Achieving Value from IT: It’s About Time-and Cost of Ownership

Why has iET Solutions chosen to focus on time to value and cost of ownership?
One of the hottest topics in IT today is IT service management (ITSM), and rightly so. ITSM is a systematic approach for making sure that IT serves the business mission in a measurable and accountable way. In other words, it’s all about delivering value. ITSM enables IT to meet user expectations, gain better control of the infrastructure, and lower cost of ownership over time through service-level agreements and other mechanisms that enable business process improvements. So it’s ironic that so many ITSM initiatives in themselves have become major projects that threaten to spiral out of control. It’s not unusual for enterprises to call in teams of consultants who work for months to set up a service management system, at great cost, not only in out-of-pocket dollars, but also in lost time and market opportunity. Obviously, implementing a technology solution should fix the problem, not compound it. iET Solutions recognizes that getting business value from IT is a serious issue for enterprises, and that’s where we’ve focused our efforts.

If there is value in the end, does it matter whether a team of consultants is required?
There are two answers to that. First, what will happen next year when the business changes direction or new technology comes along that must be adopted for competitive reasons? If the ITSM solution requires teams of consultants to set up, it will likely require teams of consultants to alter and update, and it may even require a lot of support simply to keep operating. So back come the consultants and another several weeks or months of delay and cost. This is not a onetime issue; it’s an ongoing issue for the lifetime of the organization. And second, what if you could achieve the same enterprise value without the team of consultants and long delays and complex project implementations? In other words, what if, while your competitors were trying to implement ITSM and disrupting their organizations to do it, you could hit the ground in just few weeks with a robust enterprise solution that had virtually no disruptive impact on your organization? Both of these points argue for an ITSM approach that’s flexible, that’s able to be implemented and maintained by the organization itself at a reasonable cost. We think this is the very definition of business value.

How does iET Solutions provide time to value and lower cost of ownership?
In a couple of ways. One is the robust capability we’ve built into the solution “out of the box,” so to speak. iET Solutions’ ITSM offering is a complete ITIL implementation of service management, with incident and problem management for the service desk ... change, release, and configuration management for the back office ... and, of course, management of service-level agreements, which is how the modern IT organization is measured and held accountable. It’s conceivable that an organization could take our solution and implement it “as is.” But realistically, customization will always be needed, both in setting up the system to fit the organization precisely in the beginning and in adapting it over time to unforeseen changes in business and technology, as I’ve already mentioned. So what we’ve done is create a Developer’s Studio in our solution that allows easy, rapid customization. The Developer’s Studio is an object-oriented drag-and-drop environment that allows full customization with minimal programming. Organizations can modify virtually any aspect of the application, including both forms and workflow, using an intuitive graphical interface, without the need for high-priced external vendor involvement. And these changes are implemented in an application layer so that the underlying technology can be upgraded without having any impact on the changes. When you look at the history of any application, this is what you see. Initially it’s costly and difficult to work with, but as the technology matures, the power of the computer itself is harnessed to save time, reduce costs, and produce a better result. We’ve reached that stage with iET ITSM.

Talk about iET Solutions’ asset discovery and intelligence offering. How does this fit in?
“Fit in” is exactly the right phrase, as a matter of fact. Our asset discovery and intelligence solution is built on ITIL and the Configuration Management Database, or CMDB, as specified by ITIL—just like our core ITSM solution. This means there is a smooth and natural integration of all components. But to answer the question in another way, asset intelligence is absolutely necessary in order to run an effective service management operation. You can’t provide IT services and manage changes to your IT environment unless you know exactly what you have, where it is, its status, and so on. It’s a fundamental requirement. According to industry research from Gartner, 50 percent of help desk time is spent gaining an understanding of the customer’s hardware and software configuration. Both help desk and user productivity is being reduced by the amount of time spent, as industry research firm Giga puts it, “playing 20 questions to determine what configuration is in place.” This means the typical technician spends half of his or her time (and a considerable amount of customer time as well) in the simple effort to obtain the basic information that, if it was known, might have made it possible to take action to prevent the problem from occurring in the first place. Many IT organizations are still gathering and maintaining their asset information manually, using spreadsheets and such. Some are using automated approaches, but these can be difficult and costly to implement if they require installing agents all over the enterprise. And some provide only a partial view of assets, for instance, scanning only desktops. iET Solutions’ approach to asset intelligence is just like our ITSM approach: powerful and highly automated but simple to implement and maintain. We don’t require the installation of agents; it’s all centrally managed. Essentially, we automate the whole process of asset discovery and then link to ITSM for a complete solution. In fact, our solution can be implemented and completely catalog an organization’s infrastructure and applications in a few days.

Is iET Solutions’ approach to ITIL any different, and if so, how?
This is a very important point. Nearly every developer of ITSM software has stated its support for ITIL. This is not difficult to do, on the surface. ITIL is very flexible about the methods that can be used to align IT workflow with business objectives. Unfortunately, nearly all the software packages out there were developed independent of the ITIL standards, and their support for ITIL was added later, as an afterthought. As a result, rather than having the business needs ripple through the software to drive the IT processes, these programs typically rely on service desk personnel to manually interpret business needs and make the appropriate response. iET ITSM was built from the ground up specifically to support the ITIL best-practices framework, so it provides much richer support for the key ITIL service support and service delivery processes. We’ve closely coupled each element of the ITSM framework, so business needs are clearly communicated to service desk personnel and escalated to supervisors when necessary. We’ve built this right into the solution. For example, the SLAs that are developed in the software can be easily configured without writing a line of code to drive the response process by automatically setting deadlines, alerting service desk personnel when they are approaching and alerting management when they are violated. This is another reason, by the way, that we are able to provide faster time to value and lower cost of ownership. This configurability—along ITIL guidelines—permeates our entire application.

How would you summarize what iET Solutions is offering the enterprise?
To put it simply, we provide the ability to have a customized ITSM solution that fits any company’s service management business processes without the cost and lead time that have been required in the past to obtain this level of flexibility. Our customers report they are able to save huge amounts of time and reduce errors through the ability to seamlessly deliver information from the CMDB, SLAs, and other aspects of the service desk process to the right point, at the right time, so the information can be used to quickly identify root causes, resolve problems, and meet SLAs. We are not just providing a solution that theoretically meets ITIL standards. We are helping enterprises put those standards into effect quickly and with the lowest possible cost of ownership. And most important, we are helping enterprises align their IT investments with their business missions.