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)

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.

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

 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

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.

According to Mandy Sullivan, HR Services Development Manager at Poole Hospital, “After reviewing our recruitment processes at Poole Hospital, our challenge was to identify how to introduce changes to our practices that would ultimately enable us to manage the recruitment processes more effectively.”  Mandy Sullivan continues: “It was a logical option for us to work with ICCM and extend our use of their software as they already supply our IT department with a Helpdesk/Service Desk tool that’s built upon a Business Process Management Platform.  The main benefit to this type of software platform is that it can be rolled out to other aspects of the business, which is what we’ve done in this instance with the development of our new recruitment process.”

“ICCM is very impressed with the way in which the Poole Hospital team has embraced the benefits of our software.  They are a great example of how our software can be used to improve processes across an entire organisation, and not just to improve IT practices. We look forward to working with Poole Hospital as they develop additional processes to streamline operations even further,” says James Gay, ICCM’s Sales Director.    

“With this new process in place, we believe we will experience a significant reduction in the time to recruit, predominantly because we’re now able to remove the bottlenecks that would otherwise delay prompt hire of the best talent.  In addition, we’re able to support every department within the Trust with their recruitment needs via a centralised hub that provides visibility to all internal stakeholders in the recruitment chain,” comments Mandy Sullivan.  

Download PDF, Click Here

This short video clip shows how ICCM e-Service Desk is leveraged through Microsoft Sharepoint, as well as the integration available to Microsoft Office through smart-text binding and the MS office ribbon bar capability.  Yes, you could completely operate e-Service Desk through Sharepoint, thanks to its use of webparts technology for it’s interface.  Other integrations;

• Tasks resulting from process orchestration can be revealed through Microsoft Outlook.
• Planned Service Outage calendars can be shared through Outlook.
• Microsoft Word and Excel documents can be linked to folders within e-Service Desk (folders are Incidents, Changes, Problems, etc).

Microsoft Integration Demonstration