Westblog

Westbury, the people behind SMI Suite – the operational reporting solution for IT Service Management

Posts Tagged ‘blog’

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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Posted in Processes, Products

Tags: alignment blog end-user ITSM reporting self-service BI

Business Objects tips

December 14th, 2009

One from around the interwebs for you today:

BOtips http://www.businessobjectstips.com/tips/

There are a bunch of different tips useful for those navigating around Business Objects. There’s also a blog, which I’ll be adding to the list of other blogs we like.

Personally, whenever I’m confronted with a new technology and I’m trying to get my head around it, there is nothing more valuable than advice from someone else who has been in your position and had to try to figure stuff out. With the best will in the world, vendor user guides, by their very nature, are broad-ranging and general, whereas user generated content can – and generally does – focus on the issues that crop up commonly and deal with them in greater detail.
So the question remains: which of you is going to set up smisuitetips.com?

Tom

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Posted in Tips & Tricks

Tags: blog business objects interwebs tips tricks

Zadok The Priest… or is it Zorba The Greek?

November 18th, 2009

Whenever anyone talks about blowing their own trumpet, little is mentioned of the tune that they play. I’d like to think that if I owned a trumpet and were, myself, to blow it, I’d play Zadok The Priest – one of the four Coronation Anthems that Handel composed for the coronation of George II in 1727, and that I only know about because they used it as the theme music for the Champions League. Blowing one’s own trumpet should be all pomp and circumstance, with a rousing, anthemic soundtrack.

As it happens, this entry is all about Westbury blowing our own trumpet, so head on over to youtube for a spot of Zadok The Priest. Or Zorba The Greek if you’d prefer. And if either of those don’t do it for you, how’s about the theme from Super Mario Bros on an 11-string bass?

The reason that we’re blowing our own trumpet is this very blog. We realized it had been six months since we launched the blog, and wanted to send an email around the Westbury campus updating everyone on how we’d done.

Trouble is that it turns out we’d done rather better than expected and so we decided we should show off even more – hence this entry.

In fact, since May Westblog has had:

11 contributing bloggers, 2 of whom don’t even work for Westbury
30 entries, across 6 categories, with 143 different tags

Actually that’s 31 if you count this one.

Also since August (when we started doing some Google Analytics on the site), Westblog has had:

646 unique visitors, with a peak of 25 in one day – on two separate occasions
1,576 page views, with a high of 58 on October 5^th

All of which ignores those of you who never visit the site but still read the posts from the RSS feed.

I think the stats speak for themselves and hopefully it means that we’re continuing to fill this blog with interesting, enlightening material (apart from this entry which is just shameless self-promotion with some youtube links thrown in to distract you) that you genuinely want to read.

We hope you spread the word to your friends, colleagues and competitors and I hope I can write another entry in May 2010 with even better numbers

Tom

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Posted in Announcements

Tags: blog

Other blogs that we like: updated

November 12th, 2009

Happy is the clam that gets to spend all day surfing the internet looking for interesting stuff. Sadly most of my working week involves actual work, but I do get to spend some time hunting out other blogs that cover similar ground to this one. So I figured it was probably worth adding a post listing these out, and adding new ones as I go along.

So this list is very much a work in progress and I’ll be adding more sites as I come across them. If you write a blog about ITSM, change management, HP, etc, then please let me know and I’ll take a look.

The list:

Leading at Lightspeed by Eric Douglas - Executive Business Coaching
Mainly business coaching stuff, but with an interesting section on change management with some interesting things to say

The Business Intelligence Blog by BI Guru
As referenced in another recent post, Maloy has some really interesting things to say about practical use of Business Objects.

The IT Skeptic
Reads a bit like the people so gloriously sent up over at Speak Your Branes (a personal and perennial favorite of mine) but actually has some interesting things to say.

Business Objects Tips
This is the blog section of the Business Objects Tips site. It’s slightly self-promoting (something we’re never guilty of, natch) but there are some nuggets of interest in there as well.

Tom

f78f1ehttp://blog.leadingresources.com/category/change-management

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Posted in Tips & Tricks

Tags: blog HP interesting ITSM reporting

SaaS and ITSM and eccles cakes

November 6th, 2009

I hate to dispel the myth that writing for Westblog is nothing but being fed eccles cakes by scantily-clad Revs girls, but what with the economy and all, those days of hedonistic abandon are long gone, and, actually, writing these posts can sometimes feel like a bit of a chore.

Eccles-cakes So happy is clam who discovers that someone else has written a really interesting piece on another blog, all about SaaS and ITSM, that can be brazenly hijacked and plagiarized for the purposes of Westblog… um… that provokes interesting thoughts about the things it mentions.

SaaS 3.0 and ITSM, Match Made in Heaven!!, is the piece, found over on Service Sphere‘s blog. Aside from the Guinness World Record™ for longest blog entry in history (seriously, I’ve read Salman Rushdie novels in less time), the piece is notable for the fact that it takes a long hard look at SaaS – the topic on everyone’s lips, seemingly – but only from the ITSM standpoint, which itself raises some interesting questions. After all, is the fact that we sat up and took notice of this piece an indication that other ongoing and general discussions about SaaS seem a little disconnected from ITSM? Is that because yes, of course it’s easy to see why it makes sense to have your word processing app or whatever in the cloud, but ITSM software is not the same beast as MS Word?

After all, you can send your mother a CD (or is DVD these days?) of the Office suite and reasonably expect her to be able to install it herself, with maybe only one or two panicked phonecalls about having read the entire user agreement but not quite understood all the technical terms. The same is patently not true for Service Manager 7. My preconception – and in this I may be completely wrong (it has been known, just ask my wife) – is that any software that requires significant deployment or installation assistance, will require it no matter what the delivery method of the software. And if that is the case, is that reliance on specific personalization at odds with what we think of as the SaaS model?

Well, I’m not the person to ask, because I don’t know enough to be able to present a cogent argument. If only there was some sort of link to someone else’s blog covering this very topic…

Tom

PS Does anyone else reallllllly want an eccles cake now, or is it just me?

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Posted in Implementations, Processes, Tips & Tricks

Tags: blog cloud computing implementation ITSM SaaS Service Sphere

Once in a while, someone else also has something interesting to say about BI…

September 14th, 2009

I know, I know, hard to believe, right? Hard to accept that there are interesting things to be said about ITSM, BI and operational reporting that don’t have their alpha and omega right here in Westbury Towers…

security-fail Well, I hate to be the one to burst the bubble, but it turns out that someone calling himself BIguru (or is it Big Uru… not sure…) has been blogging about security within Business Objects. BIguru (or Maloy, as he seems to call himself in the real world) has written this piece, which combines a high-level, thematic view of the issues around BO security with specific examples of usage within the BO world. The actual application of security within Business Objects XI r3 is something of a black art which few can hope to understand, so it’s always useful to get a bit of insight from someone who, from the looks of things, is at the coal-face of BO every day.

The issue of security of operational data is, no doubt, going to become more important in the coming weeks, months and years as the world comes to terms with the effects of a financial crisis founded on non-regulation and non-transparency. I have a sneaking suspicion that corporate governance – already a burgeoning pseudo-industry in the noughties – is going to balloon into an obsession at the start of the new decade. Big players are going to bolt down every movable asset and bring in hordes of consultants to define security best practice in order to minimize financial risk wherever possible. And that means that even the weekly workgroup performance report is going to be audited for security soundness, so you need to make sure your understanding of BO security principles is up to snuff.

Here’s BIguru’s piece: http://biguru.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/developing-a-business-objects-security-model-bo-xi-3-1/