Ivanti Blog: Posts by

8 Leaps To Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for ITSM Tools Report

Sun, 25 Oct 2020 23:30:33 Z

This year Ivanti was placed in the Leader quadrant in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for ITSM Tools report. After a long and tough journey moving from Niche, to Innovator, to Challenger, we made it to the quadrant that is magic: the Leader quadrant.

Obviously we’re thrilled. Having reached this point, I thought I would spend time here explaining what the MQ really means and why Ivanti’s move to Leader is so significant. (Disclaimer: this is not a Gartner authored article. This is a subjective perspective from a vendor who has navigated the waters through calm and through rapids. You can refer to Gartner’s own formal descriptions and positioning on their website.)

If you work for a mid/large business or enterprise with any involvement in an IT tool or vendor selection, you’ll almost certainly know the Magic Quadrants, and the industry analysis company Gartner. Other industry analysts and assessment reports exist, and are awesome, but today we’re talking about Gartner and their MQ. This article should give you some insight into how your vendors get to where they are and what it means.

If you’ve ever worked for a software vendor, you will undoubtedly have heard the phrase "Magic Quadrant" or the abbreviation "MQ" many, many times. The following post may help with some insider hints and tips on how a vendor can progress in Gartner’s MQs. Spoiler: It’s not easy.

First, the basics.

What is Gartner's Magic Quadrant?

Every year, Gartner produces Magic Quadrant reports for many different IT and technology markets. The reports are written by teams of wise (and sometimes pointy-headed) industry analysts up in Gartner’s ivory towers of vision and foresight. Here I’ll be referring specifically to the IT Service Management (ITSM) Magic Quadrant, but the same roughly could apply to any other technology market sector where MQs are produced.

And, OK, yes, fellow pedants, despite being called the Magic Quadrant, there are actually four quadrants in the report. An assessed qualifying list of vendors in that market are placed into one of four quadrants: Niche, Visionary, Challenger and Leader. The report is called the Magic Quadrant. All quadrants are good, as I’ll explain below, but can you guess which quadrant is the magic one?

Selected and assessed vendors get placed across the four quadrants. The higher up a vendor is placed, the greater their ability at executing. The further to the right a vendor is placed, the more complete their vision and future in that market. Thus, a vendor with a complete vision and great execution hits the top right quadrant.

I'm not going to say it’s easy to get into Niche quadrant. It’s tough to get the size and visibility into Gartner to be recognised and included. In ITSM the Niche quadrant is the most dynamic, with the biggest moves back and forth, plus new entries and exits. Everyone enters as Niche, many jostle around year on year. Moving across or up is hard.

Moving across to Visionary is often the next step. That’s where your vision translates into real new and different product capabilities. Those smaller Niche players can get there if they can stop playing catchup and can take big risks to introduce something totally left field or differentiate themselves from all others in a very unique way. They won’t get there by telling or shipping the same capabilities and vision as Leader vendors. Innovators have given clever people time and space to do creative and clever things even if the overall business is not fully focussed yet. They may not have the scale and visibility to get above the horizontal line, but they sure are doing some clever stuff.

Alternatively, a vendor might make it up into Challengers quadrant. This is mostly about scale and focus. Having a large-scale business which is focussed on success in the ITSM space leads to global events, lots of customers, excellent web content, a fireh ose of social media news, references, quotes. Also lots of products, lots of releases, lots of features. That’s about the vendor spending money to be seen and heard as a major and very visible vendor in that market,

Then, if you add good and unique vision and proven innovation and released progress towards that vision, the new features and messaging are so strong that the shift to the right brings them across the vertical and into the top right (magic) quadrant itself. The Leader quadrant. These are the largest, market-defining, expectation-setting, consistently delivering and innovating leading vendors in that market.

When discussing an MQ report, Gartner will always say is that every vendor in the report is a winner, having made it from a long list of hundreds of vendors down to a selected shortlist of usually somewhere around five to 15. And, as Gartner will emphasise time and again, being in the Leader quadrant does not make that vendor the best fit to every business’ needs.

Although there are many dimensions and factors, we could simplify to say a vendor’s position on the report is based on three things:

Real measured or assessed data performance “scores” (size, scale, product feature strength, number of events, number of global partners).
Subjective customer feedback from Gartner client calls and peer reviews.
Vendor supplied information such as road maps, vision, release information, company news, etc.

Having led ITSM products now for some time, I’ve seen first-hand how really hard it is for a global software vendor to coordinate and execute influencing all of these at the same time and to sustain that focus over a long enough period of time to progress in an MQ report.

Now to the fun stuff.

How do vendors get to the Leader quadrant, and what does it really mean?

1. All quadrants are equal, but some are more equal than others.

As described above, all listed vendors are the best shortlist in the world in that market. And some may fit different regional or vertical market needs. So don't assume the Leaders are the best for every client need.

But do acknowledge that the Leaders have size and scale to be the safest start point for your assessment. Start there, assess price against your budget, assess how long typical implementations take, cost of future configuration. Look at your total cost of ownership. Then look at culture, attitude, vision, values.

2. Contrary to rumour, it’s really not pay-to-play…

Nope, sorry. We vendors do not pay money to Gartner to get a placement in an MQ report. If only. Those darn Gartner analysts follow a strict and rigid set of selection and assessment guidelines and are both stern and uncompromising in their following of the assessment rules and calculations. There is no way to pay money for a position.

3. …but it is invest to win.

However, clearly, the more a vendor invests their time and efforts into growing in the areas that Gartner assess and score up, the more that is reflected in the position of those vendors. Remember my three dimensions above—real data scores, subjective feedback, provided information—by Increasing your marketing spend, running multiple global industry events, building new and innovative products and features, attracting many more happy new customers. Retaining happy customers.

Doing all this is expensive. Even bringing together CEOs, CPOs, product directors, product managers and product marketers into multiple repeated updates and briefings with Gartner analysts is time and resource expensive. So, clearly if a vendor sets out a plan to deliberately improve its MQ position, it will need to spend money, time, and effort to raise its overall position in the market to the required level. It doesn’t come for free.

4. Don't compare previous years, except, well yes, actually do.

Gartner will say you cannot and should not compare MQ positions year on year. Every year the criteria are adjusted and changed.

But saying that, a vendor’s position in the MQ over time tells a story. Look at Ivanti, the only vendor that has moved consistently over the last five years from Niche to Innovator, to Challenger to Leader. That journey is important and tells a clear story about the focus on the vendor over time.

5. MQ is a company report. CC (Critical Capabilities) is a features report.

Oh, this has been said many times but worth saying again. The MQ is about the whole vendor company and includes everything from go to market, partners, support, services and of course products as well. When we say Ivanti is a Magic Quadrant Leader, we mean the whole company Ivanti. As a buyer or customer, you will have a relationship with the vendor (over many years if an Ivanti customer).

Yes, there is an assessment of the product itself and that’s called the Critical Capabilities (CC) report. That assessment feeds into the product section of the MQ so does have an impact, but don't use the MQ to judge the product and don’t use the CC to judge the vendor. If in doubt, use the MQ since a good vendor will always improve their product.

6. Peer reviews help, but like anything, never trust a single review alone.

Another thing that has changed recently is Gartner’s greater focus on their Peer Reviews site where verified customers leave reviews of the vendor and their product. A clever move by Gartner, as they have been building, enhancing and promoting their new Peer Reviews site over recent years. It’s now a part of the MQ assessment criteria with a move away assessing direct feedback from only individual reference customers.

Peer reviews are good, but remember two things: the number of peer reviews is influenced by the vendor’s own investment into encouraging their customers to leave reviews, and as with any peer review system, the background on any one single data point may be questionable. (As an example, one peer review on another site criticised Ivanti Service Manager for not being a code&script-based development platform. To some customers, that might be a weakness if they expect to configure their tools with in-house developers. The review was probably left by a developer whose career depends on writing third-party toolset configuration scripts. To other customers, it may be strength to have a tool that does not require developers to configure it. So don't trust single data points.)

7. Timing is everything.

Hey vendors, want to shift further right on the MQ? Make sure your best new and innovative features are generally available, released, and have referenceable customers using the new features during the MQ assessment period. Gartner won’t score a vendor on product capabilities or their ability to execute based on future feature plans. They are very strict that if it isn’t released and GA on the assessment period, they won’t include it in the scoring.

So, letting a secret out here, Ivanti worked really hard to make sure that the new Ivanti Assistants for Service Management (which is now part of the Ivanti Neurons platform as Ivanti Neurons for Healing) was launched, availabl,e and in production usage with reference customers. We knew this was an innovative game changer and we moved heaven and earth to make sure the 2020 MQ assessment could reflect this exciting new capability.

8. Ah, vendors. You need good analyst relations.

Analyst Relations (AR) is a thing. It’s a career and an industry. I’ve seen instances where a Niche level vendor doesn’t have staff focussing on analyst relations. This is a false economy since what always suffers is the volume, focus, quantity, and consistency of communication into industry analysts. And if Gartner don't hear often from a vendor, then they are less likely to understand that vendors progress, plans, execution and vision. Solve that problem by employing Analyst Relations staff, dedicated 100% to managing the communication into analyst organisations.

If you want your house to look good from the outside, you could ask your plumber to also do some painting when he has time, or you could ask a dedicated exterior decorator and remodeller to project manage the renovation and redecoration work. Which do you think would provide a better looking house frontage? A vendor with AR cares about growth,

So, there you have it. Hopefully these eight leaps to Leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant can help in understanding how a vendor grows over time across the different quadrants, and what it means when a vendor makes it to Leader.

And just in case it’s still not clear, here’s what it means in a nutshell: the vendor has put years of effort, expertise, experience, and execution into growing a proven happy global customer base. They’ve worked day, night, year on year with focus throughout changing environments and unexpected event. They are a safe pair of hands. They can do it.

But is the vendor and their toolset just right right for you? Maybe. Maybe not. Some are expensive, some are complicated. Some are just right for your business. And, just like Goldilocks, you ned to find the one that’s just right. Are they the right fit for your business? Do their culture, values, vision, personality, and strategy fit with your needs? Only you can answer that question by talking to representatives from that vendor.

And, finally, on a personal note, I want to finish with showing massive respect and praise to all those that have helped grow Ivanti into an ITSM MQ Leader. It’s been a long, fun journey for all of us so far. All the people that have given blood, sweat, days, nights, weekends, year after year, innovating, building and launching, and selling and implementing and supporting and … well, everything I describe above. Whether within Ivanti today or in the past, or in our partner network, or of course in our customer community. If you think you may have played any part at all in this, you probably have. Thank you.

Ivanti Neurons: Beyond Self Service, Beyond Omnichannel to Self-Servicing

Wed, 29 Jul 2020 17:34:55 Z

I’m thrilled that we’ve finally announced the availability of the new Ivanti Neurons platform! It’s been a long journey involving huge efforts by all parts of the Ivanti organization over recent years to get to this point.

There is a powerful and close relationship between the Ivanti Neurons platform and Ivanti’s Enterprise Service Management and IT Service Manager capabilities. As you’ve now seen, the Ivanti Neurons platform delivers hyper-automation bots for self-healing, self-securing, and self-servicing. All of which directly enhances (nay, I’ll say transforms) what an IT service desk does, how it does it, and the service it delivers.

Self Service Today: Embracing Omnichannel Support

When we hear about self-service, we might think “self-service portal.” But it’s much more than that. I’d like to break this into two areas: self service today and self service tomorrow.

It’s now widely appreciated that people are different, and we all use technology in ways that suit us. We value choice. And we want the same personal choice from our IT or enterprise service department. Some people prefer to call a phone number, some like to search on a website. Others like to chat with real people and some like to chat with bots. Some use email, others use Slack, and still others use Teams—anytime, anywhere through lots of channels. And of course, offering a choice of self-service interfaces for employees and end users is important.

At Ivanti, we’ve continued to expand the self-service and communication channels we offer with our solutions. We’re excited to continue to do so. Virtual agents, chatbots, automatic phone systems, mobile apps, and even connectors to more than 2,000 cloud applications via our Zapier connector. We’ve added new mobile self-service chat into mobile apps in our latest release, and there’s more to come. Some say we provide the widest range of choices for end users to communicate with IT and get help.

But what about the future?

Self Service Tomorrow: Beyond Omnichannel to Self-Servicing and an Ambient Experience

Self-servicing? In a way, it’s the ultimate proactive “shift left.” Let’s use a story to explain.

Recently my dishwasher stopped working—"Error E15” (for all of you dishwasher geeks). In the old world, I would have phoned a repair person who would look up the error in a battered old manual, identify that I needed a new water pump, travel to buy the replacement pump, and then come to my house to fit the pump.

But in today’s world, we love self-service. I looked up “Error E15” in Google and discovered I needed a new pump. I bought the pump on Amazon. It was delivered to my door the next day and, surprisingly, I actually fitted it myself.

Now, instead of it costing me hundreds of pounds and taking a week or two, it cost me only tens of pounds. It did take a lot of my time, however. I had to do the virtual legwork, and it was me—not a service person—lying on the kitchen floor in a puddle, trying to unscrew a pump from the dishwasher while the dog kept licking my face. Yuck.

So, what’s a self-servicing environment? We’ll continue with the dishwasher analogy although it won’t hold water for much longer. (See what I did there?)

A self-servicing platform would have remotely asked my dishwasher if any components were nearing an end of life or in need of servicing. In turn, my dishwasher would report back that the pump was nearing failure. A new pump would be ordered and shipped automatically. And if dishwashers were like IT, then the dishwasher would fit the pump itself. And that’s where the dishwasher analogy fails, so let’s switch to IT and real life.

Ivanti Neurons: Self-Servicing

Here’s a true story of a real Ivanti Neurons platform customer applying self-servicing to transform their business:

Ivanti Neurons is able to query laptop battery health. If a battery in a laptop returns less than 15% recharging life remaining, then a ticket is created automatically in Ivanti Service Manager. That ticket follows the required workflow rules and … automatically contacts the laptop supplier with the location (address), the serial number of the laptop, and the requirement to ship a replacement battery. A day later, a ring at the doorbell and there on the doorstep is a new battery. Remove the old one, clip in the new one in. Solved. This is IT that’s self-servicing. No incidents nor need to even use any of those multiple self-service channels.

But we can get even more clever than that. With Ivanti Neurons, a lot of good IT can be shipped automatically over the wire. And that’s a lot quicker.

Let’s say you use a software product a lot and it’s approaching end of life (or a new internal update is available). Or perhaps it’s been replaced by a new or updated tool approved by IT. Ivanti Neurons steps in and installs that new version, automatically.

An Ambient IT Service Experience

What’s an ambient experience, you ask? This is something we’re familiar with using technology in our personal lives already.

Ambient technology adjusts automatically, often silently, around you. Get in your car and then what? Seat, music, and lights adjust to your saved preferences. Approach your house? The front door unlocks as the app and lock confirm your identity. Walk into your house? Lights and curtains and music adjust to your saved profiles for time of day and your physical location. Need to know something important and relevant to you? Your wristwatch pings with a notification. That’s an ambient technology experience. And the Ivanti Neurons platform makes that possible for the individual working anywhere (probably at home).

Ivanti Neurons with Ivanti Service Manager:

Understands context – The location (live, on a map!); the user; their devices; their profile; their services and needs.
Personalizes delivery – Understanding language, culture, and the working environment. Want your updates by app pop-up or text message or automated phone call out? In your language? No problem.
Provides an ambient experience – Issues are detected proactively and corrected automatically. Needs are anticipated and fulfilled before the user is impacted. Outages and incidents are prevented. Satisfaction is improved.

Why report a fault when the fault is already detected and has been corrected? Why request something you need when the requirement is already recognized and already shipped or installed?

Join Us on the Journey

You’ll need a solution that will guide you to an ambient self-servicing future. We invite you to join us on this journey. Start by reading and watching information about Ivanti Neurons, and check back regularly as we expand the self-servicing capabilities of Ivanti Neurons.

Service Management in This Time of Widescale Remote Work

Mon, 16 Mar 2020 15:50:09 Z

With the current focus on social distancing and other health precautions, service management leaders are probably already thinking about short-term implications of these rapidly incoming changes. The large-scale increased use of remote work is one implication. This might be a new option or an immediate mandatory requirement for all employees. Regardless, many IT organizations may not be ready.

Here are my top 10 recommendations for service management leaders to help prepare for widescale remote working and keep employees productive during this time. I’ll focus on ITSM first, but also look at scenarios beyond IT where the application of service management approaches and solutions can help.

1. Keep Employees Productive

Plan for all your end-users, employees, and customers working much more from home for a while. Many people will not be working in any form of office environment. For some, that’s easy; for others, it may be the first time they’ve had to do this. Are you prepared to support them, help them stay productive and handle the potential call load? Do you need to change your tools to support more home working? What happens if an employee’s laptop fails and needs replacing? Do you know what applications they need to access? Does everyone have adequate and stable home internet connectivity? Do you have an IT policy and advice document on working from home? The answers to these questions could be the starting point for your plan.

Make it easy for employees to access and use your ITSM self-service interface outside of the workplace as their first line of help. If your self-service portal is not accessible outside your DMZ already, consider making that move fast.

2. Provide IT Services from Home

It’s not just them, it’s you! Your staff may be working partially or fully at home for a while. Can everyone do their job remotely? This is where Cloud-delivered tools are so powerful. Not just in the lack of a local installation footprint but the accessibility through any browser, usually anywhere. If your ITSM tool is on-premises, is it accessible outside the firewall? This is the time to pull a matrix of every role in IT, the tools and data they need to do their job, and the accessibility of those tools from home.

3. Stay Connected

Without the social space of the office environment, it’s easy for individuals to become disconnected and isolated. Meeting tools are your friend here. Ensure every staff manager can confirm all their staff can use meeting tools such as Microsoft Teams, WebEx, Zoom, etc. Then drive regular meetings using these tools. Not once a week, but plan on daily meetings to keep everyone super-connected.

And make using a video camera mandatory. I know, people won’t want to show their bed-hair or the mess in the background. It doesn’t matter. You need to see their faces and they need to see yours. It’s how we stay connected and how we communicate. And that relates to this next recommendation...

4. Continue Leading

Now more than ever, your staff need leaders that lead. Keep regular contact with meetings, individual contact with 1-on-1’s and direct phone calls. Check in with people often. Be flexible, be caring, be supportive, but also be clear. During this current period of disruption, we all need good clear leadership. Got someone on your team with a family member unwell at home? Send a small get well soon gift. Don’t give them a hard time but do keep them focused on work if they are working. And if they are not working, don’t push on them to get back to work. Just be very clear of your expectations and the operating rules.

5. Stay Secure

Be IT-secure in the decisions you make. Don’t put your company at risk by removing VPNs, disabling firewalls, or sharing passwords in the belief it’ll make it easier to work from home. You may have to soften some of the hardest security constraints to allow home working, but you can’t afford to put your employer’s security at risk from attack. Now is a good time to check your endpoint and security management capabilities and practices to protect against potential security holes. Keep a level security head.

6. Communicate

IT has wonderful capabilities with Self Service portals to provide a clear communication platform to the business on IT’s readiness, operational state and support services. Use it. Get writing and publishing content to help address questions and uncertainty across the business. Timely FAQs are your friends. Start building or updating now your IT FAQs, knowledge articles, recordings, documents, even internal blog posts. These are important to keep everyone informed and productive.

7. Deliver Support Virtually

This is the time to reduce the floor-walking of support staff around the business. Close that Genius Bar, reduce the options for walk-up face to face support, focus more on remote access. Remote control tools are more essential than ever. Even if you could walk over to help fix something, maybe you shouldn’t go there now. Make sure everyone can easily use remote control tools to still provide needed help.

Do you use Ivanti Voice or other telephony-automation tools? Ensure this is available to all end users anywhere to submit, access and update their tickets over the phone, any time, day or night, even if remote internet connectivity is difficult. Set it up if you can to make it easier for your remote staff to deal with incoming calls without increasing wait times or abandon rates.

8. Re-Prioritize

Some things are important now, and some things can wait. Review current projects and check if some can be paused to allow your team to focus on the more important ones. That new how-to video and FAQ showing how to work from home could be more urgent now that the planned long-term upgrade of the database platform. But also move quickly if need be. Some long running projects might now need to accelerate. For example, that new self-service content might need to get published sooner, the go live of the new knowledge management workflow might be more important.

9. Be Proactive

Start with all the above points, develop your plan and put them in a document with your proposed steps and priorities. Take it to your management team for approval, then share with your teams. The worst thing you can do now is assume the status quo will work. The better approach is plan, prepare, take action, and make any needed adjustments moving forward. Even if the current situation doesn’t immediately significantly impact your business, you’re doing the right thing in preparing.

10. Help Other Departments

With service management tools very widely used by many other business departments in an enterprise service management model, consider that the leaders in those departments may not yet fully recognize the value of the service management tool they are using. Reach out to them, share your IT plan, then offer to help them with theirs. They offer self-service options, they need to share FAQs and knowledge articles, maybe they could benefit from using service management tools from home too. Leaders in departments beyond IT should take the same approach as you and take advantage of the power of Service Management.

One last point is the current wide-scale ramp-up for remote work is a reminder IT needs to regularly review and update business continuity plans. One update might be to standardize extensive remote work policies and capabilities to better prepare for the next unknown disruptive event.

Six Immediate Lessons to Learn from the British Airways IT Outage

Mon, 29 May 2017 17:21:06 Z

As I write this—on a Monday morning British Airways flight—BA is struggling to recover from one of the worst IT outages an airline has ever suffered, and accordingly, also one of the worst PR disasters.

Over the weekend, BA’s IT systems all went down. All British Airways flights were grounded for almost two full days. And not just at one airport in the UK, but worldwide. The news has been filled with pictures of mountains of luggage, terminals overflowing with distressed passengers, people sleeping on floors, lines zigzagging across packed check-in halls and out through the doors. Tearful kids, angry parents, and furious business travelers are the faces of this story.

Source: The Independent

Source: The Independent

British Airways' reputation in jeopardy

No matter how you look at it, this is a disaster for British Airways. Taking place at the start of the Bank Holiday weekend and most schools’ half-term week, we can be sure that many families have had their precious long-booked holidays trashed. The compensation cost for all passengers worldwide for two days will be horrific, and BA's reputation may never recover.

This hurts the British psyche particularly, since BA is still somehow still regarded as our national airline, with still lingering pride in its quality and reputation. After all, it’s got the name "British" in it. I’m sure the Queen gets involved there somehow as well. We regard BA as if it is still publicly owned, nationalized and subsidized by the government and paid for with British taxes.

Of course, this is not the case. BA is a very commercial, private company, fighting for profit in a competitive market and trying to retain its "premier brand" reputation while competing for every pound against the small, super cheap, no-frills airlines for the same customers.

So, the outage is bad. The fact that it was British Airways makes it somehow much worse. The outage has been headline major news in the UK for two days so far. It’s still going on, although my experience today is that many of the issues are sorted out and only a few flights appeared as cancelled.

Recent WannaCry ransomware outbreak

This is the second major IT outage issue to hit the UK/British national identity recently. Only three weeks ago, the WannaCry/WannaCrypt ransomware outbreak hit the National Health Service hard, closing hospitals and turning away patients. The NHS is genuinely government funded, free for all that need it, and baked deep in the British psyche. The ransomware outbreak impacted IT worldwide, but it most visibly hurt the UK health service.

The main conclusions described for the impact on the NHS was a lack of sufficient IT funding, old computers running XP, and slow update and patch timescales. It was only a matter of time before WannaCry or similar hit the NHS. The impact was huge.

Now it is British Airways.

The big question: What caused the British Airways IT outage?

So far, all we know is that power supply issues caused the outage of all the IT systems that manage check-in, luggage, boarding and, well, pretty much everything, apparently. It appears that some power failure basically turned off all BA IT systems, and they simply couldn’t just be turned back on again.

At this point, that story doesn’t really sit well with me. If that is true, it would suggest that BA runs its IT systems on an infrastructure that is not mirrored, replicated or built with failover capabilities across more than one location. I could understand a small non-IT company putting its eggs into one basket, but these days even mid-sized companies understand the basics of IT service continuity. It’s very normal for business critical applications run from the cloud to be automatically operated in a failover datacenter model so that if an entire DC was hit by—say a small asteroid—there would only be a short recovery time before all systems spin back up with nominal data loss in the mirrored location.

Personally I think there is more to the BA story. If it is "a UPS failed and took out our entire business" then that itself is a shocking example of criminally bad IT management. But I suspect there is more yet to come out. In fact I hope there is. But the communication from BA has been tight-lipped, brief and very limited.

Six lessons we can learn from the BA outage

In the absence of the full story, here are six lessons we can take away from the British Airways (and NHS outages), assuming that the "power supply problems' turns out to be the full story.

1. IT outages are no longer: "Sorry, our computers are down, can I call you back?" In today's digital world, IT outages impact real people, cost public money, cause horrible inconvenienceS, and put lives at risk.

2. IT is critical to your business. Don’t under-invest and hope the worst won’t happen. It just did to the NHS and British Airways. IT and digital operations are now everything. As Matt Hooper says, "Praying is not an acceptable IT strategy."

3. Agility in IT operations can prevent catastrophic failures. In a modern, agile, digital world, resilient practices enable smaller, faster, deliberate failure experiments and the building of better anti-fragile solutions. These are there to stop the sky falling in with catastrophic failures. Resilience and a lack of fragility are key.

4. But if the sky does fall in, Service Continuity Management—even just basic Disaster Recovery—is essential. Where is your DR plan? What happens if your current primary DC is hit by a plane, asteroid, explosion or earthquake? That plan should be documented and tested. How do you operate without IT?

5. IT Service Management should have prevented this, and IT Service Management could now be helping BA learn from this. Improvement comes from knowledge and knowledge comes from learning. It’s basic ITSM—avoid future incidents by analyzing the cause of previous incidents and applying changes to prevent them from happening again. In fact, so many aspects of ITSM seem to apply here: from major incident, through service continuity, to problem, knowledge and change management and then into continual service improvement.

6. Most importantly: All IT professionals need to be able to learn from BA. If BA fails to share a comprehensive and honest, detailed account of what really went wrong, then they are failing the global IT community and consciously putting us all at risk of future IT outages, in any industry. Honesty and transparency are important not only for brand trust and credibility, but also to ensure that the same mistakes are not being made by Nasa, the military, the police, the electricity, water, and gas suppliers, or the nuclear power generators. In the scientific community, failures in experiments are shared as widely as successes, so that future scientists of any country or employer can avoid making the same mistakes. This basic culture of shared learning needs to be encouraged for the benefit of all IT operations everywhere. IT operations is too important to be hidden behind a curtain of silence.

The BA outage is slowly easing. Tweets and press suggest that systems are coming back online and cancelled flights are gradually reducing. I travelled this morning without any delay, but it’s not quite over. The dust has certainly not settled, and I sincerely hope that what comes next includes an honest sharing of mistakes made and lessons learned. If not, we are just waiting until the next major outage, and that could be much worse that spending a night on a departures hall floor.

Introducing SnapIT: Transforming IT Self-Service With Ivanti Service Desk

Wed, 15 Apr 2015 23:38:21 Z

I am very excited about the latest release of LANDESK Service Desk. We’ve introduced a totally new concept that we call SnapIT. I think it’s fair to say, this one really is something quite different. It’s new, unique, innovative and potentially game-changing for IT service management technology.

What is SnapIT?

SnapIT is not a product, it’s a new concept or capability that you can design into your service desk to offer a totally new user-experience to your end users or customers. It is provided by combining a number of LANDESK product technology features and uses LANDESK Workspace mobile app (or mobile browser) with LANDESK Service Desk and Incident and Knowledge processes. It also extends to extraordinary integration across the LANDESK portfolio too.

With SnapIT, an end user gets immediate, relevant IT advice, on their mobile phone, helping on whatever their mobile camera can see at the time.

What a mobile camera can see leads to IT knowledge, advice, choices, and solutions.

SnapIT translates uncertainty into productivity.

SnapIT puts IT knowledge in context, in sight and in the palm of your hand.

I sometimes say it’s a little like Wordlens – the cool mobile app which converts text in one language seen through a phone camera to another – except with SnapIT we convert what you photograph into good IT advice. SnapIT translates questions into answers, uncertainty into productivity.

Innovative? Certainly. Transformative? Could be. Game changing? Quite possibly.

Here’s some examples where we’ve seen SnapIT transforming the individual question-to-solution personal experience.

An error that appears when you try to log in to your computer. You’ve not forgotten your password – something somewhere is broken. what do you do if you can’t even get into the computer?

SnapIT recognises the error and lets you click a link to push a fix to your computer. You wait until its says complete, and then log in.

An error that appears when you launch that application or website, or when you try to modify or save something. You’re stuck. What do you do?

SnapIT recognises the error and shows you the steps to make the correct settings. Holding your phone, you follow the steps and then you are working successfully. If it didn’t work, SnapIT also has a link to notify IT that you need further help.

A message appears ‘warning: something… continue or cancel’. What? Is that safe? is that dangerous? Should you worry? What do you do?

SnapIT recognizes the error and offers you a link to receive the correct, newer, or fixed version of the application. You click, wait, see the application installed and away you go.

A message that appears ‘You now need to do…’but you don’t understand how to do it.

SnapIT recognizes the message and presents you the documents and videos showing how to do the required action. Watching the video on your phone you proceed through the required steps and complete the needed activity.

And we’re not limited to computer screens of course. You see them also on printer screens, phone displays, projector and TV displays. I’ve even read some IT posters and technical manuals that I’ve not understood.

SnapIT changes the game. Now what you see on your computer screen can be converted into advice. in the palm of your hand. No phone call, no screenshot, no forms, NO TYPING, no waiting. Right there on your mobile device.

Overall, SnapIT makes it easy to get advice. So easy. The individual journey – the user experience – from question to answer is transformed. This places your IT department in the hand of every individual end user.

It’s also easy to apply. As we often point out, service desk design needs no code developer skills. Our customers can apply SnapIT into their service desk design without having to write and understand complex code scripts.

Sounds pretty impressive, doesn’t it As well as being innovative technology, I’m also excited about the way that SnapIT places the value of IT knowledge front and centre once again in the purpose and objective of ITSM. The value that IT brings is business-specific, role-specific, user centered. Good IT Service Management changes individuals productivity and the creation and sharing of knowledge is a vital part of that.

The technical bit : How does this magic work?

Just like lego pieces, you put the following features of LANDESK Service Desk together in the right order.

1 – LANDESK Workspace mobile app or mobile browser, which can launch a new SnapIT support process and take and attach photos.

2 – SnapIT process :

– Extracts the text from the image using OCR services

– Searches the extracted text against the IT knowledge base (as the end user to ensure correct knowledge scope)

– Refreshes screen and shows relevance-ordered matches to knowledge search.

3 – Bonus features

– Yes, this works for email as well – emails create or sent from the above steps.

– Yes, you can also do this with screenshots on a desktop browser in self-service – you don’t have to use a camera

– You can add LANDESK Total User Management to allow knowledge advice to also PUSH corrective fixes, so an end user can see an error, see the advice, click the link and watch as the fix is applied in real time to their computer.

– If the answer is not in the knowledge base, the SnapIT process can automatically generate a brand new knowledge article from the photo and the solution that IT provide. This will then be presented to an end user the next time they encounter that issue. Using SnapIT builds knowledge.

– If you really also want to search Google, you can present a ‘now search this text in Google’ link alongside your IT knowledge advice.

– And finally, Yes, SnapIT works equally in-cloud or on-premise. Just like LANDESK Service Desk.

I’m very proud of SnapIT and the people who managed to conceive, design, build and deliver this new idea out to our customers. It’s the result of a great deal of hard work and creativity. Now it’s over to you – I’d love your feedback. What do you think?

You can see SnapIT in action in our video here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMB-H1WP2ps&feature=youtu.be

You can see the first blog The Problem with IT Support – Why we need SnapIT

Gartner Symposium 2014 – A BiModal Future for Digital Humanists

Fri, 10 Oct 2014 23:59:16 Z

At Gartner Symposium in Orlando this year, the wise wizards of Gartner reached over the parapet of their ivory tower and lowered the new banners for the next year in enterprise IT.

Here are the main future IT themes, presented in detail for your delight:

Internet of Things. Not new, but clearly seen as close, important and relevant. Lots of talk about IoT. More on this below.
BiModal IT. This is great. I like this. Recognising that IT has to operate in two modes: Mode 1, keep the lights on and be safe. Mode 2, be agile and innovate. This, to me, solves the DevOpsvsITIL debates. You have both, some parts of IT are ‘solid’ and some are ‘fluid’, and that’s good.
Digital Business. Reflecting the new breed of organisation, which is highly agile, built heavily around internet economy and disrupting the more traditional business model. Gartner says, “Digital business is blurring the lines between the digital and the physical worlds, disrupting all industries and redefining the role of IT.” I think this was best explained with the outstanding keynote on the last day from John Zimmer, one of the founders of Lyft. First born from early projects, Lyft was built by two people in just three weeks, and proceeded to disrupt the traditional transportation industry so much that they have received cease and desist orders, before even starting to operate in some regions. They have 80,000 drivers but own no cars.
Then, linking on the digital theme, we have the Digital Humanist – placing people at the centre, embracing unpredictability, and respecting personal space. This seemed well received and makes good sense to me. We’ve been talking about user-oriented IT for some time now at LANDESK. This builds on and supports that direction. And, just to keep up with the Joneses, they got themselves their own manifesto. A Digital Humanist manifesto no less. Good sentiment, although there can’t be many IT bodies out there that don’t have a manifesto for something. I’m considering introducing a manifesto manifesto for people considering the introduction of a new manifesto.

IanAitchison
“Business moments are human moments” Machinists love automation. Digital humanists put people at center. #GartnerSYM
06/10/2014 10:20

Anyway, wow. That’s a lot of hashtag hype bubbles to talk about, in lots of presentations, lots of keynotes. I was lucky enough to be able to attend many sessions this year, as well as spending good time on the massive ITExpo show floor. You can tell a lot about the typical Gartner attendee from what I think was the number one hottest crowd puller on the ITExpo show floor this year. It was… the fully functioning Commodore64 1980s home computer, running on the LANDESK stand. People were queuing to journey back to their youth and get into some old school Basic programming.

10 PRINT”HELLO WORLD”

20 GOTO 10

I swear I saw a tear in the eye of more than a few silver haired CIOs as they touched – and gleefully programmed – what had been in some cases, their first introduction to the exciting world of future computing and IT.

Away from the show floor and back to the presentation and messaging content. Two themes particularly stuck with me throughout the week.

Although I’d heard Gartner people mention it before, this was the first time that BiModalIT had really made it fully into the daylight. BiModalIT is recognizing the importance of both solid secure safe IT, and innovative, creative imaginative IT. Obvious really. We need both. All this hot air of DevOps vs ITIL becomes easier to address when we recognize there is a need for both. Like cream and jam, a scone needs both to be most tasty. This let’s the clever IT leader focus resources on running the core business, and also introduce innovation and agile teams alongside.

I did see a parallel between the two ‘modes’ of IT and two of the keynote interview speakers.

Firstly, Satya Nadella. Smooth, polished, charming. Every answer clearly well rehearsed and policed in delivery and I suspect the same for the questions. More politician than innovator – and probably rightly so. Microsoft is, for many organisations, the solid, largely-reliable, core backbone for IT. Satya also had the best socks of the event.

Then balance that with Steve Wozniak. Wow. A verbal torrent, clearly unscripted, totally off the top of mind. After just the first introductory question, he poured forth a fire hose of passionate, excited, rambling words; moving way beyond the question and leaving the interviewers speechless and unable to stop him for the next 10 minutes. It was great. A real character, slightly bonkers and super-passionate. The most common tweet seemed to be “Take A Breath!” I didn’t see Steve’s socks, but I can report that he had a Nixie Watch! How cool is that?

Going back to our BiModal analogy, Wozniak was fast, changing, reacting, not always succeeding, but fluid (a torrent). Satya was prepared, polished, well made, practiced. Solid.

Clever Gartner putting their BiModal message into their speaker selection.

The other hot subject was a focus on the Internet of Things. I can see so many exciting possibilities here, but as time passed during the event I started to get a little frustrated.

I tweeted :

“There seemed to be a lack of real stories of real use of sensors and devices for increased productivity in business. Yes, yes, we all get it for the home, but where are the off-the-shelf sensors that an IT department can buy and distribute? For what? And where are the businesses that have implemented these? This is the big one for me – stop talking IoT for consumer, lets talk IoT for business.”

Anyway, that then takes me to my next point. If you see the possibilities of Internet of Things devices and sensors, then don’t forget that there is actually a relatively easy way into Internet of Things for IT right now. Of course, I’m biased – yes, LANDESK, ITSM – I understand that, but I do still see the redefined and expanded potential of tools that support ITIL Event Management for “device-to-process” communication. I did a presentation for TFT13 about this a year or so back : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuqJs9qlctQ

I talk there about employees using mobile devices and QR codes to communicate with ITSM processes in the normal flow of their work. Changing that to be a web service alert or URL call from a sensor is simple. In fact I know of one LANDESK customer that has been monotoring remote machine-room humidity using standalone moisture sensors that ping ‘ok,not-OK’ updates back to Service Desk processes. And what do those processes do? Influence and drive the correct human behaviour to ensure continued business productivity. Yes, that’s a simple form of IoT in action folks, it’s possible right now. These real stories and more real Enduser focussed sensors, touch points, QR codes enable exciting, contextual improvements in IT service.

Anyway, there you have it. An excellent week on the show floor and in the thought leadership and presentations at Gartner Symposium. Credit is due to all at Gartner for a most impressive, well run, well researched and well presented IT senior leadership event.