B M C I N D U S T R Y INSIGHTS HOW TO EMBRACE THE SOCIAL, MOBILE, ANALYTICS, AND CLOUD WAVE WITH BSM By Eric Blum, chief technology officer, EMEA vice president, BMC Software At the close of 2012, there is little argument about the endorsement of social, mobile, analytics, and cloud (SMAC) by the business. Social networking is growing as the way to collaborate at all levels of the extended enterprise. Mobility is the new route to higher productivity for employees. These two disruptive technologies — social and mobile — call for a new type of analytics, supported by big data. In addition, cloud — through fast, elastic provisioning of infrastructure, platform, and software as a service (SaaS) — gives immediate access to ready-made services for the business to consume, without CAPEX investments and with perceived low-entry points for value. SMAC is creating a wave of expectations and opportunities for business units that IT will not be able to stop. These four innovations are challenging all established IT practices. However, they are doing so with an infra structure that IT no longer builds, end-user touch points that IT no longer owns, and apps and services that IT no longer develops. Yet IT will remain account able for four key areas of excellence: quality of service, financial performance, compliance, and security. Therefore, maintaining the status quo of the governance and operating model is very challenging, unless you follow the principles below. These principles are based on the Business Service Management (BSM) platform that simplifies and automates IT processes, improves decision-making, and orchestrates workflows across cloud, virtual, distributed, and mainframe resources. ensuring ongoing configuration and compliance of the services. It must give true single sign-on (SSO) functionality, allowing the IT consumer to surf from one service to another without an authentication barrier. To realize the full benefits of cloud computing, services must be placed in the hybrid cloud automatically based on available capacity, cost, compliance, and security policy. Cloud lifecycle management becomes the core architecture block to enabling full-stack service provisioning. Only if such a system gives metering to be reconciled with pricing can the business trust that transparent chargebacks and procurement can settle vendor invoices with proof of usage. 1. INCREASE SERVICES FLEXIBILITY AT THE BACK END. 2. FOCUS ON THE FRONT END BY PUTTING THE USER AT THE CENTER. Hybrid service delivery requires flexibility in the back end of your infrastructure. The IT information system, or “IS of IT,” must be flexible enough to enable the onboarding of many cloud-based offerings through user self-service. It has to provide service activation and user entitlement across different compute, storage, and network platforms while With the popularity of “bring your own device” (BYOD), everyone is beginning to run his or her own IT. To enhance user productivity anywhere, anytime, the IS of IT must understand the context of the IT consumer and behave proactively to delight that consumer. This is a key capability that will become available with MyIT from BMC. With a native interface for B M C I N D U S T R Y INSIGHTS each major touch point, the user experience can be excellent. MyIT gives users control of the services they need — anytime, anywhere, on any device. The IS of IT with BSM naturally aligns to the most efficient network available, pushes notes and messages in a safe environment, gives service health reports, and indicates the location of resources such as printers, video conference rooms, WiFi access points, or people available for local support. With personalization being the touch point, it is no longer necessary to detail the user profile and context, because the device can push all that information automatically. This enables BSM to turn IT into “MyIT” for everyone. 3. EMBRACE MULTI-CHANNELS, THE APP STORE, AND NEW DEVOPS. Unfortunately, twelve weeks is the regular performance for enterprises to deliver standard applications into production with manually scripted processes. But mobility is requiring a whole new set of activities for those applications to be consumed on different devices. With BSM, IT gets the setup and maintenance of a secure enterprise app store that is synchronized with a fully automated DevOps process. Users can download apps to their devices in the same way they do for their personal needs. The advantage is that the configuration management database (CMDB) is getting updated, and people can be supported by the service desk. Assets and services are accounted for and monitored. Enterprise mobile services get visibility and control with BSM. 4. MOVE FROM SERVICE SUPPORT TO CUSTOMER CARE. For a long time, IT measured success by lowering the average support ticket cost and optimizing the Mean Time to Repair (MTTR). While mobility and cloud are expected to generate new challenges, IT must aim toward having fewer tickets but also focus on delivering a better user experience. BSM provides some core new capabilities for meeting these goals. First, BSM empowers IT to go social. When several people ask about the same problem, it may not be necessary for them to initiate a complex problem/knowledge-management process with the service desk. Social IT is giving users immediate access to “how-to” advice that has been successfully implemented by others. Contributions are no longer limited to the IT staff, as the community can contribute as well, and tickets can be raised automatically for process control directly from their social chat applications. In parallel, virtual agents are now enrolling at Level 0 of the service desk. They come with natural and native language interfaces and even avatars. Fewer tickets, fewer support staff needed, and better customer care: That is the new potential of BSM today. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Eric Blum is BMC Software’s chief technology officer, vice president for EMEA, and has been with the company for the last 10 years. Based on his previous tenure as the BMC EMEA Services VP, he has a particular emphasis in large, innovative, and transform ational BSM programs across international organizations, involving multi-sourcing/cloud strategy. Blum is engaged in delivering breakthrough service management platforms with a user-centric focus to enable new corporate business models. With his background, he is collaborating with a number of CIOs and CTOs, contributing to visioning, planning, and benchmarking activities. Prior to joining BMC, Blum held different management positions at SAP, Informix, and Infor (SSA). BUSINESS RUNS ON I.T. I.T. RUNS ON BMC SOFTWARE Business runs better when IT runs at its best. Tens of thousands of IT organizations around the world — from small and mid-market businesses to the Global 100 — rely on BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) to manage their business services and applications across distributed, mainframe, virtual and cloud environments. BMC helps customers cut costs, reduce risk and achieve business objectives with the broadest choice of IT management solutions, including industr y-leading Business Ser vice Management and Cloud Management offerings. For the four fiscal quarters ended September 30, 2012, BMC revenue was approximately $2.2 billion. www.bmc.com. 5. MEET BUSINESS OBJECTIVES THROUGH BETTER ANALYTICS. Show me the money! Most companies still wonder how they could do a better job of aligning IT with the business (this is among the top three priorities based on various surveys performed by leading analyst firms). If companies are struggling to be transparent about the service value proposal that IT can offer today, what about when the SMAC technologies expand at full speed? BSM connects the dots with proper service lifecycle management and a consolidated view by service for hardware, software, cloud, services, and people-related costs, based on usage. The information can be broken down by business unit. With BSM, the occasional, intense, manual work is now performed automatically and in near real-time. Fundamentally, the convergence of SMAC technologies makes business intelligence for IT inevitable. And BSM can become the most reliable source of data supporting that intelligence. In a world of immediate gratification and risk aversion, there is no room for mistake-prone manual processes, nor is there much understanding for week-long delivery delays. Without fully automated integration for end-to-end delivery and support processes, IT can’t raise its game to proactively engage with IT consumers to address this wave and also propose to the business new and better ways to reach their corporate goals. BSM from BMC is a proven platform that is designed to enable the business to get the best of these technologies well into the future. For more information, visit www.bmc.com/products/myit/it-self-service.html and www.bmc.com/bsm. BMC, BMC Software, and the BMC Software logo are the exclusive properties of BMC Software, Inc., are registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and may be registered or pending registration in other countries. All other BMC trademarks, service marks, and logos may be registered or pending registration in the U.S. or in other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. ©2012 BMC Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Origin date: 12/12. *433179*