Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how SaaS delivery and BMC Software’s “truth in data” architecture deliver big payoffs for IT support at Comverge and Design Within Reach.
Using Testing as a Service, Globe Testing Helping Startups Make Leap to Cloud...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on how Globe Testing is pushing the envelope on Agile development and applications development management using HP tools and platforms.
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a major telecom company has improved its IT performance to deliver better experiences and payoffs for its businesses and end users alike.
Using Testing as a Service, Globe Testing Helping Startups Make Leap to Cloud...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on how Globe Testing is pushing the envelope on Agile development and applications development management using HP tools and platforms.
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a major telecom company has improved its IT performance to deliver better experiences and payoffs for its businesses and end users alike.
How The Riverside Company Got Control of Their IT Service ManagementSamanage
The value of Samanage was quickly felt throughout The Riverside Company. In just a matter of weeks, asset management was fully deployed and 90% of the contracts were added into Samanage.
DevOps by Design -- Practical Guide to Effectively Ushering DevOps into Any O...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on some powerful best practices on making DevOps an accelerant to broader business goals, but at the level of a multigenerational IT activity.
Internet of Things Brings On Development Demands That DevOps Manages, Say Exp...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how continuous processes around development and deployment of applications impact and benefit the Internet of Things trend.
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a major law firm has adopted desktop virtualization and BYOD to give employees more choices and flexibility.
This slideshow was given by Marcel Nieuwpoort on february 3rd as part of the Sparked Cloud Accelerate Workshop.
It covers Microsoft's take on Cloud Computing for business.
Simply Business Cloud, asserts that:
- Businesses like the Cloud because it delivers
- A new Cloud benchmark has evolved
- Businesses are taking a step-by-step adoption approach to Cloud maturity
- Cloud is now the default for powering new business solutions
See how hosting Sage 300 CRE (formerly Sage Timberline Office) or Sage 100 Contractor on the Cloud will save you time money and headaches. Increase data security, improve response times, gain anywhere, anytime access and reduce IT maintenance! Hosting and data migration services from Ledgerwood Associates are customized for Sage software (Timberline and Master Builder). Get up on the Cloud quickly and painlessly with Timbercloud.
Lightning Talk #9: How UX and Data Storytelling Can Shape Policy by Mika Aldabaux singapore
How can we take UX and Data Storytelling out of the tech context and use them to change the way government behaves?
Showcasing the truth is the highest goal of data storytelling. Because the design of a chart can affect the interpretation of data in a major way, one must wield visual tools with care and deliberation. Using quantitative facts to evoke an emotional response is best achieved with the combination of UX and data storytelling.
Succession “Losers”: What Happens to Executives Passed Over for the CEO Job?
By David F. Larcker, Stephen A. Miles, and Brian Tayan
Stanford Closer Look Series
Overview:
Shareholders pay considerable attention to the choice of executive selected as the new CEO whenever a change in leadership takes place. However, without an inside look at the leading candidates to assume the CEO role, it is difficult for shareholders to tell whether the board has made the correct choice. In this Closer Look, we examine CEO succession events among the largest 100 companies over a ten-year period to determine what happens to the executives who were not selected (i.e., the “succession losers”) and how they perform relative to those who were selected (the “succession winners”).
We ask:
• Are the executives selected for the CEO role really better than those passed over?
• What are the implications for understanding the labor market for executive talent?
• Are differences in performance due to operating conditions or quality of available talent?
• Are boards better at identifying CEO talent than other research generally suggests?
How The Riverside Company Got Control of Their IT Service ManagementSamanage
The value of Samanage was quickly felt throughout The Riverside Company. In just a matter of weeks, asset management was fully deployed and 90% of the contracts were added into Samanage.
DevOps by Design -- Practical Guide to Effectively Ushering DevOps into Any O...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on some powerful best practices on making DevOps an accelerant to broader business goals, but at the level of a multigenerational IT activity.
Internet of Things Brings On Development Demands That DevOps Manages, Say Exp...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how continuous processes around development and deployment of applications impact and benefit the Internet of Things trend.
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a major law firm has adopted desktop virtualization and BYOD to give employees more choices and flexibility.
This slideshow was given by Marcel Nieuwpoort on february 3rd as part of the Sparked Cloud Accelerate Workshop.
It covers Microsoft's take on Cloud Computing for business.
Simply Business Cloud, asserts that:
- Businesses like the Cloud because it delivers
- A new Cloud benchmark has evolved
- Businesses are taking a step-by-step adoption approach to Cloud maturity
- Cloud is now the default for powering new business solutions
See how hosting Sage 300 CRE (formerly Sage Timberline Office) or Sage 100 Contractor on the Cloud will save you time money and headaches. Increase data security, improve response times, gain anywhere, anytime access and reduce IT maintenance! Hosting and data migration services from Ledgerwood Associates are customized for Sage software (Timberline and Master Builder). Get up on the Cloud quickly and painlessly with Timbercloud.
Lightning Talk #9: How UX and Data Storytelling Can Shape Policy by Mika Aldabaux singapore
How can we take UX and Data Storytelling out of the tech context and use them to change the way government behaves?
Showcasing the truth is the highest goal of data storytelling. Because the design of a chart can affect the interpretation of data in a major way, one must wield visual tools with care and deliberation. Using quantitative facts to evoke an emotional response is best achieved with the combination of UX and data storytelling.
Succession “Losers”: What Happens to Executives Passed Over for the CEO Job?
By David F. Larcker, Stephen A. Miles, and Brian Tayan
Stanford Closer Look Series
Overview:
Shareholders pay considerable attention to the choice of executive selected as the new CEO whenever a change in leadership takes place. However, without an inside look at the leading candidates to assume the CEO role, it is difficult for shareholders to tell whether the board has made the correct choice. In this Closer Look, we examine CEO succession events among the largest 100 companies over a ten-year period to determine what happens to the executives who were not selected (i.e., the “succession losers”) and how they perform relative to those who were selected (the “succession winners”).
We ask:
• Are the executives selected for the CEO role really better than those passed over?
• What are the implications for understanding the labor market for executive talent?
• Are differences in performance due to operating conditions or quality of available talent?
• Are boards better at identifying CEO talent than other research generally suggests?
The impact of innovation on travel and tourism industries (World Travel Marke...Brian Solis
From the impact of Pokemon Go on Silicon Valley to artificial intelligence, futurist Brian Solis talks to Mathew Parsons of World Travel Market about the future of travel, tourism and hospitality.
We’re all trying to find that idea or spark that will turn a good project into a great project. Creativity plays a huge role in the outcome of our work. Harnessing the power of collaboration and open source, we can make great strides towards excellence. Not just for designers, this talk can be applicable to many different roles – even development. In this talk, Seasoned Creative Director Sara Cannon is going to share some secrets about creative methodology, collaboration, and the strong role that open source can play in our work.
The Six Highest Performing B2B Blog Post FormatsBarry Feldman
If your B2B blogging goals include earning social media shares and backlinks to boost your search rankings, this infographic lists the size best approaches.
Each technological age has been marked by a shift in how the industrial platform enables companies to rethink their business processes and create wealth. In the talk I argue that we are limiting our view of what this next industrial/digital age can offer because of how we read, measure and through that perceive the world (how we cherry pick data). Companies are locked in metrics and quantitative measures, data that can fit into a spreadsheet. And by that they see the digital transformation merely as an efficiency tool to the fossil fuel age. But we need to stretch further…
Learn “How to get your IT budget to 1 percent of Revenue” HCL Technologies
Meeting an audacious goal such as this requires intelligent outsourcing, aggressive migration to the cloud, and savvy management of change
Download this report by Andy Nallappan, CIO Avago Technologies
Download Tab
Fast-Changing Demands on Data Centers Drives the Need for Automated Data Cent...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how organization need to deal with the impact that IT and big data is having on data centers and how DCIM can help.
With Large Workforce in the Field, Source Refrigeration Selects an Agile Plat...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a nationwide company has harnessed the power of mobile applications to increase the productivity of its workforce.
Navicure Gains IT Capacity Optimization and Performance Monitoring Using VMwa...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how claims clearinghouse Navicure has harnessed virtualization to meet the demands of an ever-growing business.
Rapidly Evolving IT Trends Make Open, Agile Integration More Important than EverDana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on the maturing of open source software and its role in making enterprises responsive to a changing landscape.
Virtualization Spurs ERP Operations and Disaster Recovery for Sportswear Gian...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how Columbia Sportswear has harnessed virtualization to provide a host of benefits for business units.
Connector Corner: Automate dynamic content and events by pushing a buttonDianaGray10
Here is something new! In our next Connector Corner webinar, we will demonstrate how you can use a single workflow to:
Create a campaign using Mailchimp with merge tags/fields
Send an interactive Slack channel message (using buttons)
Have the message received by managers and peers along with a test email for review
But there’s more:
In a second workflow supporting the same use case, you’ll see:
Your campaign sent to target colleagues for approval
If the “Approve” button is clicked, a Jira/Zendesk ticket is created for the marketing design team
But—if the “Reject” button is pushed, colleagues will be alerted via Slack message
Join us to learn more about this new, human-in-the-loop capability, brought to you by Integration Service connectors.
And...
Speakers:
Akshay Agnihotri, Product Manager
Charlie Greenberg, Host
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 3DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 3. In this session, we will cover desktop automation along with UI automation.
Topics covered:
UI automation Introduction,
UI automation Sample
Desktop automation flow
Pradeep Chinnala, Senior Consultant Automation Developer @WonderBotz and UiPath MVP
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered QualityInflectra
In this insightful webinar, Inflectra explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming software development and testing. Discover how AI-powered tools are revolutionizing every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from design and prototyping to testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Learn about:
• The Future of Testing: How AI is shifting testing towards verification, analysis, and higher-level skills, while reducing repetitive tasks.
• Test Automation: How AI-powered test case generation, optimization, and self-healing tests are making testing more efficient and effective.
• Visual Testing: Explore the emerging capabilities of AI in visual testing and how it's set to revolutionize UI verification.
• Inflectra's AI Solutions: See demonstrations of Inflectra's cutting-edge AI tools like the ChatGPT plugin and Azure Open AI platform, designed to streamline your testing process.
Whether you're a developer, tester, or QA professional, this webinar will give you valuable insights into how AI is shaping the future of software delivery.
Neuro-symbolic is not enough, we need neuro-*semantic*Frank van Harmelen
Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI is on the rise. However, simply machine learning on just any symbolic structure is not sufficient to really harvest the gains of NeSy. These will only be gained when the symbolic structures have an actual semantics. I give an operational definition of semantics as “predictable inference”.
All of this illustrated with link prediction over knowledge graphs, but the argument is general.
JMeter webinar - integration with InfluxDB and GrafanaRTTS
Watch this recorded webinar about real-time monitoring of application performance. See how to integrate Apache JMeter, the open-source leader in performance testing, with InfluxDB, the open-source time-series database, and Grafana, the open-source analytics and visualization application.
In this webinar, we will review the benefits of leveraging InfluxDB and Grafana when executing load tests and demonstrate how these tools are used to visualize performance metrics.
Length: 30 minutes
Session Overview
-------------------------------------------
During this webinar, we will cover the following topics while demonstrating the integrations of JMeter, InfluxDB and Grafana:
- What out-of-the-box solutions are available for real-time monitoring JMeter tests?
- What are the benefits of integrating InfluxDB and Grafana into the load testing stack?
- Which features are provided by Grafana?
- Demonstration of InfluxDB and Grafana using a practice web application
To view the webinar recording, go to:
https://www.rttsweb.com/jmeter-integration-webinar
Key Trends Shaping the Future of Infrastructure.pdfCheryl Hung
Keynote at DIGIT West Expo, Glasgow on 29 May 2024.
Cheryl Hung, ochery.com
Sr Director, Infrastructure Ecosystem, Arm.
The key trends across hardware, cloud and open-source; exploring how these areas are likely to mature and develop over the short and long-term, and then considering how organisations can position themselves to adapt and thrive.
Slack (or Teams) Automation for Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Soluti...Jeffrey Haguewood
Sidekick Solutions uses Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Solutions Apricot) and automation solutions to integrate data for business workflows.
We believe integration and automation are essential to user experience and the promise of efficient work through technology. Automation is the critical ingredient to realizing that full vision. We develop integration products and services for Bonterra Case Management software to support the deployment of automations for a variety of use cases.
This video focuses on the notifications, alerts, and approval requests using Slack for Bonterra Impact Management. The solutions covered in this webinar can also be deployed for Microsoft Teams.
Interested in deploying notification automations for Bonterra Impact Management? Contact us at sales@sidekicksolutionsllc.com to discuss next steps.
Kubernetes & AI - Beauty and the Beast !?! @KCD Istanbul 2024Tobias Schneck
As AI technology is pushing into IT I was wondering myself, as an “infrastructure container kubernetes guy”, how get this fancy AI technology get managed from an infrastructure operational view? Is it possible to apply our lovely cloud native principals as well? What benefit’s both technologies could bring to each other?
Let me take this questions and provide you a short journey through existing deployment models and use cases for AI software. On practical examples, we discuss what cloud/on-premise strategy we may need for applying it to our own infrastructure to get it to work from an enterprise perspective. I want to give an overview about infrastructure requirements and technologies, what could be beneficial or limiting your AI use cases in an enterprise environment. An interactive Demo will give you some insides, what approaches I got already working for real.
Essentials of Automations: Optimizing FME Workflows with ParametersSafe Software
Are you looking to streamline your workflows and boost your projects’ efficiency? Do you find yourself searching for ways to add flexibility and control over your FME workflows? If so, you’re in the right place.
Join us for an insightful dive into the world of FME parameters, a critical element in optimizing workflow efficiency. This webinar marks the beginning of our three-part “Essentials of Automation” series. This first webinar is designed to equip you with the knowledge and skills to utilize parameters effectively: enhancing the flexibility, maintainability, and user control of your FME projects.
Here’s what you’ll gain:
- Essentials of FME Parameters: Understand the pivotal role of parameters, including Reader/Writer, Transformer, User, and FME Flow categories. Discover how they are the key to unlocking automation and optimization within your workflows.
- Practical Applications in FME Form: Delve into key user parameter types including choice, connections, and file URLs. Allow users to control how a workflow runs, making your workflows more reusable. Learn to import values and deliver the best user experience for your workflows while enhancing accuracy.
- Optimization Strategies in FME Flow: Explore the creation and strategic deployment of parameters in FME Flow, including the use of deployment and geometry parameters, to maximize workflow efficiency.
- Pro Tips for Success: Gain insights on parameterizing connections and leveraging new features like Conditional Visibility for clarity and simplicity.
We’ll wrap up with a glimpse into future webinars, followed by a Q&A session to address your specific questions surrounding this topic.
Don’t miss this opportunity to elevate your FME expertise and drive your projects to new heights of efficiency.
GraphRAG is All You need? LLM & Knowledge GraphGuy Korland
Guy Korland, CEO and Co-founder of FalkorDB, will review two articles on the integration of language models with knowledge graphs.
1. Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08302
2. Microsoft Research's GraphRAG paper and a review paper on various uses of knowledge graphs:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/graphrag-unlocking-llm-discovery-on-narrative-private-data/
Epistemic Interaction - tuning interfaces to provide information for AI supportAlan Dix
Paper presented at SYNERGY workshop at AVI 2024, Genoa, Italy. 3rd June 2024
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/synergy2024-epistemic/
As machine learning integrates deeper into human-computer interactions, the concept of epistemic interaction emerges, aiming to refine these interactions to enhance system adaptability. This approach encourages minor, intentional adjustments in user behaviour to enrich the data available for system learning. This paper introduces epistemic interaction within the context of human-system communication, illustrating how deliberate interaction design can improve system understanding and adaptation. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the potential of epistemic interaction to significantly advance human-computer interaction by leveraging intuitive human communication strategies to inform system design and functionality, offering a novel pathway for enriching user-system engagements.
FIDO Alliance Osaka Seminar: The WebAuthn API and Discoverable Credentials.pdf
Cloud Approach to IT Service Desk and Incident Management Bring Analysis, Lower-Costs and Self-Help Benefits to Two Remedyforce Users
1. Cloud Approach to IT Service Desk and Incident
Management Bring Analysis, Lower-Costs and Self-Help
Benefits to Two Remedyforce Users
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how SaaS delivery and BMC Software’s “truth in
data” architecture deliver big payoffs for IT support at Comverge and Design Within Reach.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: BMC Software
Join Danielle Bailey and Alec Davis at Dreamforce 2012
Sept. 18-21 in San Francisco.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're
listening to BriefingsDirect
Today we present a sponsored podcast discussion on how two companies are extending their use
of cloud computing by taking on IT service desk and incident management
functions as a service.
We will see how a common data architecture and fast delivery benefits combine
to improve the efficiency, cost, and result of IT support of end users.
Our examples are intelligent energy-management solutions provider Comverge
and how it’s extended its use of Salesforce.com into a self-service enabled service desk
capability using BMC’s Remedyforce. [Disclosure: BMC Software is a sponsor of
BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
We'll also hear the story of how modern furniture and accessories purveyor, Design Within
Reach, has made its IT support more responsive even at a global scale via cloud-based incident-
management capabilities.
Stay with us now to learn more about improving the business of delivering IT services, and in
moving IT support and change management from a cost center to a proactive IT knowledge
asset.
Here to share their story on creating the services that empower end users to increasingly solve
their own IT issues, is Danielle Bailey, IT Manager at Comverge in Norcross, Georgia. Welcome
Danielle.
Danielle Bailey: Thank you so much for having me.
2. Gardner: We are also here with Alec Davis, the Senior System Analyst at Design Within Reach.
He's in San Francisco, but the company is based in Stamford,
Connecticut. Welcome to BriefingsDirect, Alec.
Alec Davis: Thank you, very much. Thanks for having me.
Gardner: Danielle, when your company started looking at
improving your helpdesk solutions and your IT support, I have to assume that -- like a lot of
companies -- you had some significant pain and cost when it comes to providing that support,
particularly as you change systems and move through the maturation and evolution of IT.
Could you describe for me some of the problems were that you really wanted to solve, that you
want to improve?
Pain points
Bailey: We had three pretty big pain points that we wanted to address, as we moved forward.
The first was cost. As our company was growing pretty quickly, we were
having some growing pains with our financials as far as being able to justify
some of the IT expense that we had.
The current solution that we had actually charged by person, because there
was a micro-agent involved, and so as we grew as a company, that expense
continued to grow, even though it wasn’t providing us the same return on
investment (ROI) per person to justify that.
So we had a little over $55,000 a year expense with our prior software-as-a-service (SaaS)
solution, and so we wanted to be able to reduce that, bring it back more in line with the actual
size of our IT group, so that it fit a little bit better into our budget.
One of the reasons we went with Remedyforce is that rather than charging us by the end user, the
license fees were by the helpdesk agent, which would allow us to stay within the scope of what
our size of our IT team was.
The second big issue that we had was that a lot of our end users were remote. We have field
technicians who go out each day and install meters on homes, and they don’t carry laptops, and
the micro-agent required laptops for them to be able to log tickets.
We wanted to be able to use something that would allow us to give our field techs the ability to
log tickets on a mobile application, like their iPhones that we have for them to use. So it was
important that whatever we went forward with had that aspect, and Remedyforce did have that.
The third issue was that we were Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliant and we needed to make sure
that whatever solution we chose would allow us to track change management, to go through
3. approval workflows, and to allow our management to have insight into what changes were being
made as they went forward, and to be able to interact and collaborate on those changes.
So that was the third reason we chose Remedyforce. It has the change management in there, but
it also has the Salesforce.com Chatter interface that we are able to use to make sure that
managers can follow some of the incidents and see as we go through if we have any changes that
we can quickly work with them to explain what we may need and that they can contribute to that
conversation.
Those were the three biggest things that we were kind of looking at when we were deciding what
to move forward with.
Gardner: Alec, does this sound familiar or were there some other concerns that you had in your
particular company that you wanted to address?
Different stories
Davis: We have kind of a different story. A couple of years ago we made a huge corporate move
from San Francisco to Stamford, Connecticut. At that move we saw that it was an
opportunity to look at our network infrastructure and examine what hardware we
needed and whether we could move to the cloud.
So Remedyforce was part of a bigger project. We were moving toward
Salesforce and we also moved toward Google Apps for corporate email. We
wanted to reduce a lot of the hardware we had, so that we didn’t have to move it
across the country.
We were also looking for something that could be up and running before that move, so we
wouldn't have any downtime.
We quickly signed up with Google, and that went well. And then we moved into Salesforce.com.
At Dreamforce 2010, Remedyforce was announced, and I was there and I was really excited
about the product. I was familiar with BMC’s previous tools, as well as some of the other IT
staff, so we quickly jumped on it.
But as part of that move, something else kind of changed about our IT group. We did grow a bit
smaller, but we were also more spread out. We used to all be in one location. Now, we're in San
Francisco, Stamford, and also Texas. So we needed something that was easily accessible to us
all. We didn’t necessarily want to have to use a virtual private network (VPN) to get onto a
system, to interact with our incidents.
And we also liked the idea of a portal for our customers. Our customers are really just internal
customers, our employees. We liked the idea of them being able to log in and see the status of an
incident that they have reported.
4. We're also really big on change management. We manage our own homegrown enterprise
resource planning (ERP) system. So we do lots of changes to that system and fix bugs as well.
And when we add something new, we need approval of different heads of different departments,
depending on what that feature is changing.
So we are big on change management, and prior to that we were just using really fancy Microsoft
Word documents to get approvals that were either signed via email or printed out and specifically
signed. We like the idea of change management in Remedyforce and having the improved
approval process.
Gardner: Danielle, let’s learn a little bit more about your company, Comverge. Tell us what it
does, what your business is, but then also a little bit about your IT support situation in terms of
numbers of users and their distribution around the world?
Bailey: Comverge is a green energy company. We try to help reduce peak load for utility
companies. For example, when folks are coming home and starting to wash clothes, turn on the
air-conditioning and things like that, the energy use for those utilities spikes.
Hardware and software
We provide software and hardware that allows us to cycle air-conditioning compressors on and
off, so that we reduce that peak. And by reducing that peak we are able to help utility companies
to meet their own energy needs, rather than buying power from other utilities or building new
power plants.
We have been in business for about 25 years. We originally started out as part of Scientific
Atlanta, but they have taken on new companies across the country to integrate new technology
into what we offer.
We are now nationwide. We provide services to utilities in the Northeast, from Pennsylvania, and
then all the way down to Florida, and then all the way west to California, and then to Texas, New
Mexico, and different areas in-between. And we’ve recently opened new offices in South Africa,
providing the same energy services to them.
Comverge tries to make sure that the energy that we're able to help provide by reducing that load
is green. It’s renewable. It’s something we can continue to do. It just helps to reduce cost as well
as to save the environment from some of the pollution that may happen from new energy
production.
In a nutshell, Comverge is a leading provider of intelligent energy management solutions for
residential and commercial and industrial customers. We deliver the insight and controls that
enables energy providers and consumers to optimize their power usage through the industry’s
only proven comprehensive set of technology services and information management solution.
5. In January, Comverge delivered two new products, the Intel P910 PCU that includes capabilities
to support dynamic pricing programs, and Intel Open Source Applications for the iPhone. The
iPhone is very important to us. Our field technicians are using it at residential and commercial
installations, and we just want to make sure that we continue with that innovation.
Gardner: And how many IT end users are you supporting at this point?
Bailey: About 600, and those are in South Africa, as well as all around the U.S.
Gardner: And so you are delivering your support through the same infrastructure, the same
applications delivery across the globe?
Bailey: That’s right, because it is web-based, everybody can access it. It's great.
Gardner: And what's the new experience in terms of performance on that?
Bailey: As far as the end users, they've all been really happy with it. We transitioned in April to
Remedyforce from our old SaaS system, but the users say that Remedyforce is a lot easier for
them to use, as far as putting in ticket and for them to see updates whenever our technicians write
notes or anything on the tickets. It's a lot easier for them to share with others whenever they have
to change what we are working on.
Join Danielle Bailey and Alec Davis at Dreamforce 2012
Sept. 18-21 in San Francisco.
Core business
Gardner: And it seems that your core business is involved with getting more data and
information and making that useable in terms of management of energy resources. I suppose the
same effect is being employed here at the IT level.
Is there something about the information that you are able to glean from your interactions, from
these tickets, and from your IT workforce that you are then bring back into how you provide IT
better, to make it either proactive or building a better knowledge base asset?
Bailey: We are. We just implemented Remedyforce in April. So we are still building our
knowledge base. We didn’t have that capability previously. So we are able to use some of the
tickets that we have come in as we process and update those and control and close those. We are
able to build articles that our technicians can use going forward.
I have recently switched my ERP analyst, but because I was able to pull some of that information
out of Remedyforce, where I had my prior ERP analyst, it actually helped me to train this new
person on some of the things they can do to troubleshoot and resolve problems.
6. We are also able to use the automated reporting out of Remedyforce so that I can schedule
reports on our tickets, see how many we have open, and for what categories and things like that,
and take that to our executive management. They're able to see our resource needs, see where we
may have bottlenecks, and help us make decisions that help our IT group move faster and more
efficiently.
Gardner: Alec at Design Within Reach, help us better understand your company, what it does,
and then also some of the requirements that are unique to your organization, when it comes to IT
support.
Davis: Design Within Reach is a modern furniture retailer. We've been around for 12 years,
starting in San Francisco. We have a website that has the majority of our sales. We also have
“studios” that are better described as showrooms. We have usually about five reps in those
studios, and we have about 50 studios around the U.S. and Canada.
So those [reps] are our users that we support. We've become a very mobile company in the last
couple of years. A lot of our sales reps are using iPads. One of the requirements we've had is to
be able to interact with corporate in a mobile fashion. Our sales reps walk around the showroom
and work with our customers and they don’t necessarily want to be tied to a desk or tied to a
desktop. So that is definitely a requirement for us.
Our IT staff is small. We have an IT group, information technologies, and we also have our
information systems, which is our development side. In IT we have about six people and in our
IS department we also have about six people. We have kind of a tiered system. Tickets come in
from our employees, and our helpdesk will triage those incidences and then raise them up to a
tiered system to our development side, if needed, or to our network team.
We do have also some contractors and developers. As I mentioned before, we have our own ERP
system. We do a lot of the development in house, so we don’t have to outsource it. It's important
for those contractors to be able to get into Remedyforce and work the change management we
have into the requirement, and also in some cases look at incidences to look how bugs are
happening in our ERP environment.
Self-help improvement
Gardner: Given that you have a fairly concentrated group that is accomplishing significant
amount of work, is there anything about the Remedyforce approach that's given you self-help
improvement? How have you been able to empower those end users to find the resources they
need, to keep you fairly lean and mean when it comes to IT?
Davis: Well, we have put most of the onus on our IT department to know how to resolve an
issue, and we did have a lot of transition with new employees during our move. So building a
knowledge base with on-boarding new IT people is also very important. Again, we're a small
7. team and we support a larger internal customer base, so we need them to start and have the
answers pretty quickly.
Time is money, and we have our sales reps out there that are selling to our large customer base. If
there's an issue with the reporting, we need to be able to respond to it quickly.
Gardner: And the conventional wisdom is that helpdesks are still costly, and the view has been
that it’s a cost center. Is there anything about how you have done things that you think is
changing that perception? Is it becoming more of a proactive approach, and is there a way of
defining IT support more as a collaborative interaction rather than just a necessary evil?
Davis: Well, essentially the reporting has helped us to isolate larger issues, and to also identify
employees that put a lot of incidents in. With the reporting, which is very flexible, and with
reporting for management, requirements can change. With the Remedyforce reporting, I can
change those existing reports, create new ones, or add new value to those reports.
Mainly you see how many tickets are coming in. We can show management how many incidents
we are handling on a daily basis, weekly, monthly, and so forth. But I use it mainly to identify
where are the larger issues. Managing an ERP system is a large task, and I like to see what issues
are happening and where can we work to fix those bugs. I work directly with the developers, so I
like to be as proactive as I can to fix those bugs.
And we are very spread out and very mobile, so we like the flexibility to be able to get into
Remedyforce without VPN or traditional methods.
Gardner: It sounds as if you are gaining almost a business intelligence (BI) insight as to what's
going on with your IT operations through the perceptions and needs of your end users. I assume
that is allowing you to be more proactive, rather than simply trying to firefight all the time?
Davis: Absolutely. And I didn't answer your second question about collaborating. Collaboration
is becoming very important to us. We did roll out Salesforce.com Chatter to most of our
company, and we are seeing the benefits in our sales team especially. We are trying to use Chatter
and Remedyforce together to collaborate on issues. As I said, we are spread out, and our IT
group has different skill sets.
Depending on what the issue is, we talk back and forth about how to resolve it, and that's so
important, because you do build up knowledge, but the core of our knowledge is in every one of
our employees. It's very important that we can connect quickly and collaborate in a more
efficient way than we used to have.
Support scrum
Gardner: That's interesting. So it sounds as if it's almost a “support scrum,” as opposed to a
development scrum effect, is that fair?
8. Davis: That's fair, yeah.
Gardner: Danielle, similar question. How has the perception of IT support been shifting for
you? Is there a shift afoot there at Comverge around the perception that IT support is a cost
center?
Bailey: Yes, we have been able to show where IT is actually starting to save money for the rest
of the company by increasing efficiency and productivity for some of our groups. There are some
of the development works that we are able to do by being able to track and change processes for
folks, making them more efficient.
For example, one of the issues that we had was that we were tasked with trying to reduce our
telecom expense. We were able to go through and log all of the different telecom lines and
accounts. We had to trace them down and see where they were being used and where they may
not be used anymore. We worked with some folks within the team to reduce a lot of the lines that
we didn’t need anymore. We have been moving over to digital, but we still had a lot of analog
lines.
Before, we didn’t have a way to really track those particular assets to figure out who they
belonged to and what their use was. Just being able to have that asset tracking and to work
through each of those as a group, we were able to produce a lot.
The first quarter of the year we reduced our telecom expense over $50,000 a year and we are
continuing with that effort.
Gardner: It sounds as if you're able to codify best practices, instantiate them into other areas,
and then gain quite a bit of efficiency in the process.
Bailey: Exactly, as well as being able to track and recognize what some of the assets are, and be
able to end the lifespan of those that we no longer need.
Gardner: Is there something about having a common repository, or configuration management
database (CMDB) in this case that you think is extensible? Is there a way of not only gathering
more information in terms of knowledge, but then applying it in other ways?
Bailey: With the knowledge base that we're building, we're able to let a lot of users begin to self-
help. We have a pretty small IT team. We have only two people on what we call helpdesk
support. Then we have 2 network team members, and we have about 10 people on our
information services team, where we do development for the software and data services.
Support staff
So our IT support team is really small, but by being able to track assets that we have, manage
problems that we have, and maintain the trends for those, we're able to better utilize an external
9. company that we have. There are only about three people on that team as well, to make our
processes a little bit more efficient.
We're able to reach out to them when we need to by assigning tickets to them. They're able to log
in without being inside of our corporate network. They're able to track and complete issues for
us, and we're able to keep all of that knowledge going forward. If we have a similar issue again,
we're able to go back, review that, and fix the problem.
It's been a lot of help for us to just start building that knowledge repository. Whereas before, if
someone left the company, you would lose years and years of knowledge because there was no
place that it was documented.
Gardner: I think we can even look to IT as being a bit of a pioneer here. Is there a way of taking
this model, and maybe even the very tools that you are using, and bringing that to other forms of
support within your organization? Perhaps it's HR support. It might even be extending beyond
the boundaries of the organization to your actual customers, rather than your internal employees.
Any thoughts about how what you've been doing and learning might apply to other types of
support functions within your overall organization?
Bailey: We're actually still in our infancy with this, because we just implemented it in April. But
we have multiple call centers that actually provide support to our utility and for residential
customers who go through a separate ticketing system that's part of software that we have had,
that's actually going away.
We're talking about now replacing that call center ticketing system with Remedyforce, so that we
all use the same ticketing system and we are able to maintain that information in one place.
Because Remedyforce also ties into Salesforce.com, we'd be able to track some of our residential
and utility customers in the Salesforce side as well, so that if the salesperson is aware that there
is an issue going on with their utility, they can follow the information as it applies to that contact.
Then, they're able to also reach out directly to the utility and make sure that things get handled
the way they need to be handled according to contracts or relationships. So it's certainly
something we are hoping to expand on.
We are also planning to use, and have already started using, Remedyforce for our HR group.
When we have new hires or terminations, they're able to able to put in IT support tickets for that.
We're able to build templates for each individual, so that as we receive notification that someone
has been terminated, we can immediately remove them from the system too. HR has that access
to put in those tickets and build those requests, and that helps maintain our SOX compliance.
10. Synergy and benefits
Gardner: I should think too that when you combine your data around what's going on for your
employees with what's going on with your customers, there's going to be some synergies there,
and some other analysis benefits that will extend to how you might start defining new products
and services in the market, and how you would implement them.
Bailey: Yes, we're hoping so. We're still having those conversations and trying to find out where
we can just bring truth into our data. If we can bring everything together so that we have insight
and reporting, and all of the master data is in one place -- or at least tied together in one place --
there's definitely going to be synergy and efficiency and more “truth” in our information.
Gardner: Alec, how might you be able to extend what you have been doing with Remedyforce
into other service support, call center, or ticketing activities?
Davis: Information is very important to us, very important to myself. I like to see what is
happening in organizations from a support standpoint. We haven’t really pushed out
Remedyforce to a lot of other departments outside of HR, who of course is helping us with on-
boarding the new employees and off-boarding as well.
But all of our internal support teams, our operations team that support our sales teams, some
people in finance, and of course HR, are all using Salesforce cases.
So we have all of our customer information. We have all of our vendor information. That would
be the IT vendors, but we're also a retail company, so our product retailers are in there too.
We've also moved it out to our distribution center. They have the support team there. We've also
started bringing in all of our shipping carriers and all the vendors that they work with. So we
have all of our data in one place.
We can see where a lot of issues are arising, and we can be more proactive with those vendors
with those issues that we are seeing.
It's great to have all of our data, all of our customer information, all of our vendor information, in
one location. I don’t like to have all these disparate systems where you have your data spread
out. I love having them in one location. It's very helpful. We can run lots of reports to help us
identify what’s happening in our company.
Gardner: I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been talking about how two companies
are extending their use of cloud computing by taking on IT service desk and incident
management functions as a service. And we have seen how they have used BMC Software’s
Remedyforce to improve the business of delivering IT services and business services -- and to
move IT support and change management from a cost center to more of a proactive knowledge
asset.
11. I'd like to thank our guests, Danielle Bailey, IT Manager at Comverge. Thank you so much,
Danielle.
Bailey: Thank you for having me.
Gardner: And Alec Davis, Senior Systems Analyst at Design Within Reach. Thank you so
much, Alec.
Davis: You’re welcome. It's been my pleasure.
Gardner: And this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. I would like to
thank our listeners too for joining, and don’t forget to come back next time.
Join Danielle Bailey and Alec Davis at Dreamforce 2012
Sept. 18-21 in San Francisco.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: BMC Software
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how SaaS delivery and BMC Software’s “truth in
data” architecture deliver big payoffs for IT support at Comverge and Design Within Reach.
Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.
You may also be interested in:
• Ocean Observatories Initiative: Cloud and Big Data Come Together to Give Scientists
Unprecedented Access to Essential Climate Information
• Where Cloud Computing Ultimately Takes Us: Hybrid Services Delivery of Essential
Information Across All Types of Apps
• For Steria, Cloud Not So Much a Technology as a Catalyst to Responsive and Agile
Business
• Cloud-Powered Services Deliver New Revenue and Core Business Agility for SMB
Travel Insurance Provider Seven Corners
• Ducati Races Ahead with Private Cloud and a Virtualization Rate Approaching 100
Percent