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HP Service Manager 9.20

June 30th, 2010

With the release of HP Service Manager 9.20, HP not only released an update for Service Manager but also an alignment in version numbering with the BTO Suite. So it is release 7.20 renumbered. They did a tremendous job in improving the user interface by releasing an updated web user interface. They improved quality and performance on both the client and server side. HP improved the integration capabilities with the BTO suite on CLIP & CCRM, KM and change. Now they support the BTO incident data model.

Service Manager offers dashboards that can give you a real time overview of possible SLA breaches, open incidents by service, priority or location. This gives management a clear overview on how it is doing right now.

SMI Suite offers you a service management reporting solution that extends this dashboard feature in such a way that reports can be shared with others with a user friendly intuitive interface with drag and drop functionality. They can be incorporated in documents, PowerPoint presentations and even can be refreshed on the fly. Additionally one can drill down to the details of the underlying records a report is based on. To avoid heavy queries on the database during working hours, SMI Suite offers automatic scheduling and distribution of reports.

Luc

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We are the Champions (of reporting)

June 1st, 2010

The 2010 FIFA World Cup will be the 19th FIFA World Cup, the premier international football tournament. It is scheduled to take place between 11 June and 11 July 2010 in South Africa. The 2010 FIFA World Cup will be the culmination of a qualification process that began in August 2007 and involved 204 of the 208 FIFA national teams. As such, it matches the 2008 Summer Olympics as the ports event with the most competing nations. The thirty-two countries that are qualified are ‘fighting’ for the tournament to decide which country can be crowned as World Champion for the next 4 years.

To achieve the goal to be the World Champion the team of trainers/coaches, players and all kind of staff members (doctors, chefs, dieticians, etc) need to find the right chemistry. This chemistry and right communication in all kind of ways are extremely important to achieve the goal of being the next World Champions. As a natural born Dutch guy I hope the Dutch team, aka the Oranje (Orange), will perform great, but I completely accept that England are going to win – because Wayne Rooney is the best player in the world.

Next to the football Orange team there is another Orange team, the Westbury Orange team. We have our managers as our coaches. We have our R&Defense as the engine of the team. We have Sales and Marketing as our midfield who are exploring the outside world. Our consultants are the attackers who are finishing off the work by implementing our powerful SMI reporting solution at the customers side, or, in other words, scoring the goals. And last but absolutely not least, we have our Support department as our staff to facilitate and to support the internal Westbury Orange team players and of course all our customers.

The Westbury Orange team has been putting their strength together to create chemistry and this Orange team full of chemistry was able to bring you a powerful reporting solution like SMI Suite. I dare to call it the World Champion of reporting solutions on HP Service Center / Service Manager. I hope you’ll agree with that.

On behalf of the Westbury Orange team I wish you a great World Cup next month and I hope the best for your favorite country – although I hope the Orange will reach the final and lose to England. If not the other Orange team is already a World Champion.

Martin

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Self Service Reporting for ITSM delivered!

May 21st, 2010

My favorite BI analyst Boris Evelson of Forrester discusses in his latest blog the alignment between the business and IT for BI. The question on the table is if the main requirements for the business (BI should be fast, agile and easy to use) with regards to BI can ever be fulfilled by IT? Because of the business requirements BI vendors are very much focused on developing tools for Self-Service Reporting to put the power of BI in the hands of the end user. Although there is a long way to go, Boris predicts that Next Gen BI tools will close the gap between business and IT.

For Westbury closing the gap between business and IT for IT Service Management is what we do! Like Boris mentioned in his blog, BI vendors like Westbury take care of the back end (ETL, reporting database) of the BI solution and provide the end user (IT process owners) with an easy to use, non-technical user interface (see diagram)

The main challenge for our customers (the IT process owners) in getting the data out of their Service Management tooling is that they are fully dependent on either their internal BI team or some external BI consultants. This dependency is expensive and causes a huge delay  in getting the right reports out to the requesters (the business). Exactly like Boris predicts in his blog, the end users (again, the business) want to create or modify the reports themselves. IT (in our case Westbury) delivers the technical environment and out of the box BI tooling (SMI foundation) that moves the reporting power in to the hands of the end user.

Self Service Reporting for IT Service Management delivered!

Floris

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The brains behind HP Service Manager

May 4th, 2010

While studying massage I thought of some comparisons with my work at Westbury [bear with him, this is going somewhere interesting - Westblog Ed].

In the world of massage, anatomy is a very important part. Anatomy is the biological science concerned with the structure of the human body, including the human bones, muscles, ligaments and other structures. The most common functions are to hold the body together and to make it possible to move the body. The processes of how every structure of the body works together are very complex. Luckily we have a brain that’s taking care of all the complexity and a nervous system that’s taking care of all kind of communication between all structures. This saves us a lot of energy.

When I look at the HP ServiceCenter / Service Manager (SC/SM) database I see a similarity in the complexity. Maybe not that complex but when you think of reporting on the SC/SM database you need high skilled people (sort of like surgeons) to make reports and even then it’s not always possible to report on the subject you want to report on.

Westbury has created the ‘brain’ of SC/SM. This ‘brain’ is taking care of organizing the data from the SC/SM database into a relational database with a standard structure so you can easily report on it. Furthermore the ‘brain’ is doing all kind off calculations to enhance the ease of reporting. The ‘brain’ also contains a universe layer on top of the structured database. Next to the ‘brain’ Westbury created a nervous system. This nervous system is taking care of informing the right people at the right time by scheduling and publishing the reports.

And like the real brain, Westbury’s ‘brain’ and ‘nervous system’ can save companies that want to report on SC/SM a lot of energy, along with time and money.

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Information at your fingertips

April 26th, 2010

Do end-users really exist?

I am wondering about the definition of end-users. Regarding reporting or BI, I find it difficult to define these. Taken literally the word ‘end-user’ seems too static and out of date to get around a real description.

However based on our extended experiences of more than 12 years of report building, BI implementations and end-user training I feel the following types are close to what we experience in day to day’s engagements.

  1. Light users – The users who need static and reoccurring overviews. Real time information is not required and exploring data sets or ad hoc in-depth analyses neither. How? Static, free-of-charge pdf or html overviews. For managers and to support fixed and predefined arrangements on information sharing.
  2. Dynamic users – Those who need real time refreshable information. For example they want a real time status of the performance of department during a specific period. How? Reports which could be refreshed and prompt you for the data set you would like to see. For example the report will prompt you for department, region, classification, period … before it refreshes. Process owners, workgroup managers, team leads, business users …
  3. Explorers – Users who need to explore, navigate and visualize data themselves (googling your data). There are certain questions to be answered which need low profile data mining. How? Use a BI tool which provides you exploring data sources, the capability to define your data set by pointing/clicking and easily sharing your results (by iPhone)? It should be powerful, simple, intuitive and fast. Process owners, workgroup managers, team leads and your business for low profile data mining. But are you up for it? Mature enough yet to provide these access and responsibilities?
  4. Power users - The users which need slicing and dicing data for specific answers. To empower route cause analysis when dashboards are telling you, you are under performing as a group or at your process. So not for answering questions on how we are doing it, but why this is happening. How? Use easy to use slice and dice functionalities together with application configuration knowledge to get there. By the way these are your colleagues which provide you also the above 3 information sources.

Do you agree?

Step in the future and enjoy it now at:

http://westbury-it.com/media/product-demos/part-1-introduction-to-report-building

http://www.sap.com/netherlands/solutions/sapbusinessobjects/large/business-intelligence/search-navigation/explorer/index.epx

Martijn

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Self Service Reporting!

April 20th, 2010

Working on our new web site really triggered me to focus hard on the benefits of SMI Suite, our reporting solution for HP Service Manager/ServiceCenter.

Our main goal with the new site is to make sure that the home page immediately makes clear what SMI Suite does and how it will help our customers. Result of three months of brainstorming and editing is the following intro block that will be prominent on our home page:

Westbury’s SMI suite is the self service reporting solution for HP Service Manager

Do you like it? Is it unambiguous?

The main benefit to extract from this sentence is “self service reporting”. SMI Suite will put the power of reporting in the hands of the power users, the ones really in need of the reports. With SMI suite there is no dependency on internal or external BI specialists, no need for technical, scripting knowledge or endless sessions explaining the reporting requirements to whoever will create them for you. SMI suite will do all the heavy lifting of extracting the data from the HP SM database for you and load it into our own SMI database. The Business Objects layer we created on top of our SMI DB will allow you  – by just dragging and dropping the objects  – to build your reports and distribute them to those who requested them.

Check out our Test Drive to experience the ease of use of SMI suite yourselves: http://westbury-it.com/solutions/service-management-intelligence-suite/smi-suite-test-drive

The new web site will be up before the HP Universe in Washington DC this June. This means that we will have several more brainstorm and editing sessions over the content and the layout of the web site. Although it will probably never be perfect, the main objective is to be absolutely clear about what we are doing and how it will help our customers. Once the web site has been launched I will definitely check with you all if we have accomplished this goal.

Floris

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Metric of the month – First Call Resolution

April 19th, 2010

At Metricnet the current metric of the month is First Call Resolution.

This metric is one of the metrics that’s in use at almost all of our customers and if your not measuring it yet, you should!

Check out http://www.metricnet.com/metric_month.html for their coverage of the metric.

Of course we ship a start up report around First Call Resolution with our SMI Suite product and we actually provide an easy to configure computed boolean as there are numerous variations in determining whether or not a ticket has been resolved at first call.

David vH

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Get started up with Westbury’s start-up reports!

April 16th, 2010

Our Westbury Service Management Intelligence Suite solution contains a lot of start-up reports. In the past we called them “out-of-the-box reports”, but we changed the name for one very important reason. When one of these report is missing one or more important fields specific to the customer in question, they only have to add the missing fields in to make the report suit their purpose. So “start-up reports” is more accurate because these reports can be modified, customized, copied and changed as much as you like.

It wasn’t until a year after I started working at Westbury that I found out that the out-of-the-box reports could be customized. Now we’re referring to them as  start-up reports and that says it all. Hopefully it’s clear that the reports in our SMI Suite are a starting point for you to launch your own, customized initiatives.

Ilse

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Boris Evelson: 2nd gen meta driven BI apps

March 17th, 2010

Boris-EvelsonLooks like Boris Evelson is quickly becoming Westbury’s most favorite analyst (see post below). In this post Boris explains what he is looking for in, what he calls, 2nd gen meta driven BI apps.

My excitement about blogs like these is obvious, because like 2nd gen BI apps, Westbury’s goal is to auto-generate as many steps as possible out of the ETL components necessary for our SMI suite.

Here’s the link:

Next gen of metadata driven BI apps

Take a look!

Floris

Next gen of metadata driven BI apps

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New Release: SMI Suite version 7.206

March 8th, 2010

The latest release of Westbury’s SMI Suite is now available, introducing exciting features that will serve our rapidly expanding customer base.

Building tomorrow’s product requires listening to the market. And with this version, Westbury’s product team has done just that. Process owners, for example, will find their quest for process optimization finally answered with this version’s ability to automatically analyze and identify inconsistent use of the processes implemented in HP ServiceCenter or HP Service Manager.  The latest version furthermore offers full support for HP ServiceCenter/Service Manager environments that rely on the IBM DB2 database platform.

Continuing to work in tandem with our customers, we are looking forward to further enhance SMI Suite in upcoming versions.

The Westbury Product Team

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