A strange thing happened last week when I sat down with a couple of coworkers to discuss the recent purchase of an IT automation tool.  We didn’t talk about the tool.  Well, we didn’t talk about it beyond a few minutes of stating “awesome, we bought it.”  Instead of discussing the software, we talked about process and strategy, and how the organization will now be forced to mature its event and incident management in order to gain the most ROI on our investment.

To give you a little bit of a background, the software is called eyeShare and it was developed by a boutique software company called Ayehu (http://www.ayehu.com/).  I first came across this software over a year ago and through the wonderful world of social media (I’ll give LinkedIn credit on this one), I had a chance to meet with the Founder and CEO of Ayehu to get a personal demo on how the technology works.  The reason why I’m so excited to be part of a meeting focused on an IT tool, and not talk about the actual tool, is because this is a case where limitations have been removed, ease and flexibility have been introduced, and now people at my workplace don’t have the option of stating “we don’t have the system we need”  as to why we cannot push for any process improvements.  Ok, I understand ITSM is more about the people, processes, and products, and in that order of most to least important, but let’s not ignore the fact that we do live within limitations of technology.  I’ll go on to boldly state that one of the reasons why ServiceNow is so successful (I’ve worked on the product so I’m confident in being fairly correct on this one) is because it also removes limitations and makes my job infinitely easier by changing the question of “can we do it?” into the question of “should we do it?”  That simple change in questioning now forces us to change the focus of our improvements.  Since technology is no longer in the spotlight, we only see our processes and culture as being the hindrance to success.

So here I am with two powerful and flexible tools in my wonderful world of ITSM.  Could it get any better?  Absolutely!  The best part is that eyeShare has integration with ServiceNow.  So the tool that is handling event management with automated workflow is now talking to the platform used for managing tasks, pulling metrics and running the entire ITSM program.  It’s this integration I want to emphasize as being the key to success.  While it’s possible to purchase several different tools and technologies to cover the entire gamut of IT needs, I still want a single “go to” source for assessing the current state of our processes.  In essence, I don’t mind the purchase of another product as long as it integrates nicely into our existing infrastructure without taking any resources from our staff.

So I’m wondering; where do we go from here?  The answer is easy, however the work will be difficult and cumbersome.  We now get to start classifying our events, prioritizing those classifications based on our incident management process, streamlining the event management process, and eventually throwing in some automatic ticket assignments based on CI ownership.  As is the case with all ITSM process improvements, the journey will be long and arduous, but at least I’m confident we have the right tools for the job…which is something I don’t ever want to think about.

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Started working in IT in 1999 as a support desk analyst as a way to help pay for food during college. Studied Electrical Engineering for two years before realizing biochemistry was more fun than differential equations, and so ultimately graduated with a Biology degree in 2006. Having (reluctantly) failed at getting accepted into dental school, embraced working in IT and has gone broke becoming an ITIL Expert. Likes to jog, sing camp songs, quote Mel Brooks movie lines and make dumb jokes and loves working for an Israeli tech company where December 25th is a regular work day.