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

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

At Westbury we’re entering a new stage of Openness by means of Yammer. We use it for expressing feelings, ideas, vision, and performance and to just celebrate victories internally at this first stage. It will prepare us using this culture of Openness for the next stage in which we will be sharing with our allies outside our organization (partners, customers, industry specialists …). Openness provides new opportunities of idea generation, vision commitment breaking through all hierarchical settings and it (will) attracts customers, partners and talent. Some regions like Australia show where we are headed. And it’s more and more influencing fields of expertise like communication, leadership, competitive advantage, idea generation … Just notice the headlines and different articles.

On the other hand window-dressing seems almost normal behavior in the world of finance (products, financial stability …). Don’t we all know the examples by now? In an other field like IT Service Management we often notice the same kind narrowness and fear to share figures and ideas on the performance of processes and units. It’s a heavy burden for those involved and they often strangle with new improvement initiatives (processes, products, services) which in the end should lead to new competitive advantages. It results in static, nothing saying reports instead of reports being information drivers for improvement and idea generation to get there.

It’s difficult to move forward. Sometimes it seems we need a crisis and new social developments to open our eyes to really start providing data en stages to discuss these problems and data into the Openness.

How to start in the field of service management? Ask questions and provide openness. I think it’s just as simple as that. Questions like: Are our reports really reflecting the correct picture? Are we providing the right data at this moment? What does that data actually say? And if we compare this with other data, what does it mean to us and our customers? And discuss those kinds of questions with managers, colleagues and customers. Perhaps by using network tools like Yammer?

Be aware that we can’t keep up window-dressing taking into account that more and more real improvements and authenticity are counting in this world within the social context in which more and more of your performance, data and comments on your organization will be available and free accessible on the Internet (benchmark sites or sites like http://www.glassdoor.com/index.htm).

Are you prepared to clean the window and share your lights?

Also check out:

http://www.itsmportal.com/columns/clean-window-if-you-want-more-light

http://www.yammer.com

http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2010/08/the_future_of_w.html

Martijn

Interesting research from TDWI among BI adopters shows the following popular strategies to squeeze more out of existing BI investments:

1. Use more BI Self-Service as this offloads reporting from IT and empowers users to get the data they need & when they need it;

2. The implementation of a BI Competency Center and/or the use of small-inter disciplinary teams;

3. Reduction or elimination of spreadmarts;

4. Using existing tools instead of purchasing new ones as well as cutting-edge approaches such as the application of agile or spiral development techniques.

5. BI tools consolidation.

Especially 1 and 2 were rated as the most important strategies to do more with less. From our engagements we notice the same. Our product is a typically a self service solution and attracts more and more attention this year. We earlier choose the path of self service and based on experiences and customer requests most of our development efforts are heading that way.

An interesting downside mentioned in this research is report chaos which occurs when BI teams implement self-service BI without governance or controls.

Together with the second important strategy mentioned above it more and more shows that the organization and processes around BI are crucial. This underlines our vision that successful reporting and day to day BI practice should be embedded in a governance structure (BI strategy, reporting process, organization and roles).

Are you ready to Do more BI with Less?

Feel free to respond or to contact us.

Source: TDWI report – Getting the Greatest BI Bang for Your Buck http://tdwi.org/Articles/2010/08/04/BI-Bang-for-Your-Buck.aspx

Martijn

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

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

The session was well attended – not only in terms of numbers showing up, but also in the quality of discussion and input from the attendees.

The goal of the session was to identify challenges that people were having in reporting from ServiceCenter and Service Manager, and then to look at the solutions available, including Crystal Reports and – of course – SMI Suite.

David vH led the session, assisted ably by Richard and David dSA. We’d like to thank everyone who attended for their participation and input – and we hope the session was useful.

Tom

As I type, David vH, Richard and David dSA are hosting a training session (in association with Vivit, the official HP user group) around reporting for HP Service Manager and HP ServiceCenter.

Tomorrow the show proper kicks off and we’ll be manning booth 409 in the exhibition hall – make sure you stop by and say hello.

Throughout this week I’ll be blogging – including some video blogging if I can get my laptop to play nice  – and we’ll be tweeting more than than Ashton Kutcher, Diddy and Stephen Fry put together. Watch this space!

Tom

But sometimes you have to embrace change. Like, when Westbury launches a brand-spanking-new website and Westblog site on the same day. Sure, everything’s new and different and you didn’t think there was anything wrong with the old sites, but you can’t stand in the way of progress.

The new main site – http://westbury-it.com – has been radically redesigned, from the bottom up, to more closely match our main marketing message – that we’re the vendor behind the operational reporting solution for HP Service Manager. We’re trying to keep things clear and simple, so the look and feel of the new site is also clean and spare, with some subtle gradients and limited use of bold color.

The Westblog site picks up where the main site left off, but with a few different touches to make it clear that you’re looking at a separate site.

The timing for the launch is no coincidence – we’re ramping up for the HP Software Universe 2010 show next week, and we’re hoping that many of the show’s attendees notice and take a look at the new site.

We’d love to know what you think about the redesign – let us know in the comments below or tweet us @westbury_it.

Tom