BMC Helix ServiceOps Innovations
Excellent service is increasingly the primary driver of business success, and in today’s modern digital economy, a customer’s experience of that service is what can make or break a company’s survival. Whether it’s a queue at a coffeeshop, a “Please Wait” circle on an app, a request for help from an agent (live or virtual) that times out, or a shipping delay in our current supply chain crisis, any kind of failure in expected service delivery can lead to reputational and customer losses.
At BMC, we are always helping our customers deliver compelling services with the quality, performance, and management capabilities they require to gain a competitive edge in the marketplace. In considering how best to offer and fine-tune services, we focus on needs—and while many of us have long been catering to Gen Y (or Millennials), we are increasingly turning our attention to Gen Z as well, which is aging into and beyond college and quickly becoming the dominant spending group. In addition to no-wait experiences, both groups have similar expectations from the applications they use both at home and at work (a line that has become almost indistinguishable for most): a prioritization on smaller, more personalized interactions, and a preference for novelty—two needs that businesses must meet quickly and comprehensively to remain competitive, for both internal and external customers.
So how do organizations today balance the need for new capabilities around speed, novelty, and personalized experience with the risks inherent to the frequent changes afforded by DevOps principles? Traditional approaches try to bridge the IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations management (ITOM) chasm and make these solutions “talk to each other” even though they were never designed to do so. Furthermore, the enterprise service delivery infrastructure is immensely complex with business units constantly adding new services/apps/tools all the time to meet their needs. This means enterprise organizations are making decisions without knowing how it will impact their environment, which leads to performance irregularities and an inability to provide consistent service experiences.
One of the key differentiated approaches we took with BMC Helix was to natively integrate ServiceOps, where services and operations delivery and management teams can mitigate risk, manage user preferences and rules of engagement, and proactively resolve issues. This almost guarantees services perform the way they were designed at all times for optimized experiences. Consequently, users are happier, trust the company more, and even look forward to engaging further. It also frees up operations to engage fully in DevOps and innovation initiatives, further pleasing these established and emerging consumers.
Of course, data is what truly drives all the decisions we make in order to please customers. From an IT perspective, making data actionable gives a comprehensive view to IT environments, enhances operational excellence, and ultimately can allow the speed of innovation that is a true marker of success. We are thrilled to announce that we have added to our ongoing artificial intelligence (AI)-driven service management (AISM) and AI-driven operations management (AIOps) capabilities, powered by the BMC Helix Platform, to make data available and turn it into actionable insights. These powerful ServiceOps enhancements powering BMC Helix can help organizations drive timely services capabilities, reduce risk, lower costs, and increase efficiency and productivity. Even more exciting, these compelling innovations are truly customer-driven, a collaboration between our engineering and product management teams and customers who helped us narrow in on their requirements and answer them with emerging technology.
Our ServiceOps enhancements for BMC Helix Platform include features for BMC Helix Continuous Optimization, BMC Helix Discovery, and BMC Helix Operations Management, among others:
- Enhanced insights and dashboards for comprehensive data analytics, and pre-built templates for a full view of services, operations, and infrastructure
- Major incident management and collaborative incident response to streamline time to identify major incidents and intelligently swarm with key personnel to quickly resolve them
- AI and machine learning (ML)-powered root cause isolation and service health monitoring for improved incident resolution time, and AI/ML-driven event correlation to reduce event noise so automated corrective action can be taken before service impact
- Discovery and dynamic service modeling to maintain visibility into continuously changing IT environments (assets, relationships, dependencies, and topology) and business services for better service availability and performance, and improved release management
- “What-if” simulations and forecasting to optimize resources for Kubernetes deployments that minimize cost while still ensuring sufficient resources are available to guarantee performance and availability
- Our recent acquisition of StreamWeaver boosts DevOps data analytics and visibility so organizations can even more effectively and efficiently achieve service delivery and operations management excellence
And let’s not forget that intuitive and rapid self-service, the ability to find answers you need and move on quickly, is a major component of self-service for employees, especially in line-of-business functions. BMC Helix Digital Workplace studio brings new capabilities to our BMC Helix Knowledge Management integration, allowing any function to create a microsite that provides content, tools, and services from an organizational, team, or individual point of view. These microsites allow direct engagement with employees and enable easy access to the services and applications a team wants or needs to do their job in a simple, self-service, intuitive experience complemented by both chatbot and live chat agents.
It all comes down to making work easier and more personalized. With the powerful combination of AISM and AIOps to improve processes in ServiceOps, organizations can better predict change risks using service and operational data, support cross-functional collaboration to solve problems, automatically recommend problem resolutions, and free up time for innovation. And with the self-service and knowledge management capabilities of BMC Helix Digital Workplace, you can offer the fast, fluid, and personalized experiences requisite for today’s consumers.
These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.
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