By Dan Turchin, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aeroprise. Follow Dan on Twitter.
We published a new video case study on AeropriseTV about how the US Department of Homeland Security eliminated tens of thousands of dollars in SLA penalties and cut approval times from 12-18 hours to 30 minutes with mobile BMC Remedy. According to Mike Campbell from Dev Technology Group: "the best part was it just worked - no changes to Remedy, no programming required, great end-user experience!"
Enjoy!
-dan
The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.
By Dan Turchin, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aeroprise. Follow Dan on Twitter.
The iPad launched yesterday. If you weren't in Silicon Valley, you may have missed the Cameron/Bay/Coppola-esque shockwave it created. From my perch in Mountain View I saw the Transamerica Pyramid duck and cover. Larry Ellison's "Rising Sun" surfed a 400 foot asphalt wave from Redwood City to our doorstep. 7,000 tweets per minute later, a proud, spent Steve Jobs smoked a cigar and grinned at the chaos he created. Again.
Three weeks ago, Google launched Nexus One to similar fanfare and a few weeks before that it was Verizon and Motorola launching Droid. More recently, the Red Cross forever changed crowdsourced fundraising by generating more than $20 million in 72 hours - $10 at a time. Mobile technology occupies a place in our cultural pantheon usually reserved for world war, famine, or Michael Jackson.
It's bigger than gadgets, apps, or services and nobody knows what to make of it. There's just a universal, shared sense that everything from media consumption to work to travel to parenting changed forever. Distance is measured in clicks and milliseconds. Progress is measured in weeks. Moore's Law - feh. Droid's Law now governs innovation.
Out of this primordial ooze came an interesting report from Gartner last week that grounded me. $6.2 billion will be spent on mobile apps in 2010 growing to $29.5 billion in three years. This isn't a technology fad. It isn't a social revolution. It's a market for mobile digital goods that is finally growing - at a pace that dwarfs what even the most outlandish predictions forecasted a few years back.
It seemed for some time that the mobile cavalcade left businesses behind. Virtual Zippos and shoot 'em up games defined the mobile app experience. Now 70% of the Fortune 100 use iPhone and 100% of DC power brokers use BlackBerry (an unscientific estimate but did you see all those thumbs flying at the SOTU?). And you know what? It ain't because they're throwing sheep.
It's because smartphones are business essential. One customer called recently to say his CFO finally conceded to letting employees expense mobile phones after getting a demo of Aeroprise for self-service. Another told me her CIO is glued to Who's On? 18x7 (unfortunate until she found a hack to "stay on" until 11pm every night).
It's unclear who or what will benefit most from the billions about to be spent. What comforts me is knowing the smartest people on the planet are solving our biggest problems using mobile technology and the impact it will have on all of us will make even Steve Jobs wonder why he didn't see it coming.
The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.
Now that we can share more details I thought I'd pass along a story a customer told me recently, versions of which I'm hearing almost daily.
A VP of IT at one of our largest customers told me last week he's frustrated by what happened since they introduced their service catalog. First, it took a lot longer to define the services IT offers than he expected. He gave a simple example: onboarding an employee is standard catalog fare yet each company he has been at has its own unique process that combines various HR, finance, IT, and operations tasks in various ways. The workflow gets complicated fast.
After nine months they finally launched a catalog to 55,000 business users with an initial set of 47 core services. The holy grail, right? Worthy of a ticker tape parade? Promotions and raises all around? Not so fast. Turns out he didn't anticipate a separate, bigger challenge: getting 55,000 employees to care.
His team did everything you'd expect to introduce the catalog. They hosted webcasts, created online training videos, posted banners with pithy slogans in break rooms, even rewarded frequent submitters. And yet, a paltry number of users even bothered to access the request portal. Even worse, six months after launch, call volume to the help desk was about the same as before and customer satisfaction with IT was unchanged.
He gathered his braintrust, surveyed users, and learned the problem wasn't with the catalog - in fact, users gave it high marks. The problem was when users had IT issues they didn't bother getting to a PC. It should come as no surprise that they did what they'd always done: pick up the phone. Which gave him this epiphany: what if submitting a service request was as easy as calling the help desk?
Enter Mobile SRM. They're now deploying an Aeroprise mobile service catalog for their BMC Remedy SRM app that is truly, finally, beautifully simple. Quicker than a phone call. Always available. Fully integrated with the business to deliver results that actually make the catalog matter. It's early to draw conclusions but he said he got stopped in the hall by an HR Director who waved her BlackBerry at him and said she just approved a request for a new PC that would have clogged her inbox for days before. That approval triggered an alert to the line manager who submitted the request from his iPhone. He said she was giddy (when was the last time you met a giddy HR Director?).
So my VP friend is fired up - and rightfully so. But what's powerful isn't the IT success story. It's the cultural shift enabled by a few forward-thinking execs and mobile technology. What's next? Probably no ticker tape parade. But maybe a raise and promotion.
Click here to see Mobile Self Service in action. Or call +1(866)809-9102 to schedule a live demo.
The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.
By Dan Turchin, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aeroprise. Follow Dan on Twitter.
Here's an interesting exercise I tried last week: go back two years in your day planner. What were you doing? How did you do it? Pull up last Tuesday and ask the same questions. Remarkable, huh? I spent more time on the road, interacted with fewer people, knew less about their lives, and had a ton more paper in mine. Case in point: wheels up two years ago meant forced down time. Not so today. With in-air WiFi and faster, more capable devices, 5B is just an office with a view (and a fat dude snoring but that for another post).
Work and life are digital. But more important, they move faster. They're more agile, more complete - all in a way that makes them richer and more fulfilling. Extend these trends out two years and factor in the Droid generation - adolescents raised today with the expectation that anything is a click away - and it's tough to imagine what we'll be doing and how we'll do it. One thing is clear: life won't happen in front of a PC and service delays and information gaps won't be tolerated.
Inspired by that world, we recently launched our most exciting product ever. It extends the value we've always provided IT to the rest of the business. It's not a product launch as much as a reminder that technology is catching up with life as quick as life is catching up with technology. The product is called Mobile BMC Self Service and it devolves control over how and where we work to where it should have always been: the hands of end-users.
Mobile BMC Self Service gives you and me, mortals with phones, the power we've always needed. We can now submit and manage service requests, browse the catalog, and know in real-time wherever we are when our issues are being worked, by whom, and when they'll be resolved. The way to build more dynamic businesses isn't to add features or work longer hours. It's by spending more time collaborating and less time waiting. It's by making fewer calls to the service desk and more calls to action that drive innovation and create business value.
What we announced is bigger than a new product, bigger than anything we could do alone. It's the next step in the evolution of enterprise self-service. It's the culmination of years of hard work and industry leadership from BMC, Aeroprise, and RIM. You'll be hearing more about it in the months ahead but consider this your invitation to join a dialog that's just getting started and will influence how we all work and live for years to come.
Want to learn more? Check out this video of Mobile BMC Self Service in action.
The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.
