I sat Marc and Floris down during a brief lull in the proceedings at HP Software Universe 2010 to talk about their plans, hopes and expectations for the show.
Here’s what they had to say:
Tom
Author Archive
First look at the HP Software Universe 2010 event in Barcelona
November 30th, 2010If you’re on your way to Barcelona, but aren’t quite here yet, you might like to take a look at this, our first look at the event, the conference center and the surrounding city.
Gartner Magic Quadrant for the IT Service Desk: get your reports
November 29th, 2010
Earlier this month Gartner released the latest iteration of their Magic Quadrant report looking at the IT Service Desk. The report pits the major players in the sector against one another based on a variety of criteria.
The report is interesting for us every year as it helps to show how well HP Service Manager is performing compared to its competitors, which has knock-on effects on the size of our potential market.
The news for HP was mixed, but actually one specific line in the report caught our attention more than the rankings:
“Fundamentally, IT organizations need to invest more analysis effort on metrics, processes, service-level expectations and support costs out of the box. Your vendor of choice should provide and implement meaningful measurements and reportable content from day one of production. The ability to quickly and correctly measure key IT service and support metrics, such as mean time to repair (MTTR), first contact resolution (FCR) rate, end-user satisfaction, cost per calls and so forth, should be the most important criteria when choosing a new tool, and having access to that data is essential for the IT service and support organizations to justify further improvements.”
The good news here is that when a customer buys HP Service Manager and also SMI Suite, this is precisely what they get – advanced measurements and reportable content out of the box. The question remains how differently Service Manager might have fared in the Gartner rankings if the optional addition of SMI Suite had been taken into account as a feature.
It’s also heartening that Gartner sees the issue of reporting as so central to the overall success of any ITSM platform – something we’ve believed for a long time. The logic is fairly simple: if you’re only using the ITSM tool as a repository – i.e. you’re recording lots and lots of data about incidents, interactions, changes, problems and SLAs, and you’re using that data operationally – but not doing much with the data beyond that, then you’re missing half the point of having the tooling in the first place.
Tom
ISO want to get certified
November 17th, 2010Lately it feels like we’ve been hearing less about ITIL and more about ISO 20,000 certification.
I wasn’t completely clear on the difference between the two, but according to this very useful site:
ITIL is usually the starting point and in practice is often used by organisations wanting to address a particular “point of pain”, such as a process that is obviously failing. Once one process has been implemented successfully it soon becomes obvious that the related processes would also be worth implementing…and a service improvement journey begins.
Achieving ISO/IEC 20000 is undertaken when organizations want to test and prove they have adopted ITIL advice effectively. It is used to develop consistent, integrated processes across organisational and national boundaries. Customer organisations also use it to compare providers.
This sort of suggests, then, that if more and more people are talking about ISO 20000, it must follow that the maturity of ITSM processes is improving across the board. Right?
Except that’s not what we’re seeing. Undoubtedly, IT has been hit as hard (if not harder) by the recent economic turbulence as any area of business. And when budgets are cut, the first things to go are areas perceived as luxuries – things like systematic improvement of processes – and the areas that remain are the critical, can’t-do-without things: fighting fires as and when they appear. The irony, of course, is that proper process improvement would reduce the need to fight fires, and so an effort to reduce costs ends up costing more.
The other thing we’ve noticed as a result of the downturn is that IT departments are being asked to justify themselves to their customers – more so than ever. CIOs now have to demonstrate the value of IT, and the return on investment that the business can expect from increased IT infrastructure. It’s something that we at Westbury are very interested in, because the easiest way for a CIO to demonstrate value is through producing cold, hard metrics – and that’s where SMI Suite comes in.
So maybe this move towards ISO 20000 is nothing to do with maturity, but rather an attempt by IT departments to protect their budgets – the idea being that the certification proves the worth of the department.
If so, it’s a shame. We’d rather see real progress in maturity and real commitment to efficient, productive processes. But whether that means ITIL or ISO 20000, you won’t get anywhere without the data, and that’s when you’ll want to start talking to us.
Tom
The beauty of data visualization
November 11th, 2010Here at Westbury we’re pretty addicted to Ted.com.
Last year we breathlessly shared with you the video of Hans Rosling making data sexy, and to follow that up, here’s David McCandless talking about the beauty of data visualization.
If you click through to the video on the actual Ted.com site you’ll notice some disparaging comments about the quality of the data that McCandless uses in some of his visualizations. For me, that kind of misses the point. His first visualization is all about numbers reported by news media and how to make sense of them when you see them just as numbers on a page or screen. His point, if I’ve got it right, is that numbers like 250bn or 500bn are both so mindblowingly enormous that it’s hard to appreciate that one is literally twice the size of the other – until, that is, you *see* that represented as two boxes, one of which is twice the size of the other.
The implications for ITSM are, hopefully, fairly clear. We – quite rightly – pride ourselves on the fact that we’ve solved the issue of getting data out of Service Manager, but we also recognize how pointless that might be if there were not also an easy to use way to convert that raw data into something visual to aid true comprehension of what the numbers mean.
Interesting stuff! Here’s Mr. McCandless:
Countdown to Barcelona begins
November 1st, 2010We’re now approaching the final run-in to HP Software Universe 2010 in Barcelona (November 30th to December 2nd), and we’d like to hear from you about your plans.
- What tracks or events are you most excited about?
- With so much social media available these days, do you plan in advance which sessions to attend, or do you listen to what other attendees are excited about before making up your mind?
- What’s more important; the things you learn at the track sessions or the things you learn by networking at the event?
- Which exhibition vendor is going to have the best giveaways?
Comment below or tweet at us (@westbury_it).
Tom
Upcoming EMEA events that we’ll be at
August 30th, 2010We have a slew of upcoming events in Europe and Russia that we’ll be attending, so we thought it was worth posting up the details in case you’re thinking of attending one of the events and news that we’ll be there will sway you. Hopefully it will sway you towards attending and not the other way around, but you never know…
1. HP Software Forum, Russia
Radisson Hotel, Moscow, 16th September
Our very own Bens van Altena will be presenting and we are hoping to meet with distributors and prospects.
2. Rubik Synergy
Kasteel van Brasschaat, Brasschaat, Belgium, 16th September
Marc Kuijpers and David van Heusden will be presenting and meeting with customers and prospects. The presentation will about SMI Suite and will include an ITSM roundtable discussion.
3. 
Netherlands Customer Day
Location TBD, 1st week of November
In conjunction with Rubik, we’ll be hosting a customer event in the Netherlands. Details will follow soon.
4. HP Software Universe
Barcelona, 30th November to 2nd December
We’ll be exhibiting at HPSU in Barcelona. You can learn more about the event here: http://h41112.www4.hp.com/events/software-universe-2010/index.php
Tom
Vivit Special Interest Group update
August 27th, 2010As you may be aware, Westbury is very closely involved with Vivit, the HP user group, and in particular with the Vivit HP Service Management Special Interest Group. Here’s a round-up of new from the SIG:
Latest news from the Vivit HP Service Management Special Interest Group.
HP Service Manager 9.2
For those who attended the recent VIVIT sponsored webinar entitled “What’s New with HP Service Manager 9.2“, we hope you found it useful. Thank you to those who answered the follow up survey. For those who may have missed this event, the session was recorded for your viewing. Please click here to access.
HP Service Manager Survey
As the Vivit SIG for HP Service Management, we’re very interested in your opinion on various topics around HP Service Manager. We’ve created a very short survey, the responses to which will determine our focus for future webinars, and shape the agenda for Local Interest Group events. We’d appreciate a few moments of your time to take a look and complete the survey, which you can find here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/STR9TVK
Upcoming events of interest
There are several local events coming up that are fully focused on HP Service Management. We definitely recommend attending one of these sessions if you’re in the area. Please also let us have feedback about the value of these events.
1. User Group Minnesota – August HP ITSM User Group Meeting
August 20th
http://www.eventbrite.com/event/761103481
2. New York / New Jersey LIG event – What’s new with HP Service Manager 9.2
August 26th
https://www.vivit-worldwide.org/chapters.cfm?id=122&action=event&chapterid=111&chaptereventid=574
3. Chicago LIG event – ITSM User Group
September 8th
https://www.vivit-worldwide.org/chapters.cfm?id=122&action=event&chapterid=4&chaptereventid=576
Mark your calendars! HP Software Universe 2010 Barcelona
http://h41112.www4.hp.com/events/software-universe-2010/index.php
Tom
Our partners talk ITSM reporting
June 24th, 2010While we were at the HP Software Universe conference last week, we took a moment to talk to some of our partners.
In particular we wanted to know what challenges they were seeing among their customers when it came to ITSM reporting, and their answers were pretty illuminating, especially when you bear in mind that we didn’t even buy them a beer by way of thank-you for waxing lyrical on camera.
Many thanks to the participants:
Steven Kiss of Achievo
Emily McMullin of Techport Thirteen
Ken Herold of Melillo Consulting
Tom
HPSU attendees speak: why is reporting awesome?
June 16th, 2010
