Enterprise IT Efficiency Tops the CIO Wish List

What’s top of mind for CIOs as 2013 draws near? At gen-E, we have conversations with CIOs every day, and the one issue that continues to shape their decision making is creating more IT efficiency. The scope of their responsibilities has broadened – from contending with multitudes of mobile devices, to overseeing huge global enterprise platforms, including both legacy and newly implemented systems. It’s a never-ending challenge for CIOs to stay on top of day-to-day IT demands, and at gen-E, we think companies are going to need to get every level of the organization involved in order to make IT more efficient – which will ultimately make the organization more successful.

Through our Resolve ITPA family of products, our approach to process automation is directed at doing just that. Resolve is a solution that is the first of its kind to bring together enterprise social, collaboration, dynamic knowledge management, decision support, analytics, process orchestration and process automation – all in a single platform. 

With Resolve, it’s all about putting human ingenuity at the forefront of workplace advancement. This approach has allowed our customers to do everything from achieving time savings of thousands of hours each year, to maintaining 24/7 uptime, improving incident handling by up to 50 percent and preventing loss of service to customers.

The gen-E mission, and our Resolve platform, is based upon four key pillars that, together, bring IT efficiency to new levels. These pillars include:

People

People are the first and most crucial part of the equation: we approach automation as a mechanism to provide more opportunity for creative work versus repetitive work.  Individuals are happiest when they participate in a community that asks the best of them and allows them to contribute their potential.  Resolve gets the entire organization to participate in IT – to make it better and share their experiences for the benefit of all. And what’s more, they get rewarded for doing so through our gamification features.

Processes

Processes have always been human centric, and with Resolve we add the additional dimension of social interaction.  Not that cross departmental and cross functional collaboration doesn’t happen today, but with Resolve we provide the tools to make it easier, and most important -- to make it measurable.

Knowledge

Peter Drucker once said, “Knowledge is the source of wealth. Applied to tasks that we already know, it becomes productivity.  Applied to tasks that are new, it becomes innovation.”  Apply this same precept to your organization and you’ll see why we think knowledge management is one of our cornerstones – and in fact, it is at the very core of our platform to create ongoing business intelligence, encourage ongoing knowledge sharing, and create a continuous cycle of actionable feedback for use at every level of the organization. 

Automation

Last but not least is automation and the tools that make it possible.  Our domain of IT Process Automation has spawned a host of powerful automation tools, integration libraries, and process template libraries. The gen-E team has labored long and hard to encapsulate the knowledge and best practices we’ve developed through the years and build an automation platform that is unmatched in flexibility and power and has a deep library of tools that make it easy to automate.

Take a look at our online demos to get a better feel for how Resolve can transform IT efficiency in your organization. Or feel free to contact us directly for more information.

Enterprise Social Is Not Facebook

The Facebook-like approach that represents the foundation of Enterprise Social today is seriously struggling. And Chatter, while useful for sharing updates about what employees are doing or thinking – and to a somewhat lesser extent, sharing documents – have simply not taken off. Why?

The reasons are unclear, but analysts and industry experts alike, along with those of us here at gen-E, have seen this phenomenon take shape. Our team has experimented with it first-hand over the past 18-24 months, and what we strongly believe is that organizations can exploit network effects via Social within a business context only insofar as that network helps employees do their jobs better.  And that is where automation comes in.  Added to the equation, automation makes Enterprise Social useful, which brings us to our unique value proposition at gen-E.

The mission of ‘Social’ technology within our Resolve Social ITPA platform is to

• Increase the dissemination and use of institutional knowledge and automation tools to make our customers’ business more efficient.
• Provide users a forum to collaborate, share experiences and contribute innovative ideas in way that benefits the user and their employer.
• Harness weak ties across organizational boundaries to strengthen operational excellence and thereby increase the pace of innovation and learning within the enterprise.

Resolve was built from the ground up to encourage sharing, and in fact, includes Social embedded at the platform layer to maximize collaboration across your network. How does it work? To give you a brief example, exceptions within the automation process in Resolve initiate social collaboration, meaning support staff are alerted when exceptions occur, and they’re able to instantly interact with live running processes – to offer their insight, to learn, adapt and quickly take action. All the while, the organization’s process knowledge is improved and updated in real-time, so that the wisdom gained at that particular point in time is available for ongoing use. Now that is how Social makes sense in the enterprise.

Want to learn more? Take a look at these Resolve videos for starters: http://www.gen-e.com/onecolumnList/Video. And feel free to contact our team of experts with any questions you may have. We look forward to hearing from you.

gen-E Reaches New Milestone with Investment from Solis Capital Partners

It’s no secret that gen-E has grown tremendously over the past few years, and today, we’ve reached a new milestone as a global IT process automation (ITPA) software and services provider. We’re pleased to announce we’ve received a private equity investment from Solis Capital Partners, a private equity firm located in Southern California.

We’ve had many long discussions with the experts at Solis about how to best grow gen-E from both an R&D and market development standpoint. First and foremost, the investment will ensure our Resolve Social ITPA^TM platform and complementary solutions and services remain at the forefront of market innovation, and we look forward to showcasing how it will benefit our customers and partners for years to come.

The Solis investment will also fuel further expansion for us on a global scale. In conjunction with our partners across North America, Europe, Australia, South America and Southeast Asia, we’ll make further inroads into markets such as utilities, finance and telecommunications, and we’ll look for innovative new ways to serve our customers.

Craig Dupper, Partner of Solis, is looking forward to helping to guide our growth. "gen-E’s leadership team has successfully orchestrated a market-leading ITPA platform while laying the groundwork for an expanded worldwide partner network,” says Dupper. “We look forward to partnering with gen-E to pursue exciting growth opportunities ahead, building upon the company’s leading market position."

In closing, we’d like to first thank our gen-E team for their valuable contributions, which have been essential to our success, as well as the success of our customers. We also wish to thank our customers, partners, colleagues and friends for believing in us through the years. Stay tuned – the best is yet to come!

You can read more about the financing announcement on our News page.

Adding a Culture of Automation into NOC, Customer Care Initiatives: One CSP’s Game-Changing Approach

In this final post in our three-part series on what it takes to out-innovate your competition, we discuss the impact of building a culture of automation within network operations center (NOC) and customer care initiatives. Automation combined with successful knowledge sharing makes it possible for organizations to achieve the ultimate goal: an elastic process model that scales efficiently with the business. 

So, you’re making progress – based on our previous posts, you’ve embraced the idea of building a culture of knowledge sharing into your NOC and now you’re ready to take that concept to the next level. And what is that next level? Our expert advice is to systematically design a method for integrating automation into the underlying services including diagnostics, triage and repair. 

To make this happen, a proven approach is to first build a library of diagnostic tests that gather diagnostic information for each element of the network infrastructure (network equipment, servers, applications, etc.).  Automation models can then be designed to process each event and/or ticket and then apply the appropriate diagnostic, triage and repair procedures.  In short order, you have added an entirely new level of efficiency to the NOC.

Applying this same approach to the underlying processes of customer care can also make an impact on efficiency. As an example, consider the advancements that a communications service provider (CSP) with operations across three states recently achieved with its innovative automation-based approach to customer care.  In early 2010, the company deployed an IT process automation (ITPA) solution that allows its NOC and engineering teams to quickly and easily build automation schemes that expedite a wide range of repetitive or complex activities, including those that impact customer service. Customer service representatives (CSR) can make use of these automations to instantly identify resolutions for customer issues.  When a CSR makes a request, the system immediately pulls information from a variety of pre-defined sources and provides the CSR with a high-level analysis of that information with warnings and corrective actions that can be put to work in seconds. 

The system also streamlines troubleshooting for hundreds of front-line CSRs staffing the CSP’s U.S. call centers. When an event occurs, the NOC can instantly issue an alert to an entire team of internal managers, field technicians and even outside vendors to inform them of the issue and help them prepare to take action.  Diagnostics and fix-actions are embedded into event and incident remediation workflows, setting the stage for dramatic business process improvements and entirely automated approaches to solving critical customer issues.

Knowledge for the Taking

For all of these actions, results are archived in a centralized Wiki-based collaboration platform that the CSP maintains, allowing CSRs to easily go back and review outcomes for future reference, and modify results as new resolutions emerge.  By storing these outcomes over time, the solution has grown organically to provide a vast knowledge base through which CSRs can quickly search and find effective results-based documentation on an ongoing basis.

Through improved collaboration, a new culture of knowledge has been instilled within this CSP organization. Valuable knowledge – knowledge that previously may have been scattered across various technology departments, or shared exclusively among high-level operations staff and subject matter experts – is now readily available and easily accessible for those handling the CSP’s most pressing day-to-day demands. In addition, the company’s library of automations now contains thousands of action tasks. That number will continue to grow because the CSP is constantly identifying trends coming into the NOC that make sense for automation.

With the ITPA solution in place, the CSP is able to significantly reduce IT and customer service response times. CSRs are now empowered to solve issues quickly and efficiently, and with less escalation. In addition, the CSP has realized a cost-effective way to transform OSS/BSS practices, while also enhancing internal communication; improving CSR workflow and problem solving; and achieving a time savings of thousands of hours each year to drive dramatic improvements in customer service.  

Innovation Drives Bottom Line Success

The challenges facing CSPs today are multi-faceted, and include the need to deliver and monetize new services, contend with eroding margins on existing services, and deal with the staggering increases in data traffic driven by new media consumption behavior.  Only those CSPs that embrace the new technology currency of the day – automation and collaboration – will be able to adjust accordingly, and at a sufficient pace. 

By creating dynamic, human-centric communities powered by automation and focused on operational excellence, everyone – from CSRs to engineers, operations personnel and subject matter experts – is united and in position to directly make vital process improvements.  In sharing their collective expertise and experiences, and striving to maximize the value they bring to an organization, these individuals can evolve their organizations in a way that has not been accomplished before. In turn, those with less expertise benefit from the unique knowledge of these experts.

At the same time, a system evolves in which those with the highest levels of expertise can focus more of their energies on adapting processes and tools to meet the ongoing demands of the market – and outpacing the ever-changing operational gauntlet that continues to confront today’s complex CSP landscape.

And that’s exactly what our Resolve social ITPA software is designed to do. Resolve empowers businesses to break down traditional organizational and process constraints with an innovative approach to automation.  Powered by actionable and dynamic social media-based knowledge sharing capabilities, Resolve has been proven to help our customers realize as much as a 200 percent cost savings within months of deployment.

Want to find out more? Visit our website at www.socialitpa.com or click on this link for full details on our new Resolve Event Management Automation solution: http://www.resolve-systems.com/files/pdf/EMA_Datasheet_New.pdf

The Road to Operational Excellence Begins with Eliminating Stagnation in the NOC

Building a culture of automation around a culture of knowledge within the network operations center (NOC) makes it possible for organizations to overcome stagnation and achieve game-changing operational excellence. Today’s most advanced social IT process automation (ITPA) solutions are making this possible by infusing dynamic, human-centric communities into network operations.  

Network operations and the NOC -- sometimes referred to as Level 1 support -- form the foundation for high-quality service assurance, ensuring that the network itself supports the increasingly complex lattice of services that ride upon it. 

Each NOC that a service provider manages tends to be either geographically- or product- focused, and can be staffed by anywhere from six to 15 personnel on a single shift.  The business process of the NOC is typically defined across a classical FCAPS (fault management, configuration, accounting, performance and security) process model, centered on fault management. 

As NOC organizations have been constructed over the past 15 years, their services can be loosely classified into proactive identification of existing or potential service problems (“diagnostics”), triage of service problems (“triage”) and routing of problems to the appropriate internal or external engineering resources (“remediation”).

But each of these NOC services, once established to a reasonable level of maturity, has tended towards a state of operational stagnation, able to scale upwards with increased revenues, but with little or no economies of scale.  The NOC organizations have similarly been able to incorporate new technologies and products to support new market demands, but have been unable to optimize around those new products in a way that translates into improved operational efficiencies. 

One of the primary methods used to address these strategic challenges has been to employ lower-cost labor, either through outsourcing arrangements or other forms of labor arbitrage.  But labor costs are equalizing throughout the world and business managers are now required to begin looking at making these NOC organizations more adaptive.

Unlike biological systems, where adaptation is hard wired, organizational processes require an overarching discipline to keep from regressing to a state of stagnation.  Transforming from a rigid, stagnant operating model to a dynamic, adaptive one first requires NOC organizations, and the engineering teams that they support, to become very good at knowledge sharing.  Much investment has been made in knowledge management, but often with limited results.  Databases of operational knowledge tend to age too rapidly for a meaningful shelf life: knowledge management processes have been designed with an insufficient appreciation for human behavior to ensure continuous contribution. 

Knowledge Is Something to Be Shared – Not Managed

A culture of knowledge sharing, with the associated increase in aggregate operational and technical knowledge, is the first step in becoming more adaptive.  Organizations should actively seek out innovative ideas aimed at instilling such a culture of knowledge sharing through the use of collaborative social media technologies – treating knowledge as something to be shared, not managed.

A more knowledgeable, adaptive NOC organization does not necessarily translate into efficiency improvements, though it certainly results in higher-quality service delivery.  Additionally, providing that same NOC organization with the processes and tools needed to methodically automate the delivery of its services ensures that the operational processes are optimized while external business conditions change.  For example, an arguably large portion of the work done within the NOC consists of viewing inbound alerts or events from network and systems management tools and running various diagnostics to try and isolate the problem.  Running the diagnostics and creating or updating tickets to be routed to the appropriate internal or external engineering resource tends to consume much manual effort in a typical NOC.  When coupled with the need to support a dizzying array of new equipment and services, time constraints often dictate that a large portion of the diagnostic and triage work gets left to the assigned engineer, moving further up the value chain.

The Ultimate Game Changer: Adding a Culture of Automation into the NOC Mix

Building a culture of automation around a culture of knowledge within the NOC makes it possible for organizations to achieve the ultimate goal: an elastic process model that scales efficiently with the business.  And that’s exactly what our Resolve social ITPA software is designed to do. Resolve empowers businesses to break down traditional organizational and process constraints with an innovative approach to automation.  Powered by actionable and dynamic social media-based knowledge sharing capabilities, Resolve has been proven to help our customers realize as much as a 200 percent cost savings within months of deployment.

Want to find out more? In our next blog post, we’ll go into further detail on how to integrate automation into the underlying services previously mentioned – diagnostics, triage and remediation, while also providing insight into customer use scenarios to give you an idea of how Resolve and social ITPA can benefit your organization.

For more details on our latest ITPA offering – the Resolve Event Management Automation solution – please click on this link: http://www.resolve-systems.com/files/pdf/EMA_Datasheet_New.pdf

Using IT Process Automation (ITPA) to Out-Innovate Your Competition

Service Providers Must Ensure That Back-End and Front-End Processes and Tools Are More Adaptive, Automated and Human-Centric Than Ever Before

Information and communications networks – supporting everything from VoIP to mobile video, cloud platforms and more – have become far too big and complex for cost-effective management by traditional operational support system (OSS) methods and tools. Each step forward disrupts legacy business models yet also opens new doors to human experience and business exploitation.

As much as these technological advances have required a re-evaluation of business and service methodology, so too do they also demand a re-assessment of current notions of OSS and business support systems (BSS) practices.

The service providers that survive the market transformations currently underway must put their assumptions about service operations through a gauntlet; and, if they are to succeed at out-innovating their competition, they must also ensure that their back-end and front-end processes and tools are more adaptive, automated and human-centric than ever before.

The seemingly intractable tension between increased competition, higher service quality requirements and fixed operational costs acts to constrain innovation and drive margins down for every participant in the market. By making targeted process improvements across network operations and customer care, service providers can achieve significant structural advancements in their cost models and remove current constraints to innovation, namely cash flows.

The means of accomplishing this objective rests within a new software discipline called IT process automation (ITPA). ITPA tools and associated methods hold the promise of enabling a significant, readily-quantifiable, re-investment of firm operational resources back into innovation and other revenue-generating areas.

Here on this blog in the weeks and months ahead we’ll be going into more detail on ITPA tools and how they can help you out-innovate your competition. You’ll learn more about our Resolve social ITPA software, which helps businesses break down traditional organizational and process constraints with an innovative approach to automation. Powered by actionable and dynamic knowledge management capabilities, Resolve has been proven to help organizations realize as much as a 200 percent cost savings within months of deployment.

Ready to dive into ITPA right away? For more details on our latest ITPA offering – the Resolve Event Management Automation solution – please click on this link: http://www.resolve-systems.com/files/pdf/EMA_Datasheet_New.pdf

IT Game Changer: Unleashing Tribal Knowledge in Enterprise IT

A community is a collection of people with common needs and wants. Safety. Food. Happiness. The need to work more efficiently is a driving force behind the human desire to form communities, and experts have found that empowering the connection between efficiency and community represents an opportunity to make meaningful improvements in a corporate context.

But the innate sense of community often gets blurred in a corporation, although the need to work towards common goals and make use of “tribal knowledge” to improve efficiency is no less present. The biggest obstacle to corporate efficiency is the complexity of underlying goals and of the relationships involved in meeting those goals. We have 18^th century business models to thank for this phenomenon–they’ve left their mark and continue to pervade today’s corporate structures.

Even as modern communication tools such as email and micro blogging have made some improvements, the fact remains that cooperation and collaboration are still insufficient to promote a level of corporate efficiency that can make a lasting impact.

The community of IT workers that design, implement and support enterprise communications and computing provides an example of the inefficiencies of today’s organizations. They frequently work within highly-siloed cultures operating through complex hierarchies of specialization. The challenges they face on a daily basis often take precedence over their ability to move the organization forward. As a result, they are less strategic, more reactive and less effective collectively.

What are today’s most successful organizations doing to overcome these IT “community” issues? They’re applying three distinct innovations to “superpower” their IT professionals, and as a result, they’re reaping significant efficiency savings by eliminating much of the manual interactions between people and the systems they support. Those three innovations are SOCIAL, KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (KM) and AUTOMATION.

Our Resolve software embraces all of these innovations, and we believe it represents a significant IT game changer in terms of its capability to make powerful connections between efficiency and community. Resolve is a software platform that is defining an emerging IT management discipline called social IT process automation (ITPA). It drives social ITPA through the use of Wikis, which centralize operational knowledge for easy sharing across the enterprise, while also automating up to 90 percent of IT tasks.

No other ITPA solution on the market brings together the big three – social, KM and automation – like Resolve. We are seeing Resolve customers, from large communication service providers to global financial corporations, achieve efficiency increases of more than 250 percent in a matter of months. You can read more about the game-changing possibilities that you can achieve with Resolve here: www.socialitpa.com

On a side note, the book, “Tribal Leadership,” by Dave Logan, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright, served as an inspiration for this post. If you haven’t yet read it, I highly recommend it. Visit the book’s website for more details: http://www.triballeadership.net/book.

RBA: At the Intersection of Innovation and Automation

At this year’s TM Forum/Management World Conference in Dublin, Ireland, I had the privilege of speaking at the annual Innovation Spotlight event, hosted by Stratecast, a division of Frost & Sullivan.


Along with the other panelists, I was asked to address the need for OSS/BSS solutions that meet urgent communication service provider (CSP) requirements for reducing costs, increasing revenue and improving customer satisfaction. This topic hits home with many CSPs as well as other organizations, who, in an era of commoditization and intense competition, face complex challenges.

Innovation in every aspect of business – from partnerships and products, to operations and business service management – is clearly essential today, and the panel set the stage for me to tell attendees how our Resolve Run Book Automation platform is making a difference for CSPs. It is automating routine tasks to save time and costs, while freeing up knowledge workers to explore new avenues of growth and innovation for their companies.

TM Forum was a great experience for our team once again, and it offered an excellent opportunity to spread the word about the power of Resolve.

Incidentally, the Innovation Spotlight panel coincided with the recent selection of generationE for the annual Stratecast “10 to Watch” report, which predicts rising stars in the OSS/BSS sector. You can read more about this report, as well as all of our recent awards, by visiting the generationE website.

CIO.com Article- Don't Ditch the Domain Tools... Apply Platform Automation

I recently published an article on a CIO.com blog site outlining the perils of rip-and-replace mentality for enterprise computing environments.  See my description of the 'trap' and my proposed answers below.

http://advice.cio.com/ckindiger/15365/rip_and_replace_vs_upstream_automation_four_factors_to_consider_for_driving_efficiency_improvements_in_event_man

Article on B/OSS

Would love to get your comments on my new article on B/OSS World magazine.

http://www.billingworld.com/blogs/insider/2010/08/collaboration-combined-with-automation-the-key-to.aspx

A perspective on event management, event correlation, and the service desk.

The answer to most of the pains being experienced by organizations with large historical investments in event management, correlation, and service desk technology is not to 'rip and replace'... it is to focus on upstream AUTOMATION.  I have some clients that are considering ripping out their Network Management and Event Management Systems in favor of open source or commodity-play products, or even switching to one of the other large platform players.  These considerations are driven by a genuine frustration with difficulty in driving additional efficiency improvements from the systems.  Indeed the systems represent a tremendous investments within their environment and with the increased focus on cost savings today, there is an understandable feeling that perhaps the cost of maintaining the platform is prohibitive.

There are several considerations I would counsel a client to make prior to moving in this direction:
1) There is significant innovation occuring above the Event Management layer - Business Process Management, Run Book Automation, etc.  Unless the system is broadly adopted, it will likely not be part of the broader ecosystem of innovation.  Adopting a new Event Management system may reduce maintenance costs in the short term, but it will impede your ability to drive further efficiencies into the process itself.
2) Small software companies / aggressive development teams can often deliver quick integrations that prove difficult to maintain and constrain interoperability in the future
3) Scalability is an ongoing process.  Maintaining pace with growing computing complexities and taking advantage of the latest advances in application architecture require substantial capital investments.  A low cost provider will have difficulty investing sufficient capital to keep up the pace of innovation. 
4) In a mature technology market (like event management) low cost providers have historically either (1) been gobbled up by a larger player or (2) relegated to a niche customer segment where the particular technology market is only marginally relevant to the business, or (3) gone out of business due to being over extended without an operating model that is sustainable.

OSS, BSS, and Cloud Communications

The problems addressed by operations support systems (OSS) technology and process are not in any way diminished by the incorporation or wholesale adoption of cloud computing and cloud communications.  If anything, the rapid adoption of different cloud technology paradigms demands a renewed focus on OPERATIONS.  When the smoke settles, and new cloud driven use cases have been explored and addressed by multiple vendors, both traditional communication service providers (CSPs) and those with new business models, switching costs will be minimum, and operating costs and service experience will be paramount to retaining users (customers).  Operations process automation will take center stage in OSS strategy and will be the central 'make or break' component of a successful business model.


A recent article in CRN Magazine describing a new alliance focused on the communications side of the cloud underlines the importance of both new entrants and traditional CSPs to place operations automation at the core of their strategy.


http://bit.ly/bvjIXK


The rate of decline of traditional telecommunication services continues to accelerate.  CSPs are rapidly converting PSTN subscribers to VoIP, fixed mobile, and in some cases, mobile offerings.  Take a look at the latest TM Forum research papers- the #s are staggering (http://www.tmforum.org/).  The focus of traditional CSPs is now largely  on delivering creative bundled offerings that offer more value at increasingly lower prices.  With the onset of cloud based communications platforms hitting the mainstream, cloud communications and cloud computing will intersect and further accelerate adoption of a broadening array of cloud paradigms.


While cost savings and redundancy are key, they are easy to address in the early evolution of cloud computing and cloud communications- but they become more challenging as more services move to the cloud the various platforms are required to inter operate.  For example, consider a simple case where back office ERP systems are integrated to salesforce.com through cloud based integration components, and salesforce.com is enabled by a cloud based, integrated converged communications platform.  Scale this to millions of "users" across tens of thousands of organizations. 


A renewed focus on operations process automation is required to bring OSS capabilities in line with its importance in the continued evolution of the cloud.

Resolve (generationE) Gets Nominated for a TM Forum Excellence Award

I am very excited and proud to announce that generationE's Service Management and OSS Automation solution based on Resolve RBA, a breakout product for CSP OSS/BSS automation orchestration, has joined the likes of Alcatel Lucent, IBM, Cisco, Clarity, and other OSS providers in the TM Forum Solution Excellence Award category.  Read more about it on the TM Forum website.

http://tmforum.org/ExcellenceAwards2010/Nominees/8416/Home.html

While Resolve is a fully customizable process automation platform, generationE packages the solution with a library of Runbook Templates that span the eTOM Operations (OPS) process area.  Runbook Templates focus on areas within the FAB process grouping that represent opportunity for cross-process or cross-technology automation.  For example, there is a Runbook Template for modeling and automating several of the manual, cross application workflows associated with Resource Trouble Management.  This Template, once configured, deployed, and integrated with relevant systems (Network Monitoring, Trouble Ticketing, Performance Management, etc.) allows organizations to manage their heterogeneous hardware platforms with a standard, automated series of Runbooks performing many of the otherwise manual activities.  These activities include gathering diagnostic information on troubled devices, automatically enacting remediation steps (re-allocating resources, restarting services, etc.), and routing tickets to the responsible party (internal SMEs or external vendors).   Similarly, there are service specific Templates that cover the Service Problem Management process area- IPTV and T1 are two of the most broadly deployed.

Resolve leverages eTOM as both the foundational process framework and a reference point as new automation needs arise within our customers.  eTOM allows us to quickly characterize, articulate, and prioritize these needs into our ever growing library of Runbooks.

Go Team!

Enterprise Social Media

Over the weekend I read a fantastic article from Mat Fogarty (http://mashable.com/2010/03/05/companies-crowdsourcing/) and it started me thinking on the topic of Enterprise Social Media.  In particular I believe that we've only begun to explore the different ways that social media related innovations will change the internal culture and operational dynamics of large corporate organizations.

Mat touches on the potential transformative affect on corporate culture-

"The ability to manage and profit from employee knowledge through social networks, idea funnels, and prediction markets will be the defining competitive advantage for this decade. Employees will have a voice and enterprises will truly leverage their most valuable assets."

Most people today spend more time at work or doing work than they do at home or at leisure.  Indeed social media is already making a substantial impact on how we spend our home / leisure time and how we communicate with each other.  With numerous, ubiquitous communication tools integrated into our daily lives, social networks are becoming integrated communication hubs where we share content and experiences.

What Mat doesn't explore is the cultural challenges that might be an obstacle to corporate adoption of social media in the workplace.  Social Media provides the opportunity for massive improvements in workplace productivity and quality, there is no question.  But adoption curves might be hindered by fears of downsizing.  Increased collaboration should be a good that is directly measured by and rewarded by management.  Is it possible to accelerate adoption and reward resulting workplace efficiency improvements with increased time off, bonuses, promotions etc?

As we continue to drive towards increasing automation within technology organizations through the use of Social Media we'll be exploring how to reward those who help their organizations rise to the top.

Myth # 3: Debunking the Myths of IT Process Automation

                                     Myth # 3:
              Senior Management looks for automation
                        tools to drive staff reductions



Although the current economic climate leads one to consider the potential for a given project to result in reduced operating costs, taking a step back, the reality is quite the contrary. Indeed, organizations that excel at implementing automation tools and efficiency programs are able to consequently invest more in innovation. These companies will gain market share, leading to more, often higher paying jobs.


The benefits of RBA are that of improving business agility and operating efficiency. It is critical that an automation program centered on RBA should have the benefit objectives clearly articulated, both in order to measure those benefits to obtain continued investment and to ensure organizational buy-in. An inventory of prospective processes should be created and ranked according to their respective costs and benefits. When determining the benefits of a specific automation, the following metrics are a good starting point for measuring outcomes:


- The time it takes to complete the process manually


- The skill level it takes to complete the process manually


- The # of minutes of effort it takes to complete the process manually



Advances in automation technology provide a unique opportunity for IT professionals to keep their jobs from succumbing to the forces of labor arbitrage. Jobs that are higher skilled, and less manual, repeatable, and predictable are less likely to be outsourced to a lower skilled, lower paid labor pool.

Myth # 2: Debunking the Myths of IT Process Automation

                                         Myth # 2:
                     It’s all about the process, stupid


When organizing and planning to achieve the benefits of Automation, it is often tempting to identify overarching IT processes and focus time, money, and energy on process analysis efforts. Whereas this approach works well when building or customizing an application to model a structured process, it does not work as well with 3rd level automation.

Indeed, we have found that the focus of the effort should be on cataloguing a discreet set of manual tasks. Usually clustered around multiple application workflows and prioritizing tasks that are highly repetitive.

The process analysis work here is very minimal. We focus on highly repetitive, simple tasks.


In one pilot we conducted with Resolve at a large bank, the first Run Book helped create what equated to a savings of 4,000 hours of manual work. [Of course, the pilot turned into a global rollout with 30+ Run Books at the publish date of this paper.]


But, what about more complex tasks?

The answer, as it turns out, is that it’s really all about the people, not the process. Any approach that requires discreet, separate design efforts will ultimately hit an immovable ceiling of diminishing returns and stagnate into yet another application silo that has marginal incremental returns to the business.

In building a successful RBA program, we must:


                (a) Build internal momentum /awareness/funding


                (b) Offer a platform that is extendible to a broad set of content automation contributors (SMEs. etc) 

                 (c) Offer a platform that encourages collaboration and re-use across the organization

Myth # 1: Debunking the Myths of IT Process Automation

                                            Myth # 1:
                       If you build it, they will come

Building a sustainable platform that ensures adoption of your process automation goals is not easy. Everyone knows a lot of manual work occurs that essentially should be automated.

But, why isn’t it?

Some challenges include:

-Scripting, or heavy customization of existing applications. This is difficult to accomplish unless the right technology platform is in place.

-Understanding the manual activities required to Automate at a sufficiently granular level, requires both good interviewing and listening skills.

There are 2 fundamental approaches to achieving the benefits possible through Automation 2.0 solutions. The first approach considers treating automation as a new process and functional area, with supporting technology and people. This approach does not take advantage of recent advances in collaboration technologies and the changes in how people interact with technology.

A more strategic approach to achieving the benefits possible through Automation 2.0 is that of integrating Automation tools and techniques into each existing process.

Making the tools ubiquitous drives adoption and places the onus of and the power to automate in the hands of the SME. Take the process of Event and Incident Management. Treating Automation as a discreet project or separate function leads to an almost certain pattern of innovation and then stagnation. The only way to sustain an underlying technology architecture that perpetuates automation is to place the tools and techniques in the hands of the level 2 and level 3 engineers for developing automation content. Additionally, Help Desk and Level 1 operations personnel become more empowered with a richer set of activities they can perform because of the increased depth of operational documentation.