3

Teams that practice DevOps typically exceed profitability, market share, and productivity goals.

According to Puppet Labs 2015 report, State of DevOps, teams that practice DevOps typically exceed profitability, market share and productivity goals. So what is DevOps? Jason Hand, DevOps evangelist at VictorOps, puts it this way, “DevOps shifts the tradition of how IT is organized, how engineers interact. It brings a set of best practices that guides how engineers and IT work that is mark-edly different than a traditional set of principles. It’s a culture of automating, measuring, and sharing in the name of increased efficiencies throughout the software development lifecycle.” DevOps was a re-sponse to the conflict between development groups andIT support and aims to bring these teams together.

So what’s DevOps got to do with ITSM? DevOps advocates a collaborative working relationship between Development and IT Operations, where historically they’ve been separated. Using DevOps principles, IT can maintain infrastructure stability and availability while allowing developers to deliver new software fast and frequently.

Applying the CALMS model to IT SupportTo put DevOps into practice, IT Support organiza-tions can use the CALMS framework. Coined by Damon Edwards and John Wills at DevOpsDays Mountainview 2010, CALMS stands for Culture, Auto-mation, Lean, Measurement, and Sharing.

CultureDevOps is about speed and agility and moving from silos to constant communication. Culture is about the daily and weekly rituals that influence how a team works. Some rituals you can apply to your team include Scrum, sprint planning, and ret-rospectives, daily standups, chatrooms, and Kan-ban framework. Understand how your teams work together and seek to improve communication.

AutomationAutomation works best when it supports the people and processes in place. consider these five key areas:1. Share knowledge. Known errors should be tracked at the time of deployment and communi-cated to support. Support should link articles to incidents and problems so everyone understands what’s causing the issues. 2. Link tickets. All teams should be responsible for ticket linking and documentation so everyone knows what’s going on. Link incidents, problems, and requests to changes and releases. 3. Think about the performance of the overall sys-tem. Your team needs to be prepared to support, operate, and ensure their ability to restore ser-vices. They need to know what’s being deployed and when so they can give the right answers to the customers. 4. Testing. Support teams hold data about various customer environments that should be continuous-ly fed back to testing.5. Monitoring data. Support should know about any proactive monitoring and provide requirements for monitoring, with events linked back to incidents, problems, and changes.

Continued on page 4

What’s DevOps Got To Do With ITSM?

4

What’s DevOps Got To Do With ITSM?continued from page 3

LeanMake your processes as simple as possible. If you’re doing something that doesn’t add value, eliminate it. In addition, constantly iterate on your processes and services to deliver higher value services to the business.

Another important aspect of DevOps is the under-standing that if you’re not failing, you’re not getting things done. “What was learned” should be the most important thing your teams reflects on. Create a ritual of post-incident or post-mortem reports based on lessons learned that are shared across teams.

MetricsKeep track of metrics that matter. Measure ‘Mean Time To Repair’ (MTTR) and whether it increases or decreases over time. Measure repetitive incidents and how often they occur. Measure service level

targets in your service level agreements. And mea-sure your cost per incident, along with the total cost of support. Measure downtime costs. In some cases, increasing support costs may be the best thing to do to minimize impact to the business.

SharingWhen it comes to sharing, ask yourself these ques-tions: Do all teams understand each other’s goals, hardships, and priorities? Is knowledge shared across team lines? Are the right stakeholders in the loop of your projects, even if they’re not in your immediate group? Do your IT groups -- development, operations, testing, and support and even the busi-ness -- share ownership of successes, failures, and lessons learned?

For more information about applying DevOps prin-ciples to IT Service & Support, contact RightStar’s sales team at sales@rightstar.com.

Introducing ScanStar for SmartphonesBarcode support for BMC, Atlassian, Microsoft, and moreScanStar for Smartphones is the 3rd generation of RightStar’s exist-ing barcode acquisition and data manipulation application for pop-ular BMC, Atlassian, Microsoft and other platforms. The smartphone version of ScanStar introduces new technology and new functionality running on Apple iOS and Android OS. The Trial Edition for Android Smartphones is currently available. To download a copy, go to: http://rsdocs.rightstar.com/smartphoned-ocs/UsingScanStar.html

5

Ten Service BrokeringRequirements

When looking for the right IT service brokering solution for your enterprise, consider these ten business and technical requirements:

1. End User ExperienceYour IT service brokering solution should provide a satisfying end user experience, one that is intuitive and familiar (think iTunes). End users should be able to find and order services from a one-stop-shop portal which is easily accessible from any end user device, including tablets and smartphones.

2. Virtual MarketplaceWork with the business units in your enterprise to identify opportunities to include IT and non-IT ser-vices in the portal. Empower your business units to manage their own marketplaces and entitlements, and source services without any need for IT interac-tion.

3. Catalog AggregationSeventy percent of enterprises have up to 5 ser-vice catalogs. Make it easier for your end users and administrators by importing and consolidating all of the catalogs into your IT service brokering portal.

4. Developer ToolkitEnable third-parties or internal developers to devel-op connectors to any fulfillment systems and devel-op your own integrations to any fulfillment software.

5. Open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)Extend your service catalog both externally and in other product lines with APIs that are available to expose catalogs to external customers.

6. CostingBe fully cost transparent and make end users aware of what their request costs the organization. En-sure that your portal can add or subtract costs from service items.

7. ComplianceHave your suppliers publish information needed for any regulatory requirements relevant to your organization. Create questions to ensure their application and services are compliant. Ensure any required information from your end users is also collected during the request process.

8. Service-Level Agreements (SLAs)Your IT service brokering solution should include the ability to automatically compare actual ser-vice delivery times against SLAs and provide SLA violation alerts. The portal should also include SLA templates that thirds parties can publish against and the ability to append internal SLAs to services.

9. Third-Party and Vendor PublishingEnable third-parties to publish directly into your catalog with a self-service IT service brokering portal that allows you to take full advantage of your partner ecosystem.

10. Business Intelligence (BI)BI and analytics included in your IT service bro-kering solution will help you understand what is happening across your entire organization and gain a complete understanding of delivery times, and service trends, to name a few.

For information about BMC MyIT Service Broker, go to http://www.rightstar.com/products/bmc-prod-ucts/bmc-enterprise-appzone/

correlate to improvements in customer satisfac-tion or lower costs

5. Contrary to IT provider beliefs, customers are excited about self service

Specific findings from the survey:

• 60% of our respondents stated that implement-ing these solutions has resulted in: - An increase in the quality of data and reporting - Meaningful data is being captured for strategic decision making

• 25% stated that implementing these solutions has resulted in: - Improvement in the amount of self-service interaction by their end-users

• 100% of our respondents: - Do not track the cost of supporting their customers

Overall, there were very few surprises, other than no customer surveyed tracked cost data. In con-clusion, our customers agreed that the return on the ITSM investment is worth it, the risk is accept-able, and the ITSM toolset and a solid IT infra-structure play a critical role in revenue generation, employee productivity, and cost efficiency.

Visit Dick Stark’s blog at http://dick1stark.com

Moving from Survivor to Thriverby Dick Stark, President & CEO, RightStar Systems

6

During RightStar’s 12 years in business we have worked with over 500 different Remedy, Remedy-force and FootPrints customers in a wide range of ITSM applications. Most customers have an ITSM maturity level of less than level three, and almost all customers fail to take full advantage of the their respective ITSM tool set.

When we talk with our customers about a service desk implementation and the value received, they often state that improvements in reporting is the biggest value-add. Good reporting allows custom-ers to better measure their results. But what about improvements in customer satisfaction, reductions in the total cost of service management, and im-proved efficiencies? Is the service desk a necessary evil, or a necessary requirement for a company to move from a Survivor to a Thriver?

In 2015 we surveyed approximately 20 customers to determine why customers buy ITSM products and their perceived and real value. The five key takeaways of the study were:

1. Customer Satisfaction continues to be the #1 goal for the service desk

2. Lowering the overall cost of service man-age-ment should be the #2 goal, but this isn’t the case

3. Improvements in reporting is the most cited ITSM tool set benefit

4. To excel at ITSM requires ITSM tools, but spend-ing more on expensive ITSM tool sets does not

Moving from Survivor to Thriverby Dick Stark, President & CEO, RightStar Systems

7

Although the Reasoning Engine provides a flexible foundation for BMC Discovery processing, it is gen-erally hard to decompose problems into suitable collections of events, conditions, and actions. For this, BMC Discovery employs The Pattern Language (TPL), a high-level, domain-specific programming language. TPL programmers write logic in a nat-ural form, without regard for the semantics of the underlying engine. Then the system automatically translates it into suitable collections of rules within the Reasoning Engine. Since it is a programming language designed specifically for discovery pur-poses, TPL allows the author to focus on discovery, data manipulation, and data modeling tasks without the overhead and complexity of using an API from a general-purpose programming language, or the challenge of casting the tasks in the form of rules for the Reasoning Engine.

TPL is used by BMC Discovery’s end users to per-form customized discovery activity relating to their environment. It is also used in the monthly Technol-ogy Knowledge updates (TKUs) that are provided by the BMC Discovery engineering team. The value of TKUs is that every month BMC Discovery users enjoy extensions to BMC Discovery that enable it to discover new hardware and software.

In summary, the Reasoning Engine is a scalable, general-purpose engine that allows BMC Discov-ery to perform all the discovery tasks required by its users. Users can easily define what the system should do during discovery, how to manipulate the data that comes back from discovery, and how to represent the results within the graph database.

The above is excerpted; to request the Whitepaper in full, please go to: http://goo.gl/iY4f9k

What is BMC Discovery?BMC Discovery is a data center discovery solu-tion that automatically discovers IT assets and the relationships between them. BMC Discovery was developed to enable users to quickly understand the state of their infrastructure and to identify the important relationships that exist within it.

BMC Discovery’s Reasoning EngineThe power behind BMC Discovery is its Reasoning Engine. The Reasoning Engine is the intelligent part of BMC Discovery, responsible for choosing and or-chestrating the discovery actions and constructing the environment model with the graph database.

The Reasoning Engine is built on the principle of Event-Condition-Action: events that occur, condi-tions that match the events, and actions that need to be taken. For example, when the system per-forms a discovery request to obtain a list of pro-cesses from a server, the results come back as an event. A condition matches that event and leads to the action of creating nodes in the database to represent each discovered process. Creation of those nodes in turn leads to data events. A condi-tion could exist that matches a process node being created with a particular command line, which causes an action to create a node to represent that running software, thus enabling BMC Discovery to identify software running on the server. The way the engine makes decisions is extremely flexible and enables the system to be extended to serve virtual-ly any need. The flow of control simply becomes an emergent flow based on the events and data that flow through it.

The Power BehindBMC Discovery

Seven Keys to A Successful IT Asset Management Program

8

Here are seven common practices among organzations that have built and maintained successful IT Asset Management (ITAM) programs . . .

1. Executive SupportAn ITAM program cannot be successful in isolation. John Fulton of BMC says, “Executive support is es-sential to influence the team to gain alignment, share information, and work toward a common goal.” Ide-ally, executive support can help move the program forward and provide mediation in the face of conflict.

2. Alignment Across TeamsSays Fulton, “Alignment is required on several fronts including the definition of asset management, goas, processes, outcomes, etc. You must weave the needs of your executive sponsor into the aligned plans, but you must also ensure that everyone in-volved receives benefits for their efforts.” Organiza-tions that form a steering team or committee experi-ence inproved alignment and success.

3. A Phased ApproachA phased approach can promote early successes and build momentum. Develop a long-term plan but be tactical in your delivery to ensure iterative goals are met before continuing to the next phase.

4. Justify the DataCapture and manage only the data that is justi-fied. Says Fulton, “If there is value and the effort to capture, maintain, and manage the data to ensure accuracy is justified, then include it.” In addition, you must be sure that the data source is accurate and the integrations, processes, and people are in place to maintain the data.

5. Process, Process, Process“ITAM is 80% process, 20% technology, “says Fulton. “I make this statement not to downplay the signifi-cance of technologies, but to stress that process

is essential for a successful ITAM program, and tools should not be the primary focus.” Organi-zations should be sure that their processes and policies are well-defined, communicated, and enforced.

6. Baseline and MeasureAs the old adage states, “How can you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you are.” “Baselining is important because you must know where you started,” says Fulton. Organiza-tions use baselines to track their progress. Once you baseline, you must measure your progress on a consistent basis. “The ongoing measure-ment and comparison enables organizations to track progress and expose opportunities for improvement.”

7. Transparency and SharingOnce you finish measuring, it’s important to share the results with executive management and those teams who are sponsoring and supporting the program. This is especially critical early in the program. With the right alignment and focused scope, you significantly increase your chances of success if you communicate wins early and often. Says Fulton, “Shout your success from the roof-tops and you’ll attract other interested parties that you can draw on for support and help you expand the scope and success of your ITAM project.”

To explore technologies that support yourIT Asset Management program, please email RightStar at sales@rightstar.com.

Seven Keys to A Successful IT Asset Management Program

9

JIRA Service Desk:4 tips for getting started withknowledge management

The following article is excerpted from an Atlassian JIRA Service Desk blog article published on February 2, 2016

Today I’ll share four high-level tips designed to point you in the right direction as you get started with knowledge management and build a knowl-edge base.

1. Manage all your knowledge in one placeWith technology’s constant evolution, knowledge is everywhere. From emails and texts, to Facebook and Twitter, a plethora of information surrounds us. So aggregate your knowledge into a single repos-itory that’s simple to use. By centralizing that con-tent, you accelerate learning and help your custom-ers find the information they need.

If your team receives multiple tickets about a common issue, create an article about the topic. Or, if someone on your support team has solved an ongoing problem, have them document the steps they took to resolve the issue – that’ll be useful both for your customers and your fellow service desk agents.

2. Keep updating your knowledge baseWhether your knowledge base is internal for agent use only or available to customers as a self-service database, your system has to be easy to update. Keeping the knowledge base current improves First Contact Resolution (FCR) rates, and can reduce your cost per contact. And FCR is critical for your business: resolving issues inside the first contact improves efficiency and increases customer satis-faction, all while giving your IT team bandwidth to crank away resolving issues.

How do you identify which knowledge base articles need updating? Listen to your customers. Let your customers leave feedback on articles so you under-stand which articles are serving their purpose, and how to fine-tune the rest to deliver the best an-swers. Providing a feedback loop boosts the quality and performance of your knowledge base.

3. Adopt smarter self-serviceKnowledge management isn’t just critical for agents; it’s super important for your customers. Having an-swers to just about anything only a Google search away has seriously whet our appetite for self-service – as evidenced by the fact that 60% of consumers use web self-service to find answers to their questions. And when customers go in search of answers, those answers had better be easy to find. How do you make them easy to find? With a customer portal or intranet.

Knowledge-centered support helps customers help themselves, and lets your agents focus on the high-pri-ority issues. In fact, applying KCS can lead to a 50% reduction in incidents. As service desk portals pro-liferate throughout your company, you’ll be dealing with tons of data. This is an excellent opportunity to apply machine learning for smarter self-service, as we did with JIRA Service Desk, so the universal keyword search is smart enough to find the right request type across all portals.

4. Measure your metricsMeasuring success when you’re getting started with knowledge management is an important step towards improving your team’s performance. Some metrics to consider include:

• The number of articles attributed to First Contact Resolution• The number of articles created and updated by the team• The number of articles utilized by the team• The number of incidents with article links

By tracking the right metrics hand-in-hand with your knowledge base you’re building a winning combina-tion that’s smart, effective, and constantly learning – and that’s a winning combination.

To read the full blog article, go to http://blogs.atlassian.com/2016/02/4-tips-for-getting-started-with-knowledge-management/

Interview with Brett Winston, Head of Product Developmentat RightStar Systems.

You recently introduced ScanStar for Smartphones.How is it different from the original ScanStar? ScanStar for Smartphones is the logical extension of the existing ScanStar barcode acquisition and data manipulation application, the client of which currently runs on the Windows Mobile 6.x platform. The smartphone version of ScanStar will introduce new technology and new functionality to a new set of popular platforms; iOS and Android OS. These operating systems are widely used on smartphones today and are being adopted by purpose-built scanner manufacturers as well (Android OS in the case of the later).

The existing ScanStar Integration Engine will remain the foundation of the set of inte-grations to ITSM and ITAM products supported today. The mobile client portion of the application will be the focus of this update. ScanStar’s existing three Modules will be updated for the new client operating systems and will be called “Workflows”. A new Audit Workflow will be added for the purposes of enhancing the current Verify workflow’s capabilities and ease of use.

Support for the following technologies has been added: • Near Field Communication (NFC) *not available in trial version -- A type of RFID for specialized asset tags • Global Positioning System (GPS) -- Used to graphically map the location of assets • On-board Camera -- Allows capture of barcode tags as well as images to assign to assets

What types of organizations will benefit most from ScanStar forSmartphones?Any organization using BMC or Atlassian ITSM/ITAM applications that wishes to addasset management using barcode technology is a perfect fit. A barcode integration to one of these platforms can help the organization meet regulatory requirements and allows for improved asset management efficiency by saving time, reducing errors and cutting cost of the this process throughout the asset management lifecycle.

Is ScanStar for Smartphones available now?The current version of ScanStar for Smartphones is a trial edition which runs onAndroid-based phones and does not integrate with any of the currently supported ITSM/ITAM platforms. Instead, the application is completely self-contained and all re-cords are managed on the scanner. It is meant to provide a feel for the client-side of the solution. An iOS (iPhone, iPad) version will be released shortly. The full version for both Smartphone platforms with connectors for BMC and Atlassian ITSM/ITAM platforms will be released in the springof 2016.For more info, visit http://www.rightstar.com/scanstar-for-smartphones-barcode-scanning/

RightStar’s ScanStar for Smartphones