By Dan Turchin, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aeroprise. Follow Dan on Twitter.
Interesting lunch conversation with James, Help Desk Manager for a DoD Agency in Falls Church, VA, a few weeks back at the BMC Public Sector Forum in Washington DC. It was cold and wet - 24 hours before the onset of Snowpocalypse. James had taken the train in from rural Virginia at 6 AM, a two-hour commute he does twice a week. He has been a public sector employee for all of his 15-year career after studying Information Systems Management at SUNY Buffalo.
After graduating, James was a programmer for a short time but was too much of a people person to write COBOL in a broom closet. So he became a systems analyst then project manager. After earning his stripes on the help desk he got a promotion two years ago and is now responsible for delivering IT services to 42,000 business users in the Potomac region.
James is like most people I met at the Forum: an IT guru, committed to his job and team, and heavily invested in BMC products. Not just invested like "when will mid-tier support HTML 5" but like someone who believes in the power of technology to make work life better. He joined the Remedy keiretsu seven years ago after a bad experience with CA Unicenter.
What keeps James awake these days? In his words: "getting blood from a stone." He lost a quarter of his staff to layoffs in the past 18 months yet the expectations on his remaining team have only increased. They now support more versions of operating system, more software packages, more configurations, more VIPs, more mobile devices, and more virtual workers than ever - a perfect storm.
I asked why they need a mobile solution and he looked at me like I had just sprouted horns and a beak. He spends less time at a PC than ever and needs his team to have more detailed information sooner to avoid repeat visits and increase first-contact resolution. His day starts by checking the 'hot issues' dashboard on his BlackBerry Bold from the train. He then manages the queue by assigning, reassigning, and re-prioritizing issues using his Who's On? report. By the time he arrives in Falls Church, he has already put out the morning's fires and can spend his first hour focused on priorities for the day. He told me Aeroprise is the first technology he's used that lives up to the promise of making life better.
Multiply the extra hour or two James gets back per day across the 75 people on his team and you understand why his eyes light up when he talks about it. In the first year, he said the app will save his agency about a million dollars because they can now restore services they were going to terminate and offer a premium SLA they couldn't guarantee before - without any additional staff or hardware.
His plans for the future? Well, start him talking about how else they can use mobile technology and he gets all excited like Mark McGwire in a pharmacy. In the immediate future, they're deploying mobile change approvals for managers then mobile SRM for business users on iPhone and BlackBerry later in the year. After that... well, let's just say I look forward to seeing James at next year's Forum.
The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.
