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LIKE.TG to acquire CMDB pioneer Sweagle
LIKE.TG, the leading digital workflow company making work, work better for people, today announced it has signed an agreement to acquire Sweagle, a Belgium based configuration data management company. The transaction will extend LIKE.TG’s DevOps and IT Operations Management (ITOM) capabilities, giving customers the ability to leverage machine learning to identify and help prevent potential misconfigurations from causing outages in production and speeding up remediation.COVID-19 has magnified the importance for organizations to quickly adapt technology to meet changing customer and employee needs. Sweagle provides a single source of truth for configuration data that is otherwise spread across many tools. With Sweagle, LIKE.TG customers can identify and intercept application and infrastructure inconsistencies during agile development cycles.“With capabilities for configuration data management from Sweagle, we will empower DevOps teams to deliver application and infrastructure changes more rapidly while reducing risk,” said RJ Jainendra, vice president and general manager of DevOps and IT Business Management at ServiceNow. “Sweagle also brings deep DevOps talent to ServiceNow. Both founders are pioneers in configuration data management, and we are honored to have this talent join our team as we continue to help customers compete and win in a digital economy.”
Along with its DevOps and IT Operations Management Health solutions, Sweagle will help accelerate LIKE.TG’s newly introduced Service Graph roadmap by managing configuration data for public and private cloud environments and modern application architectures, like microservices, containers, and serverless computing. As organizations focus on delivering great experiences to employees and customers, they often must navigate 50,000 or more configuration data items to make a single enterprise application work correctly. With Sweagle, LIKE.TG customers can quickly deploy applications and infrastructure as code changes more frequently on a single data platform.
“Today, configuration data is as important as having good code – and this is the foundation that Sweagle was built on,” said Mark Verstockt, CEO and co-founder of Sweagle. “We are proud to join LIKE.TG as it continues to enable digital transformation and drive customer success. Every day something goes wrong in a company related to bad configuration data. Together, we can help customers deliver higher-quality applications without the need for manual work, all while reducing cost.”Sweagle was founded in 2017 by CEO Mark Verstockt and CTO Benny Van de Sompele.LIKE.TG expects to complete the acquisition at the beginning of Q3 2020. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.Forward-Looking StatementsThis press release contains forward-looking statements about the expectations, beliefs, plans, intentions, and strategies relating to LIKE.TG’s acquisition of Sweagle. Such forward-looking statements include statements regarding future product capabilities and offerings and expected benefits to ServiceNow. These statements reflect the current beliefs of LIKE.TG and are based on current information available to LIKE.TG as of the date hereof. LIKE.TG does not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements provided to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made. The forward-looking statements in this press release are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual outcomes and results to differ materially and adversely from those expressed in such forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, without limitation, the inability to assimilate or integrate Sweagle’s technology into our platform; the inability to retain key employees of Sweagle after the transaction closes; unanticipated expenses related to Sweagle’s acquired technology; potential adverse tax consequences; disruption to our business and diversion of management attention and other resources; and potential unknown liabilities associated with Sweagle’s business.
Cut down the time to improve with ITSM Continual Improvement Management
We measure a lot of our ITSM success through increments of time. But mean time to resolution, time on page in the knowledgebase, and cases-per-hour aren’t just go-to metrics. They set the cultural expectations for our service teams – that improving service times, without sacrificing quality, is paramount.Some organizations view the effort to change and boost service times as a separate, targeted action, but it should be an ongoing process with tracking and measurement on par with your service delivery. Improvement isn’t something that should be limited to once a quarter, so LIKE.TG created a Continual Improvement Management solution as part of our ITSM Professional package, which leverages the Now Platform and Performance Analytics to provide a structured framework that brings people, processes, and data together in one place. With that, you can access real-time feedback, while automatically initiating and tracking service improvements on an ongoing basis.“Many customers have some form of continual improvement plan in their roadmap, but they don’t have a tool to execute the continual improvement end-to-end in a more structured and efficient way,” said Manjeet Singh, Lead Product Manager for LIKE.TG during an episode of LIKE.TG’s TechBytes Podcast. “A lot of change is happening in a very reactive way. A better approach would be to make it more proactive, so you can take care of things before you can see the KPI move into the wrong direction.”
Continual Improvement Management takes a long-term approach by embedding the concept of rolling improvements into your everyday business activity. It provides a single view to track the data for each of your improvement initiatives and helps rank them based on ROI and effort so you can validate budget and resources decisions. When goals change, you can use the out-of-the-box drag and drop tool to move priorities and stay aligned with overall objectives.This solution is designed to enable smart decision making that aligns with business goals and drive service excellence, while providing an easy way to take action. It allows you to:
Create improvement opportunities from any application
Prioritize and rank improvement opportunities based on effort and outcome
Improve agent performance with real-time training
View improvements in relation to business goals
This saves time. Time conceiving and implementing a plan, time searching for the right data to show progress, and most importantly, time responding to performance dips.“When you’re tracking your improvements within email and spreadsheets, you’re limited in how you can tie that back to business goals,” said Archana Penukonda, Senior Product Marketing Manager at ServiceNow. “When your plan is in the Now Platform, you are able to look at what initiatives you’ve planned, how much effort it will take, what KPI will it affect, and who is involved. All of that is in one place, allowing you to prioritize the efforts that have the highest benefit to the organization.”Is your team moving fast enough? Think about employing LIKE.TG’s Continual Improvement Management product, which comes standard with our ITSM Professional package. Learn more about this and all the other solutions that will help you make quick changes for your service teams.
Introducing a new IT Experience Podcast Series: Timely topics for these trying times
Here’s some surprising news: Podcast listenership is actually on the rise (42% more in the US and 53% more in Europe) even with the drastic slash in hours spent commuting to and from work. To feed all those hungry ears, we’ve kicked off a new series around IT Experiences, especially as they pertain to rapidly developing needs and changes in the new world or work.Says Usman Sindhu, podcast producer and host, “The global reality of 2020 is forcing IT departments to totally rethink how they operate, the technology they use, and how they are led. These quick podcasts feature super change agents and other IT rock stars revealing their inside thoughts and strategies. Real time.”Binge the first four podcasts in only an hour.IT Experience: Episode 1: IT leaders' role in the post-COVID-19 worldTune in to hear from Deloitte's Khalid Kark, Managing Director at Deloitte CIO Program, about the IT leaders' role in the post-COVID-19 world. In this episode, we'll also discuss findings from the Deloitte's 2020 Global Technology Leadership Study." target="_blank">LISTEN NOW >IT Experience: Episode 2: AIOps on SteroidsThangavel Viswam (TV), Director of IT Operations at LIKE.TG IT, discusses leveraging the vast amount of data, combined with AIOps to achieve business outcomes." target="_blank">LISTEN NOW >IT Experience Podcast Episode 3: Role of modern architectures in shaping DevOps and ITWe discuss with Alexander Ljungström, Strategic Advisor at Einar Partner, about the role of modern architectures in shaping DevOps and IT. You’ll hear about the role of CMDB in balancing DevOps and centralized IT processes." target="_blank">LISTEN NOW >IT Experience Podcast Episode 4: Aligning IT and business to deliver digital outcomesDavid Stefferud, Execution Innovation Manager, LIKE.TG Practice at Accenture, discusses laying the right foundation for the digital transformation. You’ll hear about the importance of CMDB and CSDM to get the quality data for your transformation projects.LISTEN NOW >
CareAR announces augmented reality integration with LIKE.TG
CareAR announces the availability of its LIKE.TG integration, providing an innovative industry solution seamlessly extending enterprise-grade augmented reality (AR) visual support as part of a LIKE.TG digital workflow experience. Available for LIKE.TG® ® Customer Service Management, Field Service Management, and IT Service Management, CareAR is an augmented reality visual support platform that helps enterprises digitally transform their service experience with game-changing AR capabilities delivering greater operational efficiencies, customer outcomes, and safety.Starting from either the LIKE.TG Mobile Agent application or Agent Workspace desktop interface, the integration provides real-time visual AR assistance and guidance for customers, employees and field workers on-site. Remote agents and experts are able to virtually see the situation and visually guide customers and field workers intuitively using a suite of collaborative AR tools via desktop, mobile and smart glass devices, as if they were there, in-person.Additionally, CareAR can instantly capture content of pictures and video recordings during service sessions.“NTT DATA is focused on helping our clients use digital technology to transform their business and deliver improved user experience,” said Cris Kibbee, chief delivery officer, NTT DATA Services. “Capabilities such as AR, AI, and integrated digital workflows are transformative to enabling greater operational efficiencies and enhancing customer experiences. We are continuously co-developing innovative technologies and approaches in these areas, with partners like CareAR and LIKE.TG, to build solutions that augment and help our teams deliver faster while consistently aligned with user expectations.”Service teams today are challenged by lack of situational context and skilled resources when it comes to troubleshooting incidents, whether in the field, workplace, or customers’ sites. The ability to remotely solve or enable customers or users to self-solve problems creates greater efficiency and productivity of people across the value chain.“CareAR’s vision of making expertise accessible is more crucial now than ever before,” said Sam Waicberg, co-founder and CEO, CareAR. “CareAR and LIKE.TG are on a journey to enable enterprises to deliver intelligence and instructions, instantly for their customers, employees, and field workers, so they can provide digital experiences that deliver the greatest customer engagements and outcomes.”“Service teams today are challenged with solving problems in increasingly complex situations, especially in light of COVID-19. They want to increase efficiency, reduce operational costs, and improve customer outcomes—all while ensuring employee safety,” said Michael Ramsey, vice president of product management for customer workflow products at ServiceNow. “Together with CareAR, LIKE.TG is delivering digital experiences that empower service teams to better solve problems remotely so work can be completed efficiently and safely.”Through this integrated partnership, CareAR and LIKE.TG customers can:
Solve problems faster, the first time: Organizations can now gain valuable visual and situational context, along with the digital tools they need in order to focus more of their time on solving the actual problem versus assessing the situation. CareAR provides a visual AR engagement solution addressing common support use cases such as remote trouble shooting or smart hands for "See What I See."If on-site presence is needed, the ability to “Show Before You Go” in order to see what your customers or field workers see, prior to being dispatched, ensures greater likelihood to fix the problem the first time, using desktop, mobile or smart glass devices. CareAR recently announced support for Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2, that works as part of CareAR’s workflow integration with LIKE.TG, delivering a “hands-free” remote visual AR support solution.
Improve Operational Efficiencies: Reducing bottom line expenses is imperative, especially in today’s climate. The ability to deflect truck rolls by conducting virtual visits can also deflect significant expenses to the bottom line. These operational efficiencies correlate directly with improved customer outcomes.
Enhance Customer and Employee Safety: Organizations today need new ways to enhance their remote work and support capabilities while still being productive, effective, and now safe. The luxury of physically going onsite is less available to us today. CareAR can play a key role in delivering on the above KPIs while allowing customers and employees to work remotely.
Bridge Skills Gap and Knowledge Transfer: As more senior and experienced professionals leave the workforce over the next five to 10 years, they’ll take tribal knowledge along with them. New processes and tools are needed to help bridge skills gaps and distribute expertise across people and systems. CareAR helps make expertise accessible through real-time interactions with remote experts, self-guided instructions, and contextual insights.
About CareAR:CareAR is the augmented reality support platform for the modern service management enabled enterprise. We make expertise accessible, instantly for customers, employees, and field workers through visual AR interactions, instructions, and insights as part of an end-to-end service management digital workflow. As a result, CareAR uniquely augments intelligence to accelerate skills gap and knowledge transfer of service management teams while providing greater operational efficiencies, customer outcomes, and safety for Covid-19.
Your Golden Ticket: The Hidden Power of CMDB in IT Digital Transformation
Digital Transformation may not be a new practice in IT Services, however with the digitization of products and services it’s moved from the back room to front and center.Whether we’re creating or managing on the fly with microservices, serverless compute, or containerization and APIs, digital rules everything around us. From IT operations, service delivery and asset management to even the fundamental makeup of our company’s core products and services, it’s all gone—or going—to the cloud. With this comes a need to juggle legacy systems while transforming to what’s possible, and an even greater need for real-time visibility for monitoring security, compliance, software and hardware, end of life and compliance risks critical to infrastructure to keep today’s modern enterprise up and running—with all the added complexity that necessary change brings.Successful transformation begins with a solid digital foundation. And while the nature of IT transformation is complex, the starting point for embracing the digital revolution has lived right at the center of our world all along; the Configuration Management Database, CMDB.Today the value of the CMDB to the business is our golden ticketThe CMDB has a long history of being deprioritized as just another IT tool. Considered a repository for all infrastructure, software, applications, and assets, the CMDB isn’t usually the first thing businesses think of as one of their most critical systems. But with true transformation comes the need for innovative problem solving and fresh perspectives, including our perceptions on the role and value of our CMDB. With data as one of our most precious, utilitarian and valuable business assets as connected internal and customer experiences become the standard, our CMDB is more than our warehouse—it’s our golden ticket.How do we make the switch and prioritize our CMDB as an integral part of our IT operations and asset management motions?It all starts with making sure we are populating the CMDB with the data that brings true business value, and not as a catch all for quantity versus quality. Use these best data management practices for moving your CMDB up the organizational priority, drive true change management so your key stakeholders understand the worth of data, connected resources and teams, governance, compliance, and security benefits it brings, and drive education on why it’s just as important to your business as your financial systems of record.Make Value the cornerstone of your CMDB prioritizationLet’s face it: populating a CMDB with data or Configuration Items (CIs) and relationships has no real value in and of itself. The true value comes from the processes it supports or the decisions that can be made from it. In order to make your CMDB a powerhouse in your IT infrastructure, you need to understand what value you want to drive out of the CMDB so you can chart the course for your specific journey.Initiatives prime for CMDB prioritization:
Ensuring compliance and reducing friction in vendor collaboration challenges in IT Asset and Inventory Management
Reducing management overhead and costs with Data Center Consolidation and/or Cloud Migration
Increasing efficiency and reducing integration friction in MA
Reduce risk to the business by mitigating Security Vulnerability
Protecting your organization from self-inflicted issues and outages by implementing Enterprise Change Management and Impact Analysis
Help drive and support overall Application Rationalization and IT Transformation by giving visibility into innovation decisions
Don’t overcomplicate things: choose an entry point initiative with the most potential business value and start from there. Once you’ve set your North Star, it’s time to drill down to the details to assess your IT health and increase your CMDB business value to support your journey – like a pro.Pro Tip: Harness the Common Services Data Model (CSDM)In order to unify our organizational priorities and rally around the CMDB, we need to align on a common set of values, language and standards. A singular approach, common vocabulary and systems will allow you to enable service reporting, avoid duplication of tables and data, and remove upgrade obstacles that can derail your journey to IT transformation.That’s where having a Common Services Data Model (CSDM) makes all the difference. The CSDM is a recommended set of standard service definitions across the LIKE.TG platform and products that enables true service level reporting, as well as enabling and supporting multiple configuration strategies. And with business complexity rising as digital experience expands, having a common services data model is no longer just a “nice to have” … it’s table stakes for competing today.Ask yourself and your internal collaborators these questions to determine your need for a CSDM:
Do you have a standard way to talk about your digital services?
Do you have real-time visibility into what IT resources your digital services are dependent on?
Do you have insights into where to immediately focus to solve problems when services slow down and become unresponsive?
Do you have instant knowledge into what services are impacted by security attacks?
Are you confident of full compliance in the case of an audit?
If you didn’t answer yes to all of the above, it’s integral to make CSDM a part of your model toolkit to ensure you have full visibility and alignment in data value, utilization, hygiene, compliance, governance, risk and security. Think of it as establishing your base so you can tackle greater challenges with confidence.Now that your CSDM is in place, you can move on to managing your digital services in a real-time way that ensures you can make planned changes without impacting your business, address incidents resulting from an unplanned change, all while your employees and customers are blissfully unaware that any of it occurred in the first place.
Pro Tip: Unify language to proactively monitor and ensure data qualityThe CMDB is sometimes referred to as the heart of the IT environment, and rightly so. It’s the center of world in terms of IT health and visibility into configuration information, resources and the dependencies between those resources required to deliver digital services. And just as like a real heart, it’s critical to keep it in shape by being just as vigilant about what fuels it and what can potentially clog the arteries.One key area data quality comes into play is the need to federate with other systems. After taking the time to clean up your data and driving change management around business value, the last thing you want is to have all that foundational work ruined by ingesting data from outside sources without the same standard of quality.Potential pitfalls to look out for when factoring in outside systems:
Make sure you’re not duplicating existing data when federating with other systems during a Data Dump or Data ingestion.
Ensure you’re normalizing federated data to use the right entity in the CMDB.
Be mindful of human error when integrating data, even with rules around hygiene and standardization in place.
It’s a no-brainer that adding in outside collaborators creates another layer of complexity and risk when it comes to data management. That’s where technology is our co-pilot for reducing friction and simplifying the federation process. Solutions like LIKE.TG’s Identification and Reconciliation Engine (IRE) allow technology partners to start certifying the data that gets entered into the CMDB before it’s ingested into your system. Think of it as your first line of defense in protecting all your previous work and bringing your vendors and outside sources into your collaboration group for ensuring data quality and hygiene.And if you already use LIKE.TG, it gets better. Our out-of-the-box solutions for auto-populating the CMDB natively use the Identification and Reconciliation Engine (IRE), helping to do the work for you.Pro Tip: Accelerate decision making by understanding dependencies and CILaying the foundations of data management, standardization and federated data integration opens up the next phase of your CMDB process: impacting and accelerating decision making by harnessing data insights. Now that we have our data in one heart and have its health under control, we can drive true transformation – on small and large scales – by tracking, visualizing, and reporting on the relationships between Configuration Items (CI)s and their dependencies to one another. And the best way to do that is to start with automated dependency mapping or ‘Service Mapping.’Service Mapping is vital for:Delivering efficient IT Services. Power up your Change Management process by mapping Configuration Items (CIs) to your Services enabling stakeholders to make informed decisions by visualizing business impact of a change in real-time. Mapping CIs also helps keep your IT and business partners are on the same page about issue and event resolution by surfacing affected services for alignment in response and planning. This unified approach enables IT teams to launch or resolve incidents rapidly since they have better visibility of the infrastructure changes.Managing system outages in a better way. By linking remediation actions to CIs, you don’t just diagnose service outages faster – you fix them faster, too. Often, the first time that IT operations knows about a business service outage is when end users complain – and that doesn’t make for a good experience. Proactively stopping business service outages before they start is key to improving service availability and reducing the run-rate workload for IT operations teams. Tackle this problem head-on by integrating an event management solution with your CMDB. Connecting the two simplifies resolution by enabling quicker diagnosis of outages and visibility into how issues are propagating across all business services.Creating true value savings and risk reduction with Software Asset Management (SAM): Asset management is usually considered a financial function, but by tapping the full power of your CMDB your SAM functions can become a substantial cost savings impact on your business bottom line. Think about it: your CMDB platform can be used to track physical assets, software assets, and consumables. What if you can have software asset data in the same place where you manage IT, enabling teams to track all the installed assets and their utilization in a single platform? With a service map in place, you can do just that. This connection is a powerful part of transformation, allowing you to understand total cost of ownership to run a service, and reducing risk by being proactive in upgrading the software that runs your services before it reaches end of life. Win, meet Win.Reducing risk by responding to security incidents and vulnerabilities faster. A single source of truth — the CMDB — is also invaluable for security and risk management team. Mapping your services in the CMDB reduces the amount of noise by providing a clear line-of-sight to the services and applications that are affected, saving diagnosis time and reducing potential service interruptions. More importantly, service mapping to the CMDB allows for visibility into the information that is used by those applications – so you don’t just know where or what the problem is, but what is affected by it.Complying with regulations and requirements with ease. It doesn’t take a genius to see that the world of regulations, requirements and data management are getting more complex by the day. Practically every organization and industry today are subject to various regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes–Oxley (SOX), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA), and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Add federal government regulations and certification programs to the mix and the environment gets even more intricate. Although these various regulations differ in their requirements, they all share one common goal: ensuring that sensitive data and systems are appropriately secured, and proper governance and accountability is established. By unifying information assets, data and applications, you can better understand the relationships between them and pivot to the ever-changing landscape of regulation and compliance. Mapping services to your CMDB is an essential tool to help ensure your organization meets their audit and compliance needs by being able to track compliance at the business level- in real time.Hit the ground running with dummy-proof CMDBYou already know the power of the CMDB in your IT infrastructure, are ready to lead change management with your stakeholders to rally around its value and see the possibilities of making it the heart of all you do. Now it’s time to execute on your initiatives and turn knowledge into action.Dive deeper with CMDB for Dummies, a quick start guide for creating a configuration management plan, building a healthy configuration data management database, and aligning your plan to business use cases.Learn More:CMDB for Dummies eBookCMDB for Dummies iPaperCMDB for Dummies Animation
LIKE.TG named a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Software Asset Management Tools
I’m excited that LIKE.TG has been named a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Software Asset Management Tools. We were recognized for our Software Asset Management (SAM) solution, which we believe helps reduce software costs and mitigate license compliance risk with actionable IT insights. We think It’s a great example of how LIKE.TG makes work, work better for people.LIKE.TG innovates by listening to our customers. We built SAM because our customers wanted to manage their software, cloud and hardware assets in the same place they plan, operate, and service IT. I’m extremely proud that Gartner recognized us a Leader in this Magic Quadrant just two and a half years after we launched our SAM solution.The Magic Quadrant recognition is a testament to what we hear from our customers around the world every day. Customers all need solutions that help them achieve real business outcomes faster. In good times and bad, our customers depend on LIKE.TG to help them optimize IT productivity, cost, and resilience.Many customers aren’t just saving millions on their software spend with Software Asset Management. They are also gaining incredible efficiencies that only a single architecture can deliver. As the platform of platforms, we know a single data model is crucial to automating everyday processes for our customers. How do we know? Because they tell us.Audits are disruptive. Legacy systems and manual SAM processes leave teams disconnected and drowning in complexity. By contrast, LIKE.TG delivers digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity.Behind every great experience is a great workflow. Work should flow the way your business needs it to, enabling the experiences your employees want and your customers expect. Strategic software asset management is about providing useful, actionable information to stakeholders as decisions are being made.Embedding SAM into everyday IT management, IT operations, IT business management, vendor risk management, HR service delivery and security are game changers for customers. In the words of our founder Fred Luddy, "There is no better experience than giving someone a piece of technology that lets them do something they never thought they could do."The success of our customers means everything to us. We look forward to helping your team achieve real business outcomes quickly. LIKE.TG is the smarter way to workflow. When work flows naturally, great experiences follow.Gartner named LIKE.TG a Leader in the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Software Asset Management Tools.
5 things you should look for in your ITSM chatbot
Chatbots are rising in popularity, both in consumer and enterprises circles, because they are quick, sometimes clever, and ultimately help workers and customers get answers to common questions without bogging down your service team.As part of our ITSM Professional package, LIKE.TG’s Virtual Agent far exceeds some of the chatbots you may have used in your personal life for one simple reason – access to information.By combining our robust knowledge bases and deep integration with your data, the solution can provide custom responses within the conversation unlike other options in the market. The introduction of natural language understanding makes it even more effective. End users can ask the same questions they would ask a human agent, and the chat bot understands and responds. If an employee has an IT issue, the agent already knows what equipment has been issued and can offer suggested troubleshooting within moments, speeding the task and creating a personalized service experience.“It’s very convenient for our customers to use one single platform for everything,” said Archana Penukonda, Senior Product Marketing Manager at ServiceNow. “The connectivity busts the silos. Everything is available to them on the Now Platform, so they don’t have to build integrations into something else.”Here are some ways Virtual Agent is helping organizations scale their ITSM operations:1. Available when your workers need you - Virtual Agent is available 24/7 and can resolve issues immediately without requiring a live agent to intervene. The last thing an employee or customer wants to do in the wee hours is navigate your robust knowledge base. They get lost, and their queries still end up coming into the service desk. With Virtual Agent, common tasks can be handled in that moment, articles can be curated for the issue, and humans can go to bed satisfied at a reasonable hour.2. Seamless handoff between tech and people – Nothing is more frustrating than having to re-explain your issues when you are introduced to a new agent or being transferred to a chatbot and also having to find the magic phrases to finally get your questions answered.With this solution, you can access the right agent at the right time at any point in the conversation with no drop off in engagement. Virtual Agent is integrated with the Live Agent module to ensure transfers happen seamlessly, with information shared swiftly to the next tier of support without the clunky robot-speak. The experience is smooth for the user as well, with some companies able to make the transfer to a live agent in seconds.3. A force multiplier for your support team – The goal of any ITSM leader is to deliver a quality experience while taking pressure off the service team. This has led many companies to experiment with self service.Out of the box, Virtual Agent gives organizations access to pre-defined conversation workflows that provide an automated and cost-effective resolution to many common challenges, freeing IT staff. When launched, LIKE.TG estimated that 15% to 20% of routine interactions can be handled by Virtual Agent, but some companies, thanks to self service, are seeing their service-team workload cut in half.4. It’s where your users are – Virtual Agent is versatile, helping workers navigate robust knowledge bases and complete common requests through a range of media. It is accessible on the web through an employee portal, on mobile through our iOS and Android apps, and can also be accessed through collaboration tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams.5. Know your users to support them better – Leaders need information to make decisions, and LIKE.TG is committed to providing as much transparency into their operations as possible. Virtual Agent is no different. With data on how workers and customers are interacting with the solution, as well as on incident resolution times and escalation rates, you’ll know how to pivot to your users’ needs in real time.“Leading-edge companies are beginning to adopt enterprise chat bots, and any company that wants to augment their support staff should consider it,” said Penukonda. “Chatbots are tireless. They are like little armies that just get work done.”Ready to talk about the details? Virtual Agent comes with our ITSM Professional package. Learn more about this and all the other solutions that will help you make quick changes for your service teams.
Your ITSM should have purpose-built workspaces
Look around your desk, and you probably see a variety of tools that make you more productive — an ergonomic chair, a mug of coffee or tea, a notepad, or a charger. As individuals, we put great thought into making our personal space productive, a habit that many organizations have yet to fully replicate in their digital workspaces.LIKE.TG launched its ITSM Professional package with a focus on giving IT service teams the tools and information they need to be successful, efficient, and productive.In the past, service owners had to mine various sources of data to gather detailed information about their service portfolio. Sourcing information from many locations makes quantifying service value and performance difficult. For organizations that use multiple services, metrics, such as those that show customer satisfaction with specific services or estimated spend, become exponentially more complicated.“Most companies use multiple tools to keep track of their performance data, and that is not scalable” said Archana Penukonda, senior product marketing manager at ServiceNow. “The data problem is not always dependent on technology. Combining technology and better processes can go a long way toward having end-to-end visibility.”In our digitally transformed world, enterprises need to provide exceptional service at speed, innovate at scale, and be ever ready to pivot to new business challenges. They require an efficient and unified view of IT services to optimize and drive greater value to the business—regardless of who is providing the service. They need to have workspaces that offer a unified display of all relevant information. This eliminates lapses when digging for details and allows for more time to be spent making strategic decisions.With those needs in mind, LIKE.TG introduced purpose-built workplaces to help you report on the performance and value of services.
Service Owner WorkspaceProviding a unified view of all data related to your service portfolio, the Service Owner Workspace consolidates information on the services you own. You can monitor performance, SLAs, availability, and customer satisfaction, helping you track and analyze how services are performing. It’s also customizable. Organizations can use out-of-the-box metric definitions or create new ones tailored to their environment to help improve service quality, restore services fast, and manage service costs.
Vendor Manager WorkspaceAre you getting value out of your vendor relationships? Can you measure it? Our Vendor Manager Workspace provides a single destination to optimize vendor services by closely tracking metrics and monitoring performance. It consolidates information about service offerings, contracts, vendor improvement initiatives, SLA definitions, and risk management with metric models tailored to your organization’s specific requirements. If your third-party metrics are consistent, it unlocks a new level of transparency, fostering high performance relationships that drive value for the business.Interested in shuffling your desktop around? Purpose-built workspaces come standard with our ITSM Pro package. Learn more about workspaces and all the other solutions that will help you create more value for your service teams.
How to use Hardware Asset Management for Recording Keeping
In the life of a hardware asset, there is only one point when we know for sure we have what we purchased: When we first receive the asset.This hardware asset scenario reminds me being a little kid and playing catch with my neighbor. I would take a new baseball out of the package and throw it over the fence to him. He would catch it and then throw it back. Sometimes he would try to trick me and throw a different ball back over the fence: an old baseball, a softball, and one time a soccer ball. (That caught me off-guard.) And sometimes, he would go inside to dinner and not tell me. I would throw the ball and wait. (Until I was called in to dinner, of course.)When I took the baseball out of the package, and before I threw it over the fence, this was the only time I knew for sure I had that exact baseball. Once I threw the ball over the fence, I was never sure what I would get in return or if I would get anything back.I started writing my name on the baseballs immediately when I took them out of the package. This way, I could tell if I was getting back what I had originally thrown over the fence.Now back to the hardware asset…We receive the device and verify that what we receive is what we purchased.But at this time, we know a lot more about that exact device. We know who the vendor was and how much we paid for the device. We can match the device to that PO and invoice We have contractual information about warranty and support. And while the device is in our possession, we can attach asset tags to make identification easier. Before we deploy the device (or throw it over the fence to a user), this is the best time to start tracking the device; to create the hardware asset record with all of the supporting information we know at this point in the asset’s life.As soon as it is deployed, we have lots of tools to help us know where the device is. But nothing is more certain than when the device is in front of you; especially the very first time you receive the device.This is why tracking assets at the earlier stages of their lives is so important:
We know the most about the device at that point
We know exactly what we have
We know exactly where it is
Starting out early makes the management and tracking of that device, and all hardware assets, that much easier!If you’d like to learn more, watch the on-demand webinar: "The ITAM Triforce – Discover the power of SAM, HAM, and the CMDB"
Getting to know IT asset management
It’s funny how once you are officially in a department such as IT, everyone assumes you have deep knowledge about everything from resetting a printer to spooling up a complex cloud dev instance. And as time goes by, it gets harder and harder to admit unfamiliarity about certain areas of techdom.Take IT asset management (ITAM), for example. Yes, we all know what software is. We know what a laptop or desktop computer is. But what does it take to successfully control the usage and investment in what can be a significant cost for an enterprise?The basics: What makes ITAM run successfully.This is the management of all IT assets include computing, networking, and related equipment, as well as software licenses, entitlements, and subscriptions. In too many organizations, IT assets are quite numerous, widely distributed, and often not fully inventoried or documented. And therein lies the problem.Download Now: The Gorilla Guide to Getting Started with ITAMWhat are the common asset management mistakes and challenges?In an adjective: reactionary. Because of widespread distribution, unclear assignments of responsibility, and point tools isolated from the rest of IT, organizations tend to manage their IT assets as a reaction to some event or discovery, often unplanned and perhaps even unexpected. This has obvious risks. For example, what if you get a demand from the software vendor to prove you have licenses for every user on every machine? Failure to do so could result in license compliance true ups and even legal action. Here’s a look at the most common pitfalls not having a strong ITAM strategy or tool:Problem 1: So much wasted money.This might mean paying for software or subscriptions no longer in use or for more licenses or subscription seats than are necessary. This adds up fast. Gartner estimates $152 billion in wasted software costs and $33 billion in wasted Software as a Service usage fees. How much is your company adding to those numbers every year?1 Gartner Newsroom Oct 10, 20202 Garner Newsroom July 23, 2020Problem 2: So much silly risk.The other side of overspending is failure to purchase or acquire licenses or subscriptions needed to legally make use of specific software or services. This seemingly innocuous activity can lead to financial penalties.Problem 3: So much unnecessary work.If an audit happens, IT, finance, and other staff get drawn away from their usual work and responsibilities causing overall productivity to suffer.Those are the risks. Now keep learning about how ITAM comes to the rescue.We invite you to explore a nifty Gorilla Guide created to give the whole inside story on modern ITAM. It offers a concise discussion with topics including:
The ITAM Savings Equation
Avoiding Unnecessary Expense
How a Single Platform Simplifies ITAM
Benefits of Lifecycle Management
Piloting the Process
Measuring (and Sharing) Success
Introducing IT Asset Management (SAM) in an Organization
Reconciling the Data
Optimizing Platform Synergies and Capabilities
Get “The Gorilla Guide to Getting Started with ITAM.” And be ready for any asset management question that comes your way.
How to flatten the ITOM curve
As I sit here writing this blog, I can’t believe how much things have changed. No more chats in the hall or booking a conference room. With this pandemic, everything is virtual. My laptop and mobile are my lifeline. They are the only way I can work.I know I’m not alone. How many of you are reading this blog at the kitchen table—or, if you’re lucky, in your home office? And I suspect it’s not going to change any time soon. If ever. Changes like this have a funny way of becoming permanent. We miss the personal interaction, but we don’t miss the commute. Also, just think about how much money companies are going to save on office space.Which brings me to the topic of today’s day’s blog.With everyone so dependent on IT to keep them connected, it’s putting a huge strain on ITOM (IT operations management). Talk about mission critical. For example, if there’s a VPN issue, literally everyone is affected—not just the road warriors. And the demand for remote services is only going to increase as more of our work moves online.So, if you run an IT operations team, what are you going to do? It’s a huge challenge. Heroics aren’t enough—although I know we have plenty of heroes out there. It’s not just about dealing with today’s crisis. How do you scale as the number of digital services continues to explode? And how do you do this while keeping costs under control?Current toolsets and processes just aren’t up to the challenge. To start with, siloed monitoring tools create overwhelming noise, and it’s still a game of swivel chairs. The technology stack is becoming more complex, and it’s evolving at breakneck speed. Human beings just can’t keep up. In addition, many IT operations teams are still stuck managing infrastructure rather than focusing on what matters—the services their business depends on.It’s nobody’s fault. Everyone is doing their best, but their software tools are letting them down. Everything is too disconnected, too manual, and too slow.Something has to change.At LIKE.TG, we’re working with you to transform IT operations. Together, we’re leveraging the power of AIOps to:
Predict service issues before they happen, increasing service availability and lowering costs by shifting operations to the left
Prevent service issues from impacting users, automatically finding the root cause of issues and quickly identifying potential solutions
Automate workflows across teams, lowering MTTR and increasing productivity
And, with LIKE.TG, you get the service context you need, so you focus on what’s important for your business.Of course, all of this has to be more than pretty words. And it is. With LIKE.TG® IT Operations Management (ITOM), IT operations teams have been able to:
Reduce monitoring noise by 90%
Predict 35% of incidents before they occur
Fix common service issues 10 times faster
Improve productivity by 44%
And we’ve only just started. We’re continuing to aggressively expand our capabilities, giving you the intelligent platform, you need to flatten the IT operations curve.One day, this pandemic will be over, but the world will have changed forever. Hopefully that change will be for the better, but whatever it is, we all need to be prepared for the challenge. With LIKE.TG ITOM, you’re ready.Until then, stay safe.P.S. Don’t forget to check out our latest eBook to learn more about how LIKE.TG ITOM can help you to predict, prevent, and automate.
A new spin on managing your hardware assets
Most every kid did it: Spinning around in your parents’ desk chair. But as an IT Asset Manager, that swiveling is not so much fun.Hardware assets are everywhere: from your physical locations to your remote users to all the mobile and wifi-enabled devices to your datacenters and your network infrastructure. And it’s likely that each of these asset groups has its own deployment and management system, if not multiple systems for each asset group.So many questions…and it all takes…so…much…time.
You have dashboards on each tool and system. Which dashboard do you use? Which is most accurate?
You have to go to a dozen tools and systems to pull data, and now you have to cross-reference and reconcile all of the data. Did you get the reports with all the appropriate data from each system?
You don’t want to double count an asset, so if an asset appears on two or more reports, which of the data records is correct? How do you reconcile the multiple data points?
You need visibility into what you have, where they are, and who is using which devices. As quickly as possible. What if getting that visibility could be so much easier?Ding, ding, ding! The answer is: You need your hardware asset data on one platform. One.One platform that can automatically and accurately combine data from multiple sources.Where your hardware asset data is automatically reconciled, normalized and cross-related.With one set of dashboards and one set of reports. So now, instead of you wasting time on reconciling data from multiple tools and systems, you immediately have actionable information to manage your hardware estate.Being able to get a full picture of all your hardware assets is critical. Getting that full picture on one platform just makes perfect sense.So, let’s leave the swivel chairs for your desk and get them out of your hardware asset management.
For the 7th year in a row, LIKE.TG is named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Service Management Tools
Wow! LIKE.TG has been named an ITSM Tools Magic Quadrant Leader and placed furthest in completeness of Vision and highest in Ability to Execute in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant report. We are humbled by the recognition and gratified by the success that our customers are reporting.You may wonder whether, after being named a Magic Quadrant Leader for 7 consecutive years, if the thrill fades. To the contrary, our determination to innovate for our customers has never been greater. We believe, The Gartner accolade is a testament to our “hungry and humble” work ethic–hungry to do right by our customers and execute relentlessly to meet their needs, and humble in learning what’s working and what’s not, so we can make the right investments on behalf of our customers.A clear purposeWhen Fred Luddy launched LIKE.TG in 2004, his basic premise was to “enable people to route work effectively through the enterprise.” That rings true today more than ever.Though 2020 brought enormous, unforeseen challenges, LIKE.TG used them as motivation to deliver the workflows and applications our customers needed for emergency response and a safe return to the workplace. The company and those that make it run rose to the occasion.[Read the report: 2020 ITSM Gartner Magic Quadrant]The platform of platformsThese unusual times have clearly created a great need for digital experiences. Nine out of 10 CEOs worldwide want to support digital transformation, but only 4 in 10 say they’re prepared for it. LIKE.TG is helping close that gap with the powerful and flexible Now Platform®.LIKE.TG® ITSM, with its single, unified data model and built-in machine learning capabilities, integrates seamlessly with existing enterprise solutions to keep businesses functioning smoothly and deliver stellar digital experiences and increased productivity.For example, the LIKE.TG Virtual Agent, available to employees 24-7, understands natural language, providing answers to employees quickly in the era of remote working.As machine learning is built into the LIKE.TG platform, IT has the power to increase automation: Incoming incidents are automatically assigned, IT support staff get instant resolution recommendations, based on similar incidents resolved in the past, and any potential major incidents are intelligently identified and resolved before they negatively impact the business. To avoid frustrating UI slowdowns, our Agent Workspace enables IT support staff to concurrently resolve multiple issues rapidly while also receiving AI-assisted resolution recommendations right within the interface.Building future-proof ITSMI believe Gartner has recognized LIKE.TG as a Leader not just because we listen to customer feedback but because we also anticipate their needs. We invested heavily to build a resilient IT Service Management solution to foster business growth.For instance, LIKE.TG’s Walk-Up experience, built to enable swift face-to-face support, is now fitted with an extension that supports effective remote incident management. It enables contactless, depot-style walk-up centers through scheduled pick-ups and adaptive work assignment rules.With an increasingly remote workforce, IT staff must meet employees on the channels they are on – Slack, Microsoft Teams, or others. LIKE.TG also integrates with Amazon Connect to provide that seamless voice and chat capabilities so employees can get back to work with minimal downtime. LIKE.TG self-service has been able to deflect up to 80% of incidents or requests, allowing the IT staff to focus on more strategic issues.Boosting growth but containing costsIT and business leaders know that now is the time to raise productivity, reduce expenditures, and prepare for a more resilient future. Independent research shows that organizations that switched to LIKE.TG saved a total of $8.9 million because of improved IT and employee productivity. A reduction in overall IT maintenance and development costs saved another $6 million.Behind every great experience… is a great workflow. We are always grateful to our customers, and in service of their business goals. We are confident. This latest recognition from Gartner is a validation of our strategy, execution, and innovation for our customers.
IT just got smarter
Every company in the world needs to reduce risk and uncertainty in its IT operations, ITOM. The best way to do that is by combining AI and digital workflows. It’s all about applying machine learning to operational data so that you can generate insights about potential system issues, and then launch automated workflows that resolve problems fast—ideally, before they impact customers.Today’s partnership announcement between IBM and LIKE.TG is great news for enterprise customers. We’re combining AI-powered hybrid cloud software and professional services from IBM with intelligent, self-learning workflows running on the Now Platform® to deliver cutting-edge IT service and operations management.Engineers at IBM and LIKE.TG teamed up to create a joint IT solution, the first of its kind, that marries IBM Watson AI with LIKE.TG IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM). The joint solution will enable customers to enhance employee productivity, have full visibility into their operational footprint, and respond to incidents and issues faster.
Clients will gain deeper, AI-driven insights from their data. The joint solution creates a baseline of their normal IT environment. It provides recommendations for actions to prevent and fix IT issues at scale, before they become problems. As a result, customers can free up valuable time and IT resources from maintenance activities to focus on driving the transformation projects necessary to support the digital demands of their businesses.The new solution will be enabled through a joint go-to-market strategy, and will be available later this year from IBM.LIKE.TG ITSM allows IT to deliver scalable services on a single intelligent cloud platform to increase productivity by 20% (according to a Forrester estimate) and resolve issues faster, creating amazing employee experiences. LIKE.TG ITOM Visibility leverages Service Graph, the next evolution of our native Configuration Management Database (CMDB), to deliver automated, near real-time visibility into the true operational state of all resources and business services.Historically, the CMDB functioned as a single source of truth for your IT infrastructure. Modern IT organizations increasingly need consistent, data-driven insight into the entire digital lifecycle, not just inventory and asset management. Stemming from our acquisition of Sweagle, Service Graph now underpins all of LIKE.TG’s solutions, enabling businesses, for the first time, to integrate technology, people, and processes into a service-oriented view.IBM Watson AI applies machine learning and AI to IT operations, automating how enterprises self-detect, diagnose, respond to, and remediate IT anomalies in real time. Customers get anomaly detection along with automated recommendations based on deep analysis of prior incidents.IBM algorithms and baselining techniques will provide important context to LIKE.TG, enabling streamlined incident management, making the data more useful to agents and retraining the AI over time. Thanks to the power of AI and machine learning, the average time to resolve incidents can be reduced by 65 percent. Using LIKE.TG’s IT workflow capabilities, meanwhile, all actions and insights will be recorded for auditing purposes and to generate future insights.Using the IBM and LIKE.TG joint solution, IT pros will be able to obtain a full view of an issue, from start to finish. With recommendations and deep diagnosis from IBM Watson AI, a service agent can quickly understand the incident, without ever leaving ServiceNow.On the implementation side, IBM is expanding its global LIKE.TG practice to include additional capabilities that provide advisory, implementation, and managed services on the Now Platform. LIKE.TG is co-investing to train and certify IBM employees and dedicated staff for customer success.
IT risk is no joke in today’s technology-driven enterprises. Even the smallest outage can cause massive financial and reputational damage. In fact, market research firm Aberdeen pegs the average cost of an outage at about $260,000 an hour. Together, IBM and LIKE.TG will help customers overcome these challenges by automating old, manual IT processes and increasing IT productivity.Hats off to the talented IBM and LIKE.TG teams that collaborated to build this innovative solution. Together we’re delivering great technology and services that make work, work better for people.Use of Forward-Looking StatementsThis blog contains “forward-looking statements” about the expectations, beliefs, plans, and intentions relating to the partnership between IBM and ServiceNow. Such forward-looking statements include statements regarding expected performance and benefits of our new solution and go-to-market strategy. Forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties and are based on potentially inaccurate assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expected or implied by the forward-looking statements. If any such risks or uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions prove incorrect, our results could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements we make. We undertake no obligation, and do not intend, to update the forwardlooking statements. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those in any forward-looking statements include: (i) delays and unexpected difficulties and expenses related the solution; (ii) uncertainty as to whether sales of such solution will justify this strategy and investment; and (iii) changes in the regulatory landscape related to the solution. Further information on factors that could affect our financial and other results is included in the filings we make with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time.
5 IT strategy considerations to ensure business resilience
If you’re a Marvel® Comics fan, you might have heard about the superhero named Darwin. Darwin can evolve based on need and environment. For instance, he can acquire night vision for his evening’s mission or develop gills if swimming underwater.As with Darwin, adaptation is an essential skill for many IT operations superheroes out there as well, tough times or not. LIKE.TG executives recently sat down (virtually) with IT leaders from several industries to hear their challenges and priorities brought on by the pandemic and the changes it has wrought. One thing that was loud and clear: everyone's journey to create a resilient operation was slightly different, but all had common end goals. Here’s a brief synopsis:1: There’s no single operating protocol for retail and manufacturing companiesThe retail and manufacturing company execs said that they are more focused than ever on adjusting supply-chain mechanisms. One company quickly augmented its e-commerce platform to accommodate online sales. Another developed multiple operating protocols to receive materials in states that have different mandates. And other companies have made a priority of ensuring the health of their front-line workers.2: Preparation is criticalA small number of companies had a contingency plan prior to the pandemic. They implemented it instantly, using their past experience with SARS and other health crises as a guide. Financial services companies were prominent here. They transitioned almost overnight to working remotely, quickly boosted network capacity and bandwidth, and increased usage of self-service and digital channels.3: Reliance on Cloud and SaaS paid offCompanies that invested in multi-cloud environments and SaaS applications scaled faster and further. AS a result, service providers were able to respond to their needs swiftly and have been able to scale demand up and down as needed. Companies that narrowed their focus to the critical services that employees and customers relied on most were less likely to experience interruptions.4: Workflow automation came to the rescueThe use of self-service, AIOps, machine learning, and workflow automation across the enterprise have continually helped companies resolve common tasks. Not surprisingly, some companies had invested in automating help desk support, employee onboarding, vendor management, and other functions that help daily tasks run seamlessly.5: There’s no going backThe COVID-19 pandemic has forced companies to shift to digital. While companies get ready for the return-to-workplace mode, they’re only going to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence, machine learning, workflow automation, remote workforce enablement, and collaboration.Have your cape ready. There will be more unplanned changes aheadJust like Darwin, IT operations has shown extreme resilience to change. That will be tested even more as companies navigate uncharted waters in future return-to-work transitions. Three things to keep in mind while you prepare:
Review your IT operation’s ability to scale up and shift as needed
Consider plans to speed up cloud and SaaS where it makes sense
Automate, automate, automate
For more information, check out this eBook to learn how to optimize your CMDB strategy for today’s crisis and beyond.
Combine ITSM and ITOM to make your business more resilient
A combined ITSM and ITOM approach can make your business more resilient and proactive in three ways.We’ll start with a stat that most anyone will appreciate: In the average enterprise, about 60% of incidents are generated by machines (servers, storage, network routers, etc.) instead of people, LIKE.TG research finds.By broadening their IT management to include machines and people, many current LIKE.TG customers have reduced high-priority incidents and VPN outages, and shortened service restoration times, saving the organization thousands of employee work hours.Let’s dig into the advantages of this IT service Management (ITSM) + IT operations management (ITOM) approach:Drive down costs while swiftly resolving issuesThe shared data across both ITSM and ITOM allow for faster, more effective issue resolution. The insights can also power greater self-service for the “people part” and automation for the “machine part.” A deeper understanding of issues and the impact of change on systems allows operations to better prioritize its attention.For example: By standardizing its IT on a single platform, Danske Bank has created a scalable foundation for enterprise‑wide innovation that improves risk management and enhances the employee experience. With LIKE.TG, the bank has achieved:
A 93% reduction in high-priority incidents
A 6X improvements in time to restore services
A single platform for ITSM, ITOM, ITBM, and GRC.
Scale IT to support employee needs and business goalsRealize self-healing and proactive IT through logic-driven automation across the estate, from identifying the issue in near real-time to to prescribing a resolution. In other words, have visibility and a single source of truth to drive AIOps and predictive intelligence.For example: Accenture now has transparency and control across their services, applications, and infrastructure, leading to some incredible results:
A 41% reduction in MTTR via greater visibility and more rapidly identifying problems
A 90% reduction in time required to create a ticket
A 50% improvement in configuration item accuracy, leading to fewer problems down the road
Delivering more resilient and compelling remote service experiencesAn integrated, single platform for ITSM and ITOM allows your team to share data more freely by more intelligently determining an issue’s impact and priority level. An issue can be automatically assigned to the right resolution group using ML-based intelligence.For example: The IT team at Novant Health can now focus on helping with chat or the service desk. They automated much of the ticketing process, improved self-service, and simplified the resolution process to deliver:
A 50% reduction in workload through self-service
30% fewer ticket reassignments
28 hours of redundant support work eliminated per week
Get IT working together in new ways to solve those old problems.By leveraging a single platform, such as LIKE.TG, you can use automation and predictive intelligence to significantly reduce people-generated incidents (with ITSM) and machine-generated incidents (with ITOM).Get the whole story. Regardless whether you’re a current LIKE.TG ITSM customer, we recommend this ebook: “Reimagining IT service delivery and operations in unimagined times”
How to be an IT ninja
Ninjas are known for their stealth and agility, skills that take much practice and study to master. They are never satisfied with their current abilities and always seek to improve.Those noble aspirations are not limited to secret warriors. In the current climate, IT leaders are also busy adding new capabilities to their skillset. In my IT Experience Podcast, I regularly sit-down with IT pros who have valuable advice for their peers.The following principles can help you hone your ITSM and ITOM ninja skills as we build the post-COVID-19 workplace.Keep a growth mindset - When I sat down with Khalid Kark, Managing Director at Deloitte CIO Program, he shared his research on kinetic leaders. A kinetic leader is always reinventing herself.It’s even more critical to maintain a growth mindset. Leaders can’t just focus on focus only on responding to traditional problems. Instead, view every new challenge as an opportunity to drive agility so you can stay resilient and innovate. A growth mindset will help you create value in difficult times, whether by deploying automation to keep employees productive or building intelligence to respond to customer problems faster.[Shameless plug: It’s one thing to be an IT leader, it’s another thing to use ITSM that’s a leader in the Gartner MQ.]Align IT and business to deliver digital outcomes - IT transformation leader David Stefferud, used an analogy to explain why transformation projects often fail. Let’s say your business is looking to sell more canned peaches. But IT keeps asking for more money to upgrade their systems. The mismatch of goals and expectations creates contention among the teams, without advancing their common goal of moving those peaches.Instead, IT should come back and say, ‘I'd love to help you sell more peaches, but we need to rethink our digital capabilities to support that?’Focus on intelligence versus data - Many IT leaders care about data collection. It’s true that analytics is useless without quality data. But if data collection consumes years of effort by expensive data scientists and then doesn’t yield useful results, it becomes a burden.According to Loom Systems founders Gab Menachem and Dror Mann, IT leaders need to build intelligent systems instead of just capturing data and then relying on lengthy analysis to surface the insights they need.Make automation your top priority - Thangavel Viswam, an IT ninja on the LIKE.TG IT Operations team, shared how his team has automated resolution of VPN issues. Before they automated problem identification and i resolution, they used to have to resolve hundreds of incidents. Now they're down to tens and twenties. During COVID-19 when employees everywhere started working remotely, they hardly had to work on VPN issues. That freed up time for them to work on other strategic tasks.Put your ninja suit on and be ready to adapt and grow - IT leaders can drive business value by:
Making allies in the business by understanding their business needs.
Creating common digital transformation goals.
Develop their intelligence and automation muscles.
Agile organizations perform better
In a fast-moving world where volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) are the norm, organizations must be agile to survive, thrive and rise above competitors. Recent IDC research shows agile organizations outperform non-agile organizations across several key indicators central to delivering on C-suite agendas.[Discover the benefits of agile development.]The LIKE.TG-commissioned IDC Agility Benchmark Survey1 found that 93% of agile organizations reported growing profits (see Figure 1). Only 68% of static organizations reported the same. Equally, agile organizations perform better across several core areas and are better able to:
Protect revenues with existing customers and attract new ones.
Attract and retain critical talent.
Accelerate new business models and new solutions development.
Capitalize on targeted growth opportunities.
Figure 1: A spotlight on key metrics where agile organizations perform better than their peers; source: IDC Agility Benchmark Survey, 2020Unlocking agility requires fundamental shiftsThe need for more agility is clearer than ever, as is the realization that a whole journey lies ahead. IDC defines two characteristics that underpin agility: speed, and adaptability. Embedding these in the organizational DNA allows organizations to quickly pivot strategy, talent, processes, portfolio, and technology architecture toward changing needs.Yet, the journey is not an easy one. The path to agility will require some relevant shifts across five dimensions:
Leadership: From reactive leadership with fixed and yearly strategy and budgeting processes to rapid decision cycles to quickly ramp or sunset initiatives as needed
Structure: From a hierarchical, siloed, command-and-control organizational structure to a "team of teams" fluid, self-forming structure that allows for continuous tapping into required talent and skills
Process: From siloed, manual processes where bottlenecks and duplication lead to inefficiencies to adaptive, integrated, and end-to-end digitized processes
Portfolio: From a static product portfolio where innovation is bureaucratic and top-down to rapid experimentation and "fail fast" approaches with feedback loops from the ecosystem
Technology architecture: From a static technology infrastructure tied to legacy systems toward operating as a digital platform, leveraging real-time enterprise data
Figure 2: IDC organizational agility evolution framework—pillars; source: IDC, 20205 steps leaders should take to become more agile1. Know where you areOften, organizations overestimate their agility. More than half of European organizations consider themselves very or extremely agile. In contrast, only 21% of organizations are ahead in their agility journey. Overcoming this misperception and understanding how to move forward will require a careful assessment of where your organization is today on the agility evolution curve, as well as the ability to benchmark yourself against industry peers. This will provide a clear representation of the starting point and the end goal, and enable you to track progress.2. Benchmark yourselfBenchmark your agility maturity to the five pillars (see Figure 2). This will provide a clear map of areas that need improvement. For each pillar, IDC has also identified agility tips—practical steps that can help organizations accelerate their path to agility.3. Build an agility compassEach organization will need to define its own roadmap toward organizational maturity and strength on the key agility dimensions. The roadmap should address current capabilities, challenges, and priorities. Setting up an internal pilot project to drive changes in the organization can help you test the approach, get internal buy-in, and share best practices for scaling.4. Keep running in the "Red Queen's race"As Lewis Carroll said in his book "Through the Looking-Glass," "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that." Agility is not a safe spot to reach but rather a continual process of improvement.5. Use the whole orchestraAgility is a team sport. Make sure all levels of your organization understand the benefits of agility. You entire C-suite should be pulling in the same direction. All employees should be empowered to drive change proactively. Nurture a culture of innovation to drive entrepreneurial behavior and continuously scout new opportunities. Develop an incentive structure that's aligned with the new expectations to drive culture change across the organization.Learn more about the key traits of an agile organization, the five dimensions of agility, and the agility evolution stages in the LIKE.TG ebook "How to thrive in unpredictable times."1 The IDC Agility Benchmark Survey gathered responses from 873 large European enterprises between September and October 2020.
Deloitte harnesses LIKE.TG IT Business Management
As a world leader in professional services, Deloitte knows how to innovate and meet client requirements to a high standard. The professional services network uses LIKE.TG IT Business Management and LIKE.TG digital workflows to operate efficiently and deliver on client projects.Once Deloitte had achieved initial success with query management, the team began examining opportunities to use LIKE.TG to digitise workflows across the organisation. An apples-for-apples comparison delivered a compelling result: “Testing how we could benefit from building on the platform to solve for medium complexity process with some integrations we realised massive cost and time savings with LIKE.TG,” says McIntyre “Time savings are a huge business benefit in the professional services industry, and Deloitte realised savings in the order of a 50% to 80% reduction in time to build applications.”Deloitte is also a welcome guest on LIKE.TG's Neighbourhood series.Matt McIntyre, Partner, Enterprise Program Officer, ANZ, Deloitte joined us to discuss their use of LIKE.TG to build apps and improve prioritisation, dashboarding and other key elements of project portfolio management.The Enterprise Program team oversees investment portfolios in the region, working closely with businesses to ensure investments are properly prioritised and managed over their life cycles.McIntyre has worked with LIKE.TG since 2008. He first used the Now Platform® to support operations for the newly created ‘Deloitte Digital’ division. “I was after an ITS end-solution,” he explains. “We’re delivering digital products to clients and we needed to [triage and manage] incidents and calls.”McIntyre signed up to a developer initiative, gained access and began exploring LIKE.TG platform capabilities. In 2014, when the Deloitte Quality and Risk function approached his team for assistance in managing queries from business services professionals, Deloitte conducted an evaluation process and opted to procure ServiceNow.“We started with LIKE.TG as a platform and built a query management system that helped the quality and risk team manage queries from the business,” McIntyre says. The project required Deloitte to transition gigabytes of case emails into LIKE.TG to support a system that still runs today, along with many other platform applications.
The team now maintains nearly 25 LIKE.TG applications. They include an app used to set up engagements in core finance systems, and others that help with everything from recruitment management and approval processes, to outsourced offshore payroll processing.Deloitte evaluated a range of systems before opting for LIKE.TG IT Business Management to undertake project portfolio management. McIntyre explains the Now Platform capabilities won out, particularly for its unique digital workflow capability, along with dashboarding, recording, configurability and user interface.Looking ahead the business saw further improvements in IT Business Management. "Globally, Deloitte [was] going through transformation,” McIntyre says. That exercise entailed introducing a form of globalisation to a network of member firms that had traditionally operated individually in different markets.Deloitte’s global IT operation was looking at better ways to deliver services to internal clients, their clients and their customers, and strongly recommended ServiceNow. Deloitte Australia then deployed IT Business Management in April of 2019 and followed up with IT Service Management three months later.In the last year, Deloitte has partnered with LIKE.TG for project portfolio management. “A really good lesson when you’re evaluating the best capability for your business needs, you’ve really got to look at a vendor and what deep industry and product knowledge they have, and the changes they are making in their products to help you advance what you’re doing,” says McIntyre.LIKE.TG has also helped Deloitte solve the complex issue of project prioritisation – a task that was eating up time better used for execution. “We think we’ve found a happy middle ground in the last 12 months where we’ve moved to a quarterly prioritisation model,” says McIntyre. “With ideas and demands captured in LIKE.TG IT Business Management.”In addition, LIKE.TG has enabled the team to build dashboards and tweak them on the fly to meet the demands of stakeholders or audiences.Deloitte has now extended LIKE.TG IT Business Management to capture – at a project level – all the impacts of changes affecting the audiences and user groups within its organisation. These changes include new marketing campaigns, new talent initiatives, new IT system implementations and new product builds to meet client briefs.“We’re able to take that information and surface it out to a dashboard and answer the question of whether we are making too many changes at one time for a particular group, or can we combine some messages and create a consistent narrative going to the business,” McIntyre tells us. “That’s a really powerful thing for us to do with the platform and something that doesn’t come out of the box.”McIntyre also shared the key building blocks of building an enterprise project management office and successfully adopting underlying technologies: “It comes back to putting the user at the centre of what you’re doing and solving the questions that we had,” he says.
LIKE.TG and Oracle Cloud Integrate for Cloud Optimization
Over the past year, companies have flocked to digital transformation more than ever to protect revenue, maintain business continuity, and pursue productivity in today’s distributed work environment. Having an effective cloud strategy is a key component to any company’s digital transformation journey.To build the best cloud strategy, IT departments need one data model and cross-enterprise integration system. This gives them the ability to operate using one view across the entire IT lifecycle so they can plan ahead, prioritize, and optimize on a single cloud-based platform.A match made in the cloudLIKE.TG and Oracle share the goal of helping companies accelerate their digital transformation efforts by creating a single data view for smarter decisions and real-time analytics. Today, LIKE.TG and Oracle are announcing the integration of LIKE.TG ITOM Visibility with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for cloud optimization.This will allow joint customers to proactively visualize changes in their OCI instance and understand how business services are being impacted. This integration furthers LIKE.TG’s goal of supporting customers’ existing infrastructure, giving the Now Platform the ability to support customers wherever their workloads reside: on-premises, across the major cloud vendors, or both.“With this integration, LIKE.TG and Oracle are making it seamless for enterprises to unlock productivity for distributed teams to deliver products and services faster, access powerful business insights, and create great experiences for employees,” says Jeff Hausman, VP GM of operations management (ITOM, ITAM, security) and data foundations at ServiceNow.“Joint customers leveraging the Now Platform and OCI will get the best of both worlds: a seamless experience that maximizes the value of cloud investments and the ability to harness the power of artificial intelligence for proactive operations,” he adds.“Enterprise customers are increasingly moving toward a multicloud environment and need an easy way to manage all of their cloud resources,” says Scott Twaddle, vice president of product, industries, and partnerships for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.“This is a big step forward for all of our customers that are using Oracle, as well as other major cloud providers, to run their business-critical applications. Now customers can leverage their existing LIKE.TG Service Management Portal to view and manage all of their cloud resources, including Oracle,” he adds.Cloud visibility simplifiedGaining visibility into workload migration while managing product and service delivery is not easy, especially as companies have shifted to either fully remote or hybrid work models. The LIKE.TG ITOM Visibility solution coupled with OCI, however, provides complete visibility into multicloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and containers as a service (CaaS) resources.With LIKE.TG's comprehensive IT asset data, teams can conduct tasks such as visualizing changes, tracking incidents, and fulfilling software license compliance obligations. In fact, Oracle has verified both LIKE.TG Discovery and Software Asset Management as third-party tools for Oracle contractual events and software audits.The integration also helps distributed teams track cloud-native environments, speeding product delivery to meet increasing business demands. For example, IT teams can now use standardized cloud tags to map infrastructure and services for instant issue identification and remediation.AI-driven workflows to the rescueIn today’s challenging business landscape, organizations have limited resources and bandwidth to manage issues when they arise. With OCI, customers will leverage LIKE.TG AI-powered service operations to predict and prevent issues before they occur and impact users.Using a single, unified agent framework, IT teams can better manage vulnerabilities and software asset management and use intelligent workflows to automate incident response. This ultimately helps ensure processes run smoothly, issues don’t affect the customer experience, and customers have fewer agents to manage.Customers can easily download and implement the new integration in the LIKE.TG Store without overhauling their current LIKE.TG and Oracle environments.
LIKE.TG named a Magic Quadrant Leader in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools
LIKE.TG has been named a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Agile Planning Tools for the first time. This is a big move for us after being positioned a Niche Player in 2019 and a Challenger in 2020. We believe this position is a result of our extended integration with third-party tools, our project and portfolio management (PPM) use cases, and our portfolio management capabilities.Gartner’s research measured our IT Business Management (ITBM) and Agile capabilities, a critical part of our IT workflows strategy. This year, we’ve moved further right in the completeness of vision and upward in ability to execute. We believe this recognition is a game changer that validates our prominence in the ITBM/PPM marketplace.
A platform of strengthBuilt on the Now Platform®, ITBM provides a single unified backlog that integrates operational and development work. It can centralize all demand coming in from the IT services side, all alerts and issues coming in from the operations side, and all projects and priorities coming in from the business.Our platform is a huge strength for us. In fact, we believe we’re the only vendor that provides a shared platform for the technology lifecycle. Our common service data model, workflow, and user experience help organizations break down silos and drive more agile and resilient operations.Benefits of ITBMITBM delivers a single data model, a modern mobile experience, and a powerful integration hub. It includes a broad set of functionality, from idea management and roadmapping to project and portfolio management and visibility.Based on customer feedback, we know we’re uniquely positioned to help customers with their digital transformation journeys. Our robust roadmap includes enhancements to Scrum, Kanban, and forecasting support, as well as other capabilities. In the past year, we’ve extended third-party integration to include Azure Pipelines, Github Actions, Gitlab, and Jenkins.ITBM is able to help organizations manage all kinds of planning methodologies, including Agile, Waterfall, and hybrid. And, we’re creating experiences for the primary personas: executives, portfolio managers, program managers, and product owners. We’re also continually investing in and releasing user experiences such as roadmapping.At LIKE.TG, we’re committed to improving the user experience based on customer feedback. The upcoming Rome and San Diego releases of the Now Platform will include significant updates to our user experience.See the benefits of ITBM for yourself: Demo IT Business Management.Read the full report.LIKE.TG, the LIKE.TG logo, Now, and other LIKE.TG marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of LIKE.TG, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
How well do you know modern ITAM?
Take a quick break from those spreadsheets and take this quiz.Do you have the chops to correctly answer these questions about modern IT asset management, ITAM? Find answers, and links to two Gorilla Guides that may interest you, at bottom.QUESTION 1: What's the average yearly difference between asset compliance costs and non-compliance costs?
$500,000
$2 million
$7 million
$10 million
QUESTION 2: What percentage of office workers create at least one software account that their IT department doesn't know about?
8%
19%
32%
64%
QUESTION 3: Besides the individual software providers, what global organization protects intellectual property from software piracy?
Business Software Alliance
Conseil des Licences Logicielles
Software User Police
Committee for Proper Asset Usage
QUESTION 4: What three business practices are ITAM built around?
Contractual, ROI, Passwords
Contractual, Discovery, Financial
Users, ROI, versioning
Discovery, Financial, Passwords
QUESTION 5: In the ITAM world, automation and orchestration are the same thing.
True
False
QUESTION 6: What are the stages of the IT asset lifecycle?
Query, Deploy, Service, Manage, Retire
Request, Deploy, Service,
Request, Fulfill, Deploy, Reconcile, Service, Retire
No matter how you score, you can always learn more.These two Gorilla Guides offer intermediate level information, best practices, and insights on IT asset management – for software and hardware. Check ‘em out.The Gorilla Guide eBook to Optimizing ITAM for SuccessThe Gorilla Guide eBook to Elevating ITAM with WorkflowANSWERSQ1: B - $10 millionCompliance costs, or those relating to maintaining or meeting compliance standards, cost around $5.47 million for a company, while non-compliance costs -- including fines, business disruption, and losses in productivity and revenue -- cost around $14.82 million.”—CIO Dive, survey of functional IT leadersQ2: D - 64%A recent 1Password survey of 2,119 U.S. adults who work in an office with an IT department revealed that in the past 12 months 64% had created at least one account that their IT department “doesn’t know about.” 52% reported creating between two and five accounts that their IT department doesn’t know about. For 16%, the tally exceeded five accounts.What's in your network? Shadow IT and shadow IoT challenge technology sensibilitiesQ3: A - Business Software AllianceBusiness Software Alliance has made it their business to ensure organizations around the globe do not utilize counterfeit software as well as other explicit and implicit agreements. Moreover, they can inspect most any organization to conduct court-approved audits. Fines and penalties for non-compliance can be enormous and painful, sometimes running into the millions of dollars.Q4: B - Contractual, Discovery, Financial
Contractual. ITAM seeks to accommodate and represent all the various contracts for licenses, hardware maintenance, leases, and services that an organization might undertake, in a coherent and consistent way.
Discovery and inventory. ITAM sniffs out, discovers, and compiles as complete a list as possible of what IT assets it sees in use on an organization’s networks (as well as IT assets that are not on the network and are not assigned to a user—such as new and spare equipment), along with who’s using them, for what purpose, for how long, and so forth.
Financial. ITAM tracks all the financial activities associated with an organization’s IT assets, including their costs of acquisition, licensing, upgrades, maintenance, disposal, and more.
Q5: FalseAutomation generally refers to eliminating a manual process in a single task, such as creating a new user account, whereas orchestration refers to optimally arranging a series of automated tasks in a workflow, such as a new hire workflow.Q6: C - Request, Fulfill, Deploy, Reconcile, Service, RetireRequest: A native ITAM solution can help automate the entire onboarding process for new equipment.Fulfill: ITAM ensures that the right equipment, cloud, hardware and software is purchased (or provisioned) for the employee or datacenter workloads.Deploy: Operations and HR provide the accounts or equipment with proper orchestration with the ITAM system.Reconcile: Proactively managing software audits and true-up costs, while reducing potential legal costs associated with licensing noncompliance.Service: ITAM helps you manage any regular or preventive maintenance that may be required on software, hardware or clouds.Retire: Integrated ITAM and HR processes help to ensure IT assets and user accounts are properly decommissioned and returned for end users or datacenters.
Oracle verifies LIKE.TG as a third-party tool vendor
Updated June 27, 2022LIKE.TG has been verified as a third-party tool vendor for Oracle Database, Oracle Database Options, and Oracle Fusion Middleware. Starting June 2022 in the Now Platform San Diego release (backward-compatible to the Rome release), Oracle’s verification covers both LIKE.TG Discovery and LIKE.TG Software Asset Management (SAM).What this means for youOracle’s verification allows organizations to submit LIKE.TG usage data to Oracle License Management Services (LMS) and Oracle Global Licensing and Advisory Services (GLAS) as an alternative to Oracle measurement tools.Using an Oracle-verified solution such as LIKE.TG can significantly reduce the time, risk, and effort needed to deploy a script in your environment. LIKE.TG SAM provides your effective license position for Oracle and your other software vendors. That means you’ll be able to see your Oracle compliance position and savings opportunities before, during, and after an audit or contractual event.During an audit, LIKE.TG verified discovery exports can be provided to Oracle. In addition, the LIKE.TG SAM Report for Oracle Infrastructure incorporates details on the Oracle database running, the physical servers and virtual machines supporting these databases, and the number of processor cores that must be licensed.The LIKE.TG SAM Report for Oracle Infrastructure is for customer use and can be referenced on demand. Keep in mind a report from any verified vendor does not replace an Oracle license audit or revoke Oracle's contractual right to perform one.
Simplifying Oracle license complianceFrom the Oracle Publisher Pack Dashboard, you can drill into further details, such as which database instances have options turned on but not used. Then, you can take action to optimize costs.LIKE.TG SAM and Discovery are verified tools to discover deployments of Oracle Database, Oracle Database Options and management packs, and Oracle Fusion Middleware. We also provide support per processor and for named user plus license metrics, processor core factor values, partitioning technologies, and agreement types such as unlimited license agreements (ULAs).In addition, LIKE.TG can discover Oracle databases deployed in cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and VMware Cloud. LIKE.TG can also identify Oracle capabilities in a variety of virtualization technologies, including Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware, IBM Virtualization, Red Hat Virtualization, Nutanix Acropolis, and OpenStack Virtualization.LIKE.TG Discovery works across operating systems as well, including Windows, Solaris, Linux, Mac OS X, HP-UX, and IBM AIX.LIKE.TG IT Asset Management saves customers millions in software, hardware, and cloud costs. With LIKE.TG, you can automate the end-to-end IT lifecycle with workflow. Only LIKE.TG connects departments with a single platform to optimize costs across on-prem and cloud environments.Say goodbye to manual processes and human error from repetitive tasks in siloed tools. Now you can uncover lost assets and purchase sprawl and take action to mitigate compliance exposure.Manage your Oracle license compliance from the same place you manage the rest of IT. We help make ITAM work better for you.
Start off the new year with ITSM
Start off 2021 by learning best practices for easing ITSM implementation in your organization – tune in for these on-demand webinars and hear from LIKE.TG ITSM leaders.Implement ITSM Like a Pro—Modernize your service delivery fast with LIKE.TGFact: The longer you hang onto your legacy ITSM tools, the more your organization risks in terms of productivity loss. Myth: Modernizing is a protracted, painful process that’s likely to break your budget. It’s time to set the record straight.Delivering excellent user experiences, while helping drive down IT costs, hinges upon streamlining your digital transformation initiatives. This includes migrating your legacy on‑prem ITSM solution—transforming your team’s speed, efficiency, and productivity. There are simply too many opportunities left on the table to ignore.You’ll learn best practices for easing ITSM implementation through proven outcomes, regain opportunities missed by not migrating to a cloud solution and learn how not making the switch can greatly increase IT costs over time. See how your time to value will be shorter than you think.Hosted by:Gerald Beaulieu, ITSM, director of product marketingChris Shakespear, ITSM, global practice leaderModernize and automate IT service management like a bossYou want to deliver services that amaze your users, but your IT team is so busy constantly fighting daily fires that it can’t focus on future innovation. Now’s the time to accelerate your digital transformation.Tune in for this on-demand webinar to learn how to boost IT productivity by consolidating fragmented tools and legacy systems into a single system of engagement. Help raise the overall bar for service excellence, so you can modernize IT by consolidating to a single system of engagement, deliver better consumer experiences that make your IT team heroes, automate routine work and gain real-time visibility—empowering a proactive approach.
How human-centered design yields better ITSM experiences
Today’s employees and customers expect modern, frictionless IT service management (ITSM) experiences that incorporate digital workflows. But how do enterprise IT leaders deliver on this expectation? The answer is simple: human-centered IT service management.Human-centered ITSM means incorporating human-centered design to simplify IT technology and make it easy for people to use. It’s not a completely new concept, but it’s more critical today than ever. Here’s why.Creating enterprise IT workflowsEnterprise technology buying decisions are no longer made in isolation by high-level folks who won’t be day-to-day users of those products. Positive reception and adoption of any enterprise tool and workflow by the direct users are now critical.The consumer technology space is a great model. Companies have to compete on user experience as a key factor—particularly the emotional and human element. Take mobile phones, for example. Phone makers have to constantly innovate and compete to retain their customers because, at any given time, those customers can switch to another phone maker.Apple product launches focus on the human element of all the cool things Apple is releasing. The value proposition isn’t pure technical innovation; it’s technical innovation delivered as compelling human experiences.Similarly, the market is changing for enterprise software companies. Cost and business disruption, while certainly not trivial, are continually lessening as barriers to change. Startups proliferate, always touting their user experience as a key differentiator. Enterprise companies know they need to compete on user experience. That’s why at LIKE.TG, we’re always driving to up our game.The human-centered ITSM imperativeOne, perhaps underappreciated, reason why human-centered ITSM is important is retention, plain and simple. People are the most vital asset for any company. They’re your greatest business advantage.If you consider demographics and the workforce today, your employees are used to high-quality experiences in their personal lives, from iPhones to Amazon to Netflix. When they’re forced to use systems and processes at work that feel like the worst, clunky accounting software from before the 2000s, they’ll leave at the first opportunity. You don’t retain the best people when they’re fed up with the systems they have to work with every day.Getting started with human-centered ITSMThere’s a fairly straightforward starting point to put people at the center of your ITSM initiatives. Without bias or defensiveness, ask the people who are really using your systems how those systems are working for them—but don’t ask as their boss, because they'll say the experience is great for fear of offending you or hurting someone’s feelings. Find a way to get honest feedback, such as through an anonymous survey.Then, do ride-alongs to observe key people actually using a system or product. Shadow them and watch a day in their lives. You’ll directly witness all the ways systems aren’t meeting their needs, even if they no longer see it themselves.There are also lots of books that provide good guidance around human-centered design and usability. Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug offers some great ways to assess how easy your system is to understand and use.This exercise isn’t just for user experience professionals, by the way. A lot of IT folks don't know they're already doing human-centered design, but they are. An IT manager who thinks about fixing a process that doesn’t work for people because it doesn’t deliver the information they need in the way they need it, well, that’s human-centered design. The manager is putting humans first and making sure everything works for them.The next evolution: Human-scale designWe think a lot about human-scale design. It’s where we look at how to simplify amazing but complicated technology that may have been science fiction 30 years ago. There’s immense complexity and scale to modern systems that are often beyond human ability to directly comprehend.So, how do we scale these systems to the human level? How do we abstract, distill, and harness their power so people can know exactly what’s going on and provide ways for them to direct and use that power?One way is through artificial intelligence (AI). For example, LIKE.TG ITSM Professional has an amazing new feature called Predictive Intelligence Workbench that uses AI to successfully deflect service tickets. We focus on showing the outcomes and how to tailor the outcomes rather than all the technical details of the AI itself.We also consider the ethics of AI. There are issues of privacy, consent, bias, and empowerment. AI is not meant to replace people. We find ways for it to empower and elevate people.Human-centered ITSM is all about people. That’s why we’re always thinking, “How do we automate the mundane to free people to do the more meaningful, higher-value stuff?”Learn more about human-centered ITSM in our ebook, “The human experience of IT service management.”You can also register for our April 7, 2021, LIKE.TG webinar about human-centered IT service management.