HOW TO EMBRACE THE SOCIAL, MOBILE, ANALYTICS, AND CLOUD WAVE WITH BSM

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
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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.
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