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.
Here at the Westbury campus we’ve been having a few discussions recently about who our target audience is; their desires, their hopes, their fears… And one of the really interesting things (well, interesting to us, at least) that came out of those discussions was the subject of Heath Robinson style ad-hoc solutions to the problem of pulling reports out of an ITSM database. It’s of particular interest to us, because these sorts of solutions are our competition, so we pulled together a list of the top three reasons why customers ditch the home brew and get with the out of the box. The list was pulled together largely based on anecdotal evidence, so there’s bugger all science involved, just our own experiences collated into a hastily assembled list.
So, in no particular order, here are the top three:
It’s going to cost how much?
You know how this one goes: someone high up in the company decides that measuring the performance of IT is probably a good idea, and this directive gets passed down the line until reaches that guy who has far too much time on his hands and far too much autonomy, and who decides it would be just peachy if he could use this as an excuse to test out some of those theories he’s been working on about data warehousing and middleware. Next thing you know he’s put the order in for a new liquid-cooled server room, twenty-seven new servers and a team of DBAs, programmers, BI experts and coffee-fetching monkeys to look after it all.
Most frustratingly, the system works, and the high up gets those reports he or she wanted, so it’s really hard to argue against the installation of Deep Blue. “That’s the only way to get that data out,” your prodigal wastrel will tell you, shouting above the noise of twelve dozen case fans whirring. The truth of the matter is that he’s probably just doing what many of us in tough times – he’s making himself (and his over-built system) indispensable.
I need that report yesterday!
Number two on the list is also about money if you apply the time = money formula that I learned from watching too many 80s movies. But time is one thing you can’t buy and many of our customers are impatient people. They don’t want to wait around for their reports, just because someone else claims to be busy. When there is a separation between the person who requires the report – and who knows just how important and urgent the report is – and the person whose responsibility it is to actually run the report, then you get a disconnect. And, ultimately, the person who needs the reports will think twice before requesting them because it’s going to be too much of a hassle. And the fewer reports that are generated means the less that organization is paying attention to the measurable performance of IT, which means that any efforts towards process improvement or ITIL are doomed to fail. Conversely, when the time lag between thinking about an aspect of ITSM that you might like to report on and actually seeing that report on your screen or in your hand is shorter, the desire to run new reports increases. Suddenly, you’ll start reporting on seemingly unimportant aspects of performance just because you can, and any increase in a culture of measurement has big ramifications for how well your IT department is run and how well it is perceived externally.
She’s Lost Control
The final point is all about control. Having a specialist BI team in charge of a tool that exists for your benefit – and not having control of it yourself – can be frustrating. It’s a bit like when your Mum wants to upload the pictures she took of Uncle Dave’s 60th to Facebook, but needs your help to do it. And rather than just let you do it all yourself in five minutes, she insists that she keeps hold of the mouse while you talk her through the steps; getting the pictures off the camera and onto her PC, then uploading the pictures to Facebook, then publishing the album and so forth. Not that the BI group / your Mum are necessarily incompetent, just that when instructions have to be relayed, the process encourages mistakes and the need for repetition.
And often that disconnect between end user and ad-hoc system is there for a very good reason, in that the system is just too complicated to operate, or doesn’t have user access security nailed down enough to be opened up to anyone outside the BI team. But that doesn’t stop it being frustrating.
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And of course, if I told you the answer to all of these problems was to use Westbury’s SMI Suite then this would turn into some sort of sly sales pitch. So I won’t.
Personally I am not a great planner. I forget things, miss appointments or book events on already taken time…. and that is even when I am alone, never mind if a whole team is planning changes based on the same resources. So it is important to make sure everybody who’ s involved in planning has a good overview of the free time slots and already planned events.
When we look at the change process we talk over a lot of planning. Planned start and finish times, actual start and finish times and the related work orders also take a spot in the planning process. Thereby you need to bear in mind that your organization maybe has some freezes or there is a specific National Day, like ‘Koniggchiginnedag’ (1.46).
If your company has a CAB meeting every day, the Change Manager needs to provide a clear overview of the upcoming changes and the impact of then on the organization. All of the points above have one thing in common, if you have a good overview of the events it will make your live a lot easier, it will reduce the planning mistakes and eventually save costs.
So, let’s dive into the options:
Send an email every day with a list of changes that are planned in the upcoming few days
Teach a pigeon to fly between several floors or buildings and strap a printout of the changes to his tiny legs
Use a web based solution that gives, the people you grant access, everyone access to a clear overview of the upcoming changes
The first one is frequently used but requires a lot of “hand” work , has the risks of making simple mistakes with potentially big consequences.
The second one is an option but has at least one big flaw… what if there is a new building, new employee or the location is changes… You need to retrain the pigeon.
And last but not least, or let’s call it the best… a web based solution that provide a lot of users to see all the changes in a pretty, easy to read, interface. When you take the web based solutions and there is a new employee, a new floor or building you simply change the access rights or maybe change the location of the web based application. So instead of training a pigeon to fly a new route change the DNS and the new location is ready to see the changes.
Thereby is the internet always faster than a pidgin… well.. almost always. In South-Africa we advise you to use the pigeon (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8248056.stm).
So, I came to the simple conclusion, use a good looking, intuitive web based Calendar. Just like the Westbury ITSM Calendar. With this solution you can import the data from you Service Management application. Combine it with other sources that contain your Freezes (Holidays, National Days or planned maintenance), or add events yourself. Take advantage of the read only functionality that ensures you that there is no need for extra licensing or your application because it has its own user administration. And finally create several calendars so you can easily “filter” through your changes by showing, for example, only the High Impact ones
I will not start a marketing talk now over our calendar, I already did that, I just wanted to point out the need of a good, unified way of sharing your planning. Sad but true, I will create a similar calendar for myself to compensate my poorly planning skills. So, think it over, take a look at our Change Calendar (http://westbury-it.com/solutions/change-calendar) and fall in love with it !!
Well, we’ve been talking about it publicly for some time, and we’ve been working on it for what seems like an eternity, but we’ve finally found a way to let potential customers, partners and resellers see what SMI Suite is really all about.
We’ve always struggled because SMI Suite is not an application that can be demoed like most desktop apps. Offering a trial version download is simply not a realistic option because the magic of SMI Suite is all in the implementation – it’s how it connects to your SM7 database, how the mapping to the reporting database works, how the universes interact with the reporting DB and so forth.
So when people ask to see a trial version we’ve only been able to offer a webinar session to show them how it works, when what they really want to do is get their hands dirty and have a play. Which is perfectly understandable, and precisely why we’ve worked so hard on getting TestDrive online.
So what is TestDrive and (perhaps more importantly) what isn’t it?
Well, TestDrive is a hosted implementation of SMI Suite, using a generic sample database, and accessible through Business Objects Infoview, which is a lightweight web client. We’ve opened up access to the Incident universe, so you can use the BO Web Intelligence web app to create your own report based on any of the Incident Management data, and save a pdf copy to your local machine.
For mainly technical reasons this is a massively scaled down version of what you get with the full version of SMI Suite. In the full version you get not one but five universes (Incident, plus Change, Configuration, Interaction and Problem) and you get the full range of BO XI front-end capabilities, which includes more functionality for creating, viewing, refreshing, scheduling and publishing of reports than we offer in the TestDrive. And, for reasons that I hope are obvious, the TestDrive will not return any data from your SM7 implementation in the way that the full version of SMI Suite does.
Despite these caveats, the SMI Suite TestDrive is a great way to check out how powerful reporting can be with SMI Suite and how easy it can be to pull key data from SM7 and get real insight into performance, workload, patterns and other interesting and useful stuff.
I can’t help myself for writing a more marketing/salesy kind of blog today. The reason is that I’m constantly looking for that golden egg that explains the uniqueness of Westbury SMI Suite. One of the answers is: Westbury SMI Suite solved all the data warehouse issues for HP Service Manager/Center of maintaining the environment.
Let me give you an example.
One of our customers has developed a complete data warehouse solution specifically for HP Service Management. With this solution they solved all the nasty database / data model issues of Service Manager and even made the data warehouse relational. However, they are still interested in Westbury’s SMI suite.
Why?
Because maintaining this ever changing data warehouse environment is extremely expensive for them. Individual experts like database engineers (to modify the database), BI developers (to modify the Universes or Cubes) and ETL specialists to modify and develop the ETL layer are all required for making Service Manager fields/objects available for reporting.
With Westbury SMI foundation, reports are created from data stored in the dedicated SMI Database, whose structure is fixed. This enables Westbury to offer a standardized reporting environment, regardless of the (changing) structure of the back-end HP ServiceCenter software / HP Service Manager software database. SMI Foundation has been created in such a way that administrators can maintain the solution through a GUI, hence there is no need for any programming.
Again, I apologize for being so salesy in this blog, but it is so important for me to make sure that people understand the uniqueness of our solution. If Service Center and Service Manager customer really grasp our architecture, they will see that there is no solution like it available in the market.
Well, we have a new video available for you all to view, called SMI Suite: Behind The Scenes. It’s been a labor of love, involving a multi-million dollar budget, a crew of hundreds, a shoot lasting over six months and directorial tantrums left, right and center. Alternatively, it was done with a green screen and many many hours of painstaking post production. Not to ruin the illusion or anything.
The video is all about architecture, and as a companion piece to the video I wanted to write a blog entry about the same topic, just so the messages from the video are clear. After all, you might find it hard to focus on what I’m saying when you’re confronted with my boyish good looks in all their glory…
Sometimes we find it a little difficult to sum up neatly just how clever SMI Suite is, but we often find that when we get the chance to talk to experienced ITSM professionals in depth – and explain what’s going on behind the scenes, both with SM7 and with SMI Suite, that we almost always get a ‘gasp moment’ from whomever it is we’re talking to. It’s that moment when something suddenly makes sense and it usually falls into one of two camps. Either the person we’re talking to has just spent a month trying to understand why reporting from SM7 is so difficult, or they know precisely why reporting is so difficult, but were convinced that there was no possible solution. Remember the first time someone showed you the Rubik’s Cube? You probably thought that either there was no way a stupid toy could out-fox you, or you took one look and declared that even the greatest minds of our time could never crack such an intellectual nut. If I was going to stretch the analogy any further, I would tell you that SMI Suite is David Singmaster.
So we wanted to take some time to explain in some depth the key concepts around the architecture of SM7 and what SMI Suite does to solve the issues that the architecture raises.
First up is the simple fact that where Service Desk used a fixed, relational database to store its data, Service Manager uses a flat database structure. One of the upshots, from a reporting point of view, is the changeability of field names. So, say you have a field in Service Desk called “Priority”, the corresponding field in the SD database might be called “Priority”, or “Prty”, or “isd3y7j23hh2″ or whatever, but that back-end name would not change once it was set. Not so in Service Manager – everything is subject to change, even after initial setup. So if you were writing a SQL query to call that data, you would need to reference the field name, which might have changed since last month or last week or two minutes ago, and might change again in two minutes time. Also there’s a key difference in the way custom fields are handled – in SD they were custom only in the front end, so no matter how you renamed them in SD, the back-end fields were still called “CustomField1″, “CustomField2″, and so on. In SM7 custom names can be applied to the back-end as well.
SM7 also makes pretty extensive use of CLOBs, BLOBs and comma-delimited array fields, all of which are efficient ways for an application to store its data, but also efficient ways of making that data unintelligible to anyone or anything other than the application that wrote the data. You can think of it like a journalist who has developed his or her own form of shorthand to use when conducting interviews. It works great when the journalist wants to write up the article and can refer to the shorthand notes and quote the subject verbatim, but if the journalist’s editor wants to fact check the article and make sure the subject wasn’t quoted out of context, everything suddenly becomes very difficult, because the shorthand is gibberish.
If we accept that all of these factors make reporting from SM7 very difficult, then we’re going to need to see something pretty special from SMI Suite to solve these problems.
Well, actually, what makes SMI Suite so special is that it is designed, from the ground up, to deal with the particular challenges of SM7 – something that no other (and certainly no one-size-fits-all) application can boast. We already had a solid base in the sense that we had developed a robust, fully featured reporting solution for Service Desk – which, as you’ll remember, uses a fixed, relational database – so the challenge was really to get the SM7 data into a similar format as the SD data that we were used to reporting from.
So included with SMI Suite is a powerful ETL layer that parses the SM7 data into a separate, relational reporting database. And this isn’t just a straight dump, there are some pretty clever things going on, like data cleansing and translation of those BLOBs, CLOBs and array fields into a human-readable format. The mapping of data is based on the standard SM7 configuration, meaning that customers who make minimal customization to the SM7 implementation need only make minimal customization to the SMI Suite implementation. And for larger, more complex organizations with lots of SM7 customization, there’s a user-friendly, drag-and-drop GUI so the data mapping customizations can be easily and quickly without too much technical knowledge.
All of which basically gets us to the point where we started off with Service Desk, which is with good-quality data in a dedicated, relational reporting database, allowing us to bring in our years of experience in this kind of thing, which means standardized reporting universes, out-of-the-box reports and all the benefits of the market-leading BI software.
Which, when you think about where we were just four short paragraphs ago, is pretty awesome. Not only is it possible to run reports out of SM7, but it is possible for staff with no SQL query-writing experience, no database experience – in fact, no technical experience whatsoever – to write reports, refresh them, distribute them and so on. Which is really where SMI Suite sits head and shoulders above products like Crystal Reports or Cognos, which require you to directly query the SM7 database (potentially affecting performance), and to do so in the peculiar, techie way that the SM7 database understands. SMI Suite is all about dragging and dropping, it’s about using obvious and familiar terminology rather than interminable strings of code and it’s about adapting to the changing SM7 structure without you, the end-user, ever having to be aware of it.
“Let’s say you want to track down Steve Jobs and tell him, at great length, just how Apple’s smug advertising is destroying your faith in humanity. There’s an app for that!”
If only.
If you’re the proud owner of an iPhone, a BlackBerry or a Palm Pre – or even if you just use some of the better known pieces of business software – you will, no doubt, have been bombarded recently with messages of integration. If you’re not simultaneously posting pictures to Facebook with your phone, tweeting via Outlook and curing cancer with a Speak & Spell then you should be wondering what it is you’ve been doing with your time. Every day there’s a new plug-in that’s going to let you operate your toaster via SMS and you start to wonder if there’s some global conspiracy to create solutions for problems that don’t exist.
So it’s all the more pleasant when a piece of functionality comes along that does something really useful and provides a link between two disparate, but related elements.
Business Objects Live Office is such a piece of functionality. It’s a plugin for Microsoft Office that allows you to embed your reports into Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.
Which I think is pretty cool when you start to think about the possibilities for the way you disseminate the reports you create. Imagine being able to create a document, embed your report, and have the data in that report be live, refreshable, not just a snapshot at a particular time.
Obviously this has implications for users of Westbury’s solution because we use Business Objects as our front-end client, and we’re planning to have a video demo of the Live Office integration in the next few weeks so you can really see it in action.
Until then you can find out more at the SAP website.
You know how this one goes: someone high up in the company decides that measuring the performance of IT is probably a good idea, and this directive gets passed down the line until reaches that guy who has far too much time on his hands and far too much autonomy, and who decides it would be just peachy if he could use this as an excuse to test out some of those theories he’s been working on about data warehousing and middleware. Next thing you know he’s put the order in for a new liquid-cooled server room, twenty-seven new servers and a team of DBAs, programmers, BI experts and coffee-fetching monkeys to look after it all.
The second one is an option but has at least one big flaw… what if there is a new building, new employee or the location is changes… You need to retrain the pigeon.
!!
Well, we have a new video available for you all to view, called SMI Suite: Behind The Scenes. It’s been a labor of love, involving a multi-million dollar budget, a crew of hundreds, a shoot lasting over six months and directorial tantrums left, right and center. Alternatively, it was done with a green screen and many many hours of painstaking post production. Not to ruin the illusion or anything.
