Building `customer focused’ IT

As businesses increasingly replace physical products and services with those delivered digitally – such as banks enabling customers to deposit a cheque with a smartphone versus going to a branch – expectations for improved experiences across the technology landscape have skyrocketed, as have the pressures put on IT to deliver them.

It is also an area where both users and technology developers and vendors are still in the very early stages of identifying what types of tools are needed and what services they should provide. There are many small vendors, often start-ups, that are developing pieces of this jigsaw, though these inevitably leave end user businesses with the task of engineering them together into the specific service entity they are seeking.

That can be an intimidating task that most users will, in practice, duck unless the business need is pressing. What most will be quietly hoping for is that some of the major systems and service vendors enter the fray with more complete, packaged solutions, even if that does then include the risk of becoming locked in to a particular technology solution.

But the key factor here is that any packaged solution will need to be customer, rather than business-user, focused. The solutions that win over the next few years will be those that allow end user consumers of the new services to do what they want, and feel comfortable doing it.

This is certainly the target at which BMC is pitching. This is one of the first established big-business-systems vendors to attack this new market with the launch of the second generation of three products, MyIT 2.0, AppZone 2.0 and the idiosyncratically named Remedyforce Winter 14. Together, these are targeting the increasingly pervasive use of mobile, social, and cloud technologies.

It is the company’s view that these technologies, along with automated and industrialised IT service delivery, are the defining characteristics of the new IT.

The new products have been purpose-built to manage a wide range of rich, next-generation digital services that give employees the tools they need to maximise performance and creativity. These features also serve to increase job satisfaction and productivity while reducing what BMC calls`IT friction’.

This is where operational issue with IT get in the way of work, rather than help it. According to a survey of 900 IT professionals and 900 business users commissioned by BMC and conducted by Forrester Research in February 2013, some 86 percent of employees are estimated to lose an average of 18 hours of potentially productive time each month due to IT issues.

That translates to £2,223 annually per impacted employee, totaling £60 billion annually for Fortune 100 companies.

BMC is now aiming to free up technology managers to be proactive and preemptive, solving high priority problems for people and the organisation while streamlining and automating back-end operations.

“BMC’s second generation solutions announced today will enable IT organisations to create and deploy new services and technologies that will delight end-users and unlock productivity and business competitiveness,” said Kia Behnia, chief technology officer at BMC Software.

“Top organisations have known for a long time that mobile social technologies represent the future of IT. But the solutions they’ve had to work with in order to make that leap were not designed for that task. BMC has changed this equation. Our new products enable IT leaders to fundamentally transform the self-service experience by offering end users a powerful yet intuitive solution rooted in expectations created by Facebook and Twitter.”

MyIT 2.0is a self-service app featuring a completely redesigned user interface inspired by the latest social networking tools. It does away with forms and tickets by enabling employees to ask for help, get answers to questions and share information through real-time online messaging, social posts and more.

Together with Remedyforce, this more natural workflow cuts support costs and boosts employee and IT satisfaction. It also includes strong notification and system status components that offer real-time awareness of issues and outages.

Available with Remedyforce, MyIT 2.0 is currently in beta and will be widely available this April.

AppZone 2.0 is a universal app store that gives employees easy access to cloud, mobile, custom and desktop applications. To drive adoption, employees can comment, rate and share apps they enjoy, allowing others to on-board applications based on peer selections.

For IT, an enterprise app store provides the ability to procure, publish, secure and manage apps across the organisation.

Remedyforce Winter ‘14 is the latest release of the company’s cloud-based system for managing digital services. With this new release, MyIT 2.0 and AppZone 2.0 are now fully integrated with Remedyforce, providing employees with a strong front-end experience across on-premise, on-demand and cloud/SaaS versions. Click here for more information on Remedyforce Winter 14 Release.