Not to be outdone by Michael Collins, Jason Kennedy of the University of British Columbia and Vivit stepped in front of our camera at the HP Software Universe show to share his thoughts about Vivit and why it’s so important to have an independent HP user group.
For more information about Vivit and what the organization does, visit (or should that be vivit) their website at www.vivit-worldwide.org. Here’s Jason:
We’ve been working with Vivit for a while now – we set up the Service Management special interest groups, and from time to time you’ll even see Floris in a soccer jersey on the Vivit booth at events like HP Software Universe.
As we’re here at HPSWU in Barcelona – and since our booth is directly opposite the Vivit booth, we decided to sit Michael Collins of xMatters and Vivit down so he could share with you some more information about what Vivit is and what it does.
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
Reasons for reporting on your service management data is re-emphasized in the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for the IT Service Desk November 2010:
“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.”
During the HP Universe 2010 in Barcelona, November 30th – December 2nd, Westbury will, of course, be present to showcase the operational reporting solution for HP service management software, SMI Suite. We’re at booth C03 – come and say hello!
On Wednesday December 1st at 09.00 AM (Room P1-128) during an interactive (that’s up to you!) presentation I will dive into:
• The challenges of reporting (getting the right information at the right time)
• The requirements of reporting (easy, fast, cost effective)
• The solution for reporting (and the difference compared to other reporting technologies)
• Live demo showcasing how the solution ensures access to the data that is essential for the IT service and support organizations to justify further improvements
See you there!
David vH
If 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.
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
Lately 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
Here 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:
We’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
For information to be useful, we must explore it, analyze it, communicate it, monitor it, and use it to predict the future, but the BI industry’s attempts to support these activities with few exceptions have been tragically comical.
The technology-centric, engineering-oriented perspective and skill set that has allowed the industry to build an information infrastructure is not what’s needed to support data sense-making. To use the data that we’ve amassed, a human-centric, design-oriented perspective and skill set is needed. All of the traditional BI software vendors and most of the industry’s thought leaders are stuck on the left side of the wall.
The software vendors that are providing effective data sense-making solutions—those that make it possible to work in the realm of analytics on the right side of the wall—have come from outside the traditional BI marketplace. Highlights from http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=820
And at the same time we enable effective data sense-making by providing choices of data being cleaned, transformed and integrated when that’s absolutely necessary to increase the possibilities of exploring and analyzing.
With Westbury there’s no wall!
