
Unfortunately, there is not enough room in a blog to highlight all Metastorm DNA partners. They can be found here; http://www.metastorm.com/partners/partner_locator.asp
I thought the following Metastorm partners have offerings that can substantially enhance the value of an ICCM e-Service Desk implementation simply from having a common process platform and integration technology;
Nymbul BPM
From Business Transformation Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. BTI have developed an Apple™ iPhone®, iPad®, iPad® client application for Metastorm BPM. While the mobile technology works on iPhone’s, Droid, some Blackberry’s and Window’s Mobile as a web application, the “App” provides location and rotation to the interface. Planned enhancements include support for the Droid market and end user customization of the interface. http://www.nymbulbpm.com/
ITSM Application: Engineers can register, update, and close Requests, Tasks, Incidents from their mobile device. Managers and Directors can approve requests or changes from their mobile device.
Smart Pen BPM
From Aura Q of Manchester, England. A number of my colleagues and I use Smartpen technology for taking notes and recording audio from meetings with customers (Lightscribe). We affectionately call them “Geek pens”. It’s a slightly larger than normal pen with an Infrared “eye” that reads special Microdot Technology paper (that can be printed on a standard laserjet printer). I always felt this technology has so many other applications. Aura Q now offers a Smart Pen enhancement to Metastorm BPM technology that allows any process (including e-Service Desk) to incorporate forms and data originally handwritten on a piece of paper to be incorporated into a process and through OCR, drive the flow of a process. http://www.auraq.com/pages/procedures/Digital%20Pen.aspx
ITSM Application: Where e-Service Desk is used “outside” of IT, Field Service Agents can provide customers with paper based documents while keeping identical copies (including signatures) associated to the process artifact, without the use of fax or scanner.
SAP Integration
EPO Consulting have created a Metastorm BPM / SAP Connector that enables bi-directional web service integration for Metastorm BPM with any SAP solution. This complete web service integration solution comprises two independent, but perfectly aligned products: a) EPO XML Connector for SAP, and b) B2B WS Integrator for Metastorm BPM. The EPO XML Connector is a SAP certified ABAP add-on product from EPO Consulting. It is a complete integration solution for SAP and can be used for all SAP integration requirements. The B2B WS Integrator enables calling SAP web services from any Metastorm BPM process. http://www.epoconsulting.com/_en/index.html
ITSM Application: Business processes incorporated within SAP can be linked to IT Service processes eliminating manual process integration steps between IT Service Management and Business Applications.
With these and the many other options available for Metastorm customers (ICCM customers are essentially Metastorm customers as well), you can’t help but wonder what is not possible by leveraging BPM technology in the form of Metastorm BPM?
Tags: iPad, iPhone, Metasorm, Microdot Technology, Mobile Devices, Partners, Smart Pen
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(Source: ITSMPortal)
Seems like the wrong message to be posted on a site such as ITSMPortal. Quotes such as “We are implementing ITIL” or worse, “We are doing ITIL” is something I hear often. I think this says something about the person saying it, but more importantly, it says something about what ITIL has become. I don’t believe the authors of ITIL intended ITIL to ‘be done’ or ‘implemented’, be a goal, journey or destination. I would argue (and I believe it is stated as well) that ITIL is a reference. There were discussions (or arguments) recently on LinkedIn from a question asking if ITIL was a journey or a destination. My contribution was that it was neither, but I think there were over ten different perspectives and multiple variations of those.
I think the best perspective came from a contribution that was not mine, but we played the intellectual tag back and forth and I thought the analogy suggested really put ITIL into a proper perspective – and one I that I intend to use going forward:
When you begin a journey, you are heading for a destination. One of your goals is to get there safely, in the least amount of time and spending the least amount of money. If expediency is needed, obviously you spend more money to get there quicker. If driving though, a GPS is a handy tool to help you achieve that goal.
To see the rest of the column, and original posting, please see; http://www.itsmportal.com/columns/dont-implement-itil
Tags: Continual Improvement, GPS Analogy
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London, Dec 22nd, 2009 – ICCM Solutions today announced the release by OVUM Butler Group of their technology audit specifically on ICCM’s IT Service Management (ITSM) and Helpdesk software. By utilising Metastorm BPM® as a business technology and building ITIL® aligned processes from the ground up, ICCM’s software allows instant process and business integration from within the ITSM toolset.
The report that was produced by Stephen Mann, Senior Analyst for OVUM states that: “ICCM, through the use of BPM, differentiates itself from the ITSM vendor pack with a solution that delivers the required functionality with the additional benefits of BPM. Mann continues: and, in Ovum’s opinion, this will stand it well in what is now an overpopulated ITSM tool market.”
Mann further explains: “ICCM’s ITSM software portfolio delivers against all of the core ITIL v3 processes (with flexibility based on customer need), and should be considered by any organisation, from mid-sized SMEs upwards, seeking to meet corporate requirements for an ITSM-enabling tool.
James Gay, Director, Sales & Marketing for ICCM explained; “This independent audit confirms that ICCM adds a unique approach to the ITSM product landscape in that it leverages the capabilities and functionality of BPM technology to provide unrivalled flexibility and agility, with customers achieving rapid deployment times simply not capable with other established ITSM toolsets”.
ICCM has already beaten World Leaders in the IT Service Management field with investment into our product from many global brands, including, Tesco, BBC Worldwide, Qualcomm, DHL and The British Transport Police to name a few.
About OVUM Butler Group
OVUM is a resolutely independent advisory organisation, combining the ICT expertise of Datamonitor Technology, Butler Group and Ovum Tech, with Datamonitor Group’s 350 business analysts and relationships with 18 of the largest 20 global corporations; and, is uniquely positioned to provide practical advice to the technology, telecoms and other business sectors. OVUM’s clients have access to research and support from best-in-class analyst and consulting teams, turning analysis and insight into action. Research and advisory services make clients’ planning more effective, and help them to identify and assess relevant business opportunities. OVUM doesn’t just advise its clients, it collaborates with them to help them exploit these opportunities and to turn them into business results. At the heart of OVUM’s approach is its mission to help, to be approachable, responsive and focused on clients’ business issues, and to provide pragmatic and actionable advice and recommendations.
About ICCM
Extraordinary Service Desk Software created within the Leading Process Improvement Architecture
ICCM’s core objective is to provide revolutionary software and superior services to organisations aspiring to Best Practice Service Management. Rather than the legacy “application development” driven approach that many vendors in the market have adopted, ICCM’s forward-thinking approach blends their first-class ITIL® aligned Service Desk tool with the functionality of business technology in the form of Metastorm BPM®. This collaboration delivers unparalleled Service Management capabilities across all industries and business functions in almost every geographical region.
You can download the full report from here; http://is.gd/5xdHx
Tags: BPM, ITIL, ITSM, OVUM Butler Group, Whitepaper
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Introduction
Ever since the “Information technology” function has existed, it has been inundated with new trends and capabilities – some of significant value, many that have and will pass into obscurity. Thanks to current economic conditions, the only new ideas lately that make it are those that demonstrably reduce cost, grow or transform the business, or a combination of all three. This weaning process is actually a good thing as far too much technology acquisitions have occurred without understanding business basics – resulting in “black eyes” for IT, and the notion that IT is a black hole for company money. No matter what the technology, IT needs to address many of the most traditional objectives of business (make money, save money, grow customer list, increase quality, decrease lead time, etc).
This article outlines some of our views on the SAAS market, explains our new solution offering in simple terms, and allows the reader to make an informed decision based on the options provided and available.
Current Market for Software as a Service
Service-Now is the arguably the first ITSM vendor to achieve success with a SAAS model. And we say kudos to them. Service-now has certainly become the name in the ITSM SaaS industry and we aren’t looking to duplicate the Service-Now model. Other vendors have jumped into the SAAS market as well, either by re-engineering their applications to be web based and mimic applications originally designed for SAAS delivery. The important thing to consider is that software is software whether it is licensed or provided as a service. According to Gartner Group – software delivery is challenging regardless of delivery model.
The fundamental business principles of our licensed solution apply to our Software as a Service solution as well; At ICCM, we believe customers who wish to be self-sufficient should have the tools to do so. Furthermore, we believe scalability and a solutions’ ability to grow and adapt with your business is essential to any investment.
One of the most compelling reasons that organizations choose to partner with ICCM is the agility and flexibility of the e-Service Desk solution. The architecture leveraged within e-Service Desk allows ICCM to take a radically different approach to the design, build and deployment of ITSM solutions to all others within our marketplace. Traditional point solutions that people are most familiar with are developed in a rather awkward and dated fashion with a ‘feature function’ approach that often overlooks the complexity of the underlying process flows, interactions and business rules.
Most ITIL consultants and even ITSM vendors will agree that defining your ITSM processes and aligning them to business need is one of the most important steps in adopting the ITIL framework, however once these processes have been defined many find difficulty in how to realize this through an ITSM toolset! What makes ICCM e-Service Desk truly different and the most innovative solution available today is that utilizing Metastorm BPM as a business technology and building ITIL aligned processes from the ground up allows instant process and business integration within the ITSM toolset.
This ensures that all components are working in an integrated and coherent fashion with a clear understanding of process touch points and the information that is being passed between the various aspects of the solution.
The enabling factor that has allowed ICCM to adopt this pioneering approach within ITSM is the architecture that the solution is built upon; Metastorm BPM. The comprehensive Metastorm BPM suite of EA, BPA and BPM solutions allowing organizations to drive business and process efficiency throughout all aspects of the organization through from business strategy at the very highest level to executing complex and detailed processes at ground level.
According to Gartner Group (Symposium, 2009);
Software as a service (SaaS) is a delivery model that is now more than 10 years old. Early predictions and success of salesforce.com had many predicting the end of on-premises software as a delivery model. The current facts tell a different story. In 2008, on-premises software spend was 13 times higher than SaaS. Many of the bad practices that occurred in the on-premises world are also now moving their way into SaaS. The biggest example is shelf ware. An early promise of SaaS is that you would pay for what you need, where in fact we see many companies over buying subscriptions leading to the new phenomenon of shelf ware as a service. Shelf ware as a service is analogous to on-premises shelf ware but only now companies are renting the shelf from the provider instead of using their own data center.
The main business value of SAAS isn’t necessarily in licensing, but in avoiding new IT hires, extensive training costs, and purchasing infrastructure hardware and software.
SAAS, ASP, Private, Public, Tenancy…Oh my
It’s amazing how much arguing and debate takes place on LinkedIn and Twitter regarding SAAS vs. ASP, Private vs. Public, Single vs. Multi-tenant, etc. When what really matters the most to the customer is what business options are available, what does it enable, and what business value is derived from these approaches both now and in the future. Does it really matter what it is called?
Gartner Group identifies the following characteristics for SAAS;
- An application owned, delivered and managed remotely by one or more providers;
- Where the provider delivers an application based on a single set of common code and data definitions, which are consumed in a one-to-many model by all contracted customers at any time;
- and on a pay-for-use basis or as a subscription based on use metrics
BPM Technology introduces a very interesting twist to this equation though. And the virtualization technology ICCM is leveraging for e-Service Desk introduces even more twists – All resulting in more options available to our customers.
Most SaaS based solutions are fixed in function, providing varying levels of “configuration”. For ITSM, this is usually in the form of categories, statuses, fields, etc. Process, data and security integration remains a challenge because of this fixed functionality. The differences between BPM and traditional Service Management solutions is highlighted in a previous blog article The Difference between traditional IT Service Management Applications and a BPM Based IT Service Management Solution. All of these differences hold true whether you are using our licensed solution, e-Service desk, or our SaaS solution, e-Service Desk live.
Our virtualization technology leverages a new capability recently introduced by our partner, Cincinnati Bell Technology Services. This virtualization technology, called Virtual Data Center, or VDC, resides on Cincinnati Bell’s N + N redundant network, provides our customer with a private partition in a CBTS data center and appears as a private extension of your network. You specify and use your own IP addressing and your connectivity options are layer 2 and layer 3 agnostic via private circuit, MPLS, VPN. As a telecommunications carrier, obtaining direct, high performance connectivity with most of the globe is not a problem. In fact, CBTS has British Telecom connectivity already direct to the United Kingdom and Europe. Of course public options exist as well.
As a customer of ICCM e-Service Desk, you will automatically be a customer to the CBTS VDC service. ICCM e-Service Desk live customers can take advantage of their VDC environment, expanding or contracting not only e-Service Desk, but any server or infrastructure component needed, at a small fraction of the cost.
Capabilities of ICCM’s Software as a Service Offering
e-Service Desk addresses many of the downsides of traditional ITSM software. When ICCM decided to create a SaaS offering, we wanted to avoid and address many of the same downsides that Gartner Group has identified with SaaS vendors. The following outlines how ICCM e-Service Desk live addresses the many issues that Gartner Group has highlighted in regards to Software as a Service;
Avoiding “Shelf-ware as a Service”
Like our on-premise software, e-Service Desk, licensing is simple and reporting is available on usage. As a matter of fact, many of the analytical tools used for web technology tracking can used to monitor your usage of eSD Live. ICCM will monitor your usage suggesting changes when applicable.
Different functionality between On-Premise and On-Demand
Thanks to our virtualization technology partner, Cincinnati Bell Technology Services, your instance of e-Service Desk Live can be completely public (Internet based) or private (appear as though it is a part of your data center and infrastructure – within your domain and IP address space). The BPM technology and process models are identical to on-premise. Your capabilities to modify processes, integrate other systems, enhance and grow e-Service are no less limited than with an on-premise implementation.
With e-Service Desk Live, Release Management is not dictated by ICCM.
The common “BPM Technology” that all customers are executing doesn’t change the business rules and logic of your processes. Just like our licensed software, the paradigm shift BPM introduces with regard to customer ownership of data as well as the processes, is also preserved with e-Service Desk Live. Your processes are your processes and you can change them when your business requires it, not on a scheduled defined by ICCM.
Security Concerns
With e-Service Desk Live, your virtualized environment is not public (unless you want it to be). Your data and most importantly your processes are yours, distinct and separate from other customers. Infrastructure is shared but partitioned and your performance is not impacted by other customers. The BPM technology that e-Service Desk Live is based on has achieved a number of security certifications within intelligence and defense agencies within the United States Federal Government.
Data Ownership
Like your processes, your data is yours. The method by which you backup data is entirely up to you. Since the VDC environment can be part of your infrastructure, it can be setup to backup like other applications within your environment. Or, you can leverage other backup options available thanks to our partnership with CBTS. The question you should ask yourself is “Is my data even useable if I discontinue my SaaS contract?”. e-Service Desk Live can be implemented as a blended model (part SaaS, part on-premise), and you can decide to move all data to an owned and existing BPM infrastructure.
Reduced Long Term Cost of Ownership
Customers may see huge short term cash flow advantages with Software as a Service. Often times, if they take the financial analysis out five years, the cost of ownership may not be as appealing as that of on-premise, locally managed software. The perpetual annuity imposed by many SAAS providers doesn’t justify itself long term for smaller and medium sized companies and in some cases larger enterprises. Exclusive SaaS providers are depending on a “Multiplier effect” over the years meaning they will generate more revenue with this model than if they had sold software directly. In fact, ICCM can structure your contract so that your cost of ownership in fact declines over time, and you can even take ownership of the licenses at a certain date, or continue existing contract. It’s completely your choice.
On-premise to On-demand integration
Since the VDC environment can be public, or appear as a secure segment of your infrastructure, all of the BPM based integrations through web services, API’s, database, command line, etc. are available exactly as they are with the licensed software model.
Conclusion
Considering licensed or on-premise software is not an easy task. Customers look to SaaS as a means of lowering their cost of ownership, cost of acquisition, and reducing risk. Perhaps SaaS as a phenomenon has resulted not entirely from innovation in the delivery mechanism of software but as a result of the limited existing software choices and problems in the software industry. Companies can simply no longer afford the 6-12 month implementation times of traditional, big box service management software.
Ironically, the value proposition messaging in the industry for SaaS vendors echoes that of BPM Technology; quick implementation times, quicker ROI, no Infrastructure costs. BPM enables additional value drivers such as a consistent process and model based configuration, scalability and process agility, integration and an unprecedented level of security.
BPM technology already delivers accelerated value and process enablement at a level unheard of in the industry. SaaS pushes that capability even further providing our customers with an unprecedented number of options and choices allowing them to leverage the right model, for the right price – to achieve measurable business goals and objectives that can go well beyond IT Service Management.
For a demonstration of this capability, to setup a Proof of Concept, or if you simply want to learn more – contact us at info@iccmco.com, or (800) 651-7408.
Tags: BPM, SaaS, Software as a Service
Posted in BPM, ITIL, ITSM, SaaS | 2 Comments »
Location: Orlando, Florida
Dates: October 19-22, 2009
It has been over nine years since I have attended a Gartner Group symposium. I always used to go as an attendee (paying of course). This time, I attended as a VIP in the Gartner VIP Program. Not much has changed, such as the locale (Disney), the scope (entire Gartner pool of research), but the crowds were smaller than in the 90’s. Probably due to the economic gloom and doom of 2008/2009. There was only one, maybe two, sessions on IT Service Management. What was exciting is that there were many more sessions on BPM. And BPM had its own area of the ITExpo. Some of the highlights of the conference;
- 95% of the customers say that their BPM projects have escaped the axe. In fact, most have reported that there is even more management support for BPM than ever (thanks to this economy)
- Some of Gartner’s research also points to the fact that organizations are leveraging BPM more often and its trending towards the IT organization rather than just in the business. Obviously, this bodes well for an organization like ICCM who has created IT best practice processes based on ITIL v3.
- Metastorm leads the pack for Microsoft-centric BPM. “Because of its round-tripping capabilities, ease of use, enterprise architecture support in its Provision product and strong support for business role collaboration, it is well-suited to business transformation and continuous process improvement usage scenarios.”
- BPM is most often leveraged successfully where Continual Process (service) improvement is sought
- Quite often Cost Savings are the primary goal of BPM projects, but after Customer Satisfaction and Quality improvements are realized, cost pressures improved.
Monday morning kicked off with a welcome address from Gartner CEO, Gene Hall followed by Peter Sondergaard, Gartner’s Global Head of Research. Peter provided insight into what’s ahead for the industry and discussed findings of recent Gartner research. He predicted a 2.3% increase in IT spending in 2010 and advised careful planning with three key areas in mind:
- IT operational spending
- Increasing age of hardware as organizations delay updates
- Demonstrating hard evidence of business performance improvement.
The CIO Program kicked off on Sunday with a special keynote delivered by Vivek Kundra, the Federal CIO of the US Government. Kundra discussed his work to drive transparency, engage citizens and lower the cost of government operations. There were also three Mastermind Interviews with:
- Mark Hurd, Chairman & CEO, HP – Hurd discussed his vision for HP, the role of the CEO and the company’s transformation during his tenure.
- Eric Schmidt, Chairman & CEO, Google – As CEO since 2001, Schmidt detailed his focus on building Google’s corporate infrastructure to support rapid growth, while ensuring quality stays high and minimizing product development cycles.
- Stephen Elop, President, Microsoft Business Division – discussed changing the culture at Microsoft and his support of the consumerization of IT
Basically, the good message I got from the conference (and was actually quoted in Jim Sinur’s blog http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/10/22/whats-hot-in-bpm/ was that BPM is “the next thing” and it is not a matter of if, but when…
In sharing our solution with some of the attendees, there was definite interest in learning more about an IT Service Management solution such as e-Service Desk, that leverages and industry leading BPM Engine from Metastorm, but comes with “ready to go” processes that can be immediately leveraged to demonstrate value.
Posted in Events, Gartner Group, General | No Comments »
ICCM had an excellent show in Dallas, Texas at the ITSMF USA Fusion09 conference. There was a lot of interest and buzz about our solution, e-Service Desk. It also highlighted for us the need to continue to raise awareness and education in areas that on the surface, appear equivalent, but in reality are very, very different. During the many demonstrations, several Fusion09 attendees asked us; “What exactly is the difference between BPM and Workflow?”. The obvious observation was that they were one in the same. This is simply not the case as you will see below.
Every BPMS (Business Process Management Suite) and BPM (Business Process Management) solution set on the market have in common key differentiators from the “embedded workflow” often found within applications. Some of these differences include;
- Embedded, application based workflow is usually application-specific sequencing of pre-defined activities (ie. in an ITSM context, Change Management workflow is just Change Management)
- Embedded, application based workflow rarely interacts with external processes, systems or data sources
- Embedded, application based workflow often leverages proprietary graphics, execution language, etc
- Embedded, application based workflow effectively provides the ability to choose the specific order of execution of pre-built activity steps
The purpose of this article isn’t to contrast application specific workflow to BPM in a negative context. Application based workflow can and is often implemented as a subset of BPM. The original premise of BPM was to manage and coordinate processes executed in other technologies and on different systems as well as within itself. The initiatiation, monitoring and termination can be integrated at any point in the process to any application. BPM allows us to design and execute business process systems without being subject to the constraints of a single application or single location.
One of the value propositions of BPM is how it is often leveraged at an enterprise level to deliver processes and services beyond the company firewall. Quite often this ability is a driver for BPM within an organization. This enables processes to extend to and include remote company locations, supply chain and business partners, and agents of your organization. In this context, there are some other less obvious, but important distinctions of BPM over embedded workflow;
- BPM inherently provides diverse integration and technology support as business and supply chain partners always have different technologies.
- BPM provides the ability to vary process descriptions locally while keeping common touch points for systems to enable collaboration.
- Most BPM Suites typically can leverage industry standards such as BPEL, XPDL, and BPMN
As stated in my previous post; “Optimizing IT with BPM”. The basic value proposition of BPM is the ability to enable business (or IT) processes with less effort and cost, with higher quality than traditional means. In fact, BPM is intended to respond to the following set of business values; Agility – The ability to bring new products and services to market more quickly and adapt processes more effectively to changing market demands; Efficiencies – Most processes are inefficient due to manual effort, poor hand-offs between departments and a general inability to monitor overall progress. The deployment of BPM solutions helps to eliminate these problems. The efficiency benefits are typically expressed in the reduced number of Full Time Employee’s (FTE’s) required to perform particular tasks; and Visibility – Providing management insight into process-based performance indicators. This enables an organization to make better business decisions and handle exceptions better.
Gartner research indicates that even without process redesign, a basic investment in a BPM suite yields significant returns. By simply “making the current-state handoffs, timing and responsibilities explicit, productivity improvements of more than 12 percent are normally realized[2]”. In another report, Gartner indicates that 78% of projects see an internal rate of return (IRR) of greater than 15%. The same report indicates that these projects were deployed in very quick order (67% in less than six months, 50% in less than four months). How are these kind of results consistently possible? Once you understand how BPM works, it becomes clear;
- The ability to design process in a graphical (non-technical) way by the business process owner or analyst;
- The ability of the application to easily integrate with a wide range of data sources and supporting systems, with bi-directional data sharing;
- The ability to quickly execute a new process for evaluation, a facility to “roll back” an executed process if you get it wrong, without having to do clean-ups to data etc.
In a survey conducted in 2007 by Forrester Research of ITIL adopters in 2007 67% believed they were benefiting from adoption but only 4% reported having means in place to measure that success! Only 9% of respondents could even link the process changes to performance improvements, 75% could not link process maturity to performance improvements!
When you take the technical capability of BPM, and drive it with a process framework such as ITIL, you end up with a unique, extraordinary solution that is as mature as any company needs, has an inherent roadmap built-in for future process and service integrations, but most importantly, provides the process management and measurement that so many companies have been longing for with their ITSM program.
In summary;
- BPM is the definition, improvement and execution of an automated process
- BPM is rarely limited by technical constraints, and can be used to rapidly deploy solutions within, across and between organizations
- BPM is flexible enough to quickly adapt to changing business needs without requiring changes to the underlying technology
- BPM is flexible enough to allow changes in the underlying technology without requiring changes to the business process being executed
Special thanks to David Elliott of ICCM Solutions Ltd for providing much of the content above. He shares a Business Process Modeling and IT Management background like myself.
Tags: BPM, e-Service Desk, Workflow
Posted in BPM, Workflow | 4 Comments »
Was an outstanding conference for ICCM in Dallas, Texas. James, Charlotte and I virtually fell asleep in the lobby of the Gaylord Texan, exhausted from constant traffic at the booth. While we had hundreds of attendees stop by the booth, we had a good number of people stop by the booth because they had been referred “you gotta see this” by others at the conference. One of the conference managers even said that “ICCM was all the buzz at show”.. She probably says that to all the vendors…
Worth noting is the phenomon of social media (Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook) and the impact it is having on ITSMf, our booth, and the industry. A fair amount of traffic stopped by the booth because they heard of ICCM on Twitter.. I was interviewed during the show by Christopher Dancy of ServiceSphere. The event also gave me a chance to attend my first “Tweetup” at the resort bar. I was able to meet a good number of people who I have only “tweeted” to 140 characters at a time. What a social media revolution. You can follow ICCM Solutions at twitter.com/ICCMSolutions or myself at twitter.com/CyberJMC66.
We also had the chance to have one on one sessions with David Coyle of Gartner Group and Glenn O’Donnell and Evelyn Hubbert of Forrester Research. Great meetings with David, Glenn and Evelyn.
Most important observation… I believe the economic gloom and doom has presented ICCM with a very unique value proposition that resonated with every person we demonstrated the solution to. It only took minutes for them to see what could be done with our solution, but also what comes out of the box without modification. It’s great to hear “That’s amazing” and “Wow” so often throughout the day. More importantly, I think our implementation approach which is as difference from our industry as the solution, really appealed to the people I spoke to. Many had been through the long drawn out technology implementations where technology becomes the “critical path” of the implementation, and value a solution that finally takes technology off the critical path of Service Management implementation.
Thought I would post my first “On the road” update to our NEW ICCM Blog. Happy and Safe Travels everyone heading home from the conference!
Tags: itSMF, Service Management
Posted in Events | No Comments »