Disclaimer - this is my personal top 10 list covering the HP IT Service Management (ITSM) experience at HP Discover coming up in Las Vegas, June 11-13.

And, check out the attachment for an overview of the HP ITSM Sessions, Roundtables, and Demos to help you get the most out of HP Discover

Many, and probably all, organizations target a service-centric approach to IT Management. With a look at IT from a business and user perspective, the question is not about whether to implement a service-centric solution but rather how an organization can get there in terms of implementation. There are many factors to consider when holistically looking at the entire service lifecycle. Continue reading to find out more about the role of IT Asset Management in the service lifecycle.

Managing Oracle Database licenses is a complicated process, especially for large organizations. In today’s intricate and rapidly changing IT landscape, companies often find themselves without adequate controls, visibility and an overall handle on where Oracle Database software was deployed, in what configuration and what licenses were originally purchased. Luckily, HP Universal Discovery (UD) is here to help.

Last week about 150 people attended the HP Software EMEA Customer Forum in Brussels, discussing many facets of service and portfolio management solution implementations.

Speaking topics included demand management, software license management, configuration management and  service request catalog. For your reading pleasure, I have picked three customer presentations to write about. Please join me in having a closer look at this content.

Is a faster HP Service Manager better than a slower Service Manager (you have seen the cell phone commercials like this, right)? As we continue our series of “Did you know” topics we will consider your “Need for Speed” (Yes, I know. Again with the movie references. It is kinda my thing). Continue reading to find interesting information you may not know about IT Service Manager performance optimization and tuning.

In 2012 Gartner predicted that by 2015, 35 percent of enterprise IT expenditures for most organizations will be managed outside the IT department’s budget.  Will this trend impact your service desk?

A year has passed since that initial prediction; keep reading to find out where we stand and why LOBs are considering taking control of their service desks as a competitive advantage strategy.

This week I got hear about how the IT team at a major European oil and gas company was working to improve their quality of service delivery. As it turned out, improvement here was a strategic goal set by their CIO. To achieve their goal, the team first focused on improving their incident process. Part of this involved purchasing a service management tool. But at a deeper level, it involved setting service level objectives (SLOs) and then measuring performance against each SLO. With this data, their continual service improvement plan involved setting and measuring performance against a key performance indicator (KPI).

The HP ITSM team had a wonderful time at HDI 2013 last week in Las Vegas. Thank you to everyone who stopped by to say hello and demo Service Manager, Service Anywhere and the upcoming Service Request Catalog (SRC) for tablet. We saw old friends, made some new ones and happily talked a lot of shop!

Couldn’t make it? Didn’t get to see everything? Want to re-live it? Fret not. For your viewing pleasure we proudly present Who, What, Wear: An HDI Recap Presented by HP ITSM.

"Rock stars hang out with rock stars." - Terry Jones

When a problem arises in HP Asset Manager, do you have difficulty troubleshooting in order to diagnose and fix it? Did you know that enabling AM logging can help you identify where and when an issue arose?   Presenting the 7 simple steps to enable Asset Manager (AM) logging. 

What: McKesson and HP present the Cut Back Your Spend on Software Assets Webinar with HP Asset Manager 

When: Tuesday, May 7, 6am PT / 9am ET / 2pm BST / 3pm CEST or             

               Tuesday, May 7, 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm BST / 7pm CEST 

Where: The worldwide web - Register here 

Attire: Thinking caps optional

When it comes to delivering overall value to IT and also to the business, integration of the service desk is key.

The more integrated the help desk is to the rest of IT operations management often has a close correlation to the impact of the overall service delivered and provided not just by the service desk organization, but IT overall.

I can’t count how many service management meetings I have been in that have started with the statement, “It is people, process, and technology.” Now, after reading “Which Comes First, Customers or Employees?” by Inc.com’s Steve Tobak and an expanded blog post, I am left with three questions: Can you deliver world-class service management without happy, engaged employees? How much of a differentiator are people to our process and technology? And can people, for example, make poor processes or technology work?

The 7^th bi-annual HP Software EMEA Service and Portfolio Management Customer Forum is a few days away. It is April 16-17 at the Sheraton Hotel in Brussels, Belgium. I look forward to meeting many of you there next week but if you can’t make it, get the latest information by following @HPITSM on Twitter.

It’s morning. You arrive at the office and in the conference room is a team from IT. They look exhausted. They have been working all night.  Yesterday while testing an application upgrade, they found a problem that was traced to a customized script that had been inserted several releases earlier and  over a year ago.  Completing the problem analysis, repair, testing and documentation processes meant staying all night to ensure they stay on schedule for next week’s targeted maintenance window. Just a few lines of code ruined everyone’s evening. Had the original changes  been made by codeless configuration, that IT team may have been home on-time for dinner the day before instead of working through the night.

Welcome to Service Manager 9.31! We’ve included many new features and functionalities in the latest SM release to help you get the most out of your service desk. One such improvement we are rather excited about is the ability to customize and stylize your Service Request Catalog.  Background symbols and images, separator lines, logos, and fonts can all be transformed to reflect your unique branding. 

Robert Palmer once crooned “Doctor, doctor give me the news.” HP Service Manager (SM) administrators and implementers have uttered a similar cry.  

                                                                                                                  Bad Case Of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor)

                                                                                                                  By Robert Palmer

When you have an ailing Service Manager application, how do you diagnose the issue and, once you know what is wrong, fix the issue to bring your system back to full health? 

Below we’ve highlighted 4 of the best new supportability tools, pulled from Service Manager (SM) 9.3,that can help you diagnose problems with your system, identify the root cause, and prescribe the best remedy around. 

There is no doubt—SaaS is a software delivery and deployment model that is winning across industries. And IT Service Management solution vendors are jumping on the bandwagon toward success. Demand for simplicity and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) are among the market drivers. But how can you figure out, whether SaaS is the right strategy for your business and IT? What do you have to factor in for this decision? Maybe the traditional on-premise or a hybrid model is the right choice. Let’s look into this a bit further …

Last week the newest release of HP Service Anywhere became generally available and was  pushed out to systems worldwide.  Have you seen it yet? 

What do an ITSM person, a DBA, server administrator and a security expert have in common? Quick and easy access to data is essential, if not critical, to the success of their organization. And so enters the UCMDB Browser, a must-have tool for all with its simple, intuitive capability to access shared IT data and make the IT world more understandable.  Enjoy total access to applications, servers, databases, and the network infrastructure in physical or virtualized environments, from on-premise and off-premise systems. View powerful displays of critical data for decision-making such as impact simulation, policies and incidents, requests for change, problems, monitoring status, security status and defects. UCMDB Browser benefits IT in a variety of use cases. Read on to find out how. 

People, Process, and Technology continues to be a good description of the critical parts of a successful IT Service Management project. And experience helps in getting the most from each of these parts.

If you could be getting more out of your ITSM solution, please read on.

As opposed to saying something along the lines of “join us Live from New York”, I wanted to point out a couple of recent virtual events that are very still very timely and available to watch via replay.

So keeping with the themes of one of my favorite shows, I call this a Best of blog

What role does your service desk play?  The service desk is a vital component to understanding your customer interactions but it is also a treasure chest of data that can be transformed to actionable information.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can unlock this treasure chest and help you find the gold inside.  

State of IT improvement

Right after Peregrine Systems joined HP, I was given the honor of being a reviewer for the third version of ITIL’s Service Strategy book. Two things really surprised me about ITIL Version 3: the emphasis on business service and the whole notion of “continual service improvement.” Continual improvement surprised me because so many of the IT organizations that I had worked with were, in fact, not showing improvement in their IT organization’s people, processes, and technology. The truth is, most were good at the establishment of process, but that was as far as things went—shockingly, not much improvement was going on.

Do you need to automate your IT Service Management solutions?  Are you ready to start realizing value from your software in more effecient ways? 

Oh yea, anyone want to know what Dilbert and Mrs Doubtfire have to do with IT? 

Read On......

There is also secret text at the end with details on how to win passes to HP Discover... but shhh... I didn't tell you

For a long time I've been looking for the better analogies for the concept of having standards of data quality around your CMDB.  One day during lunch, it hit me.  You have to think about populating your CMDB like you think about eating.  And it turns out, there are MANY equivalencies here.   For example, if you overeat, you're going to gain weight, so you can't move as fast, or do as much work.  When that happens, you lose value.  Ow. 

• Remember when there weren’t computers as we know them today? And then when there were, they filled an entire room, rather than in the palm of your hand?
• Remember when grid computing connected via Ethernet was considered advanced?
• Remember when ‘cloud’ just meant a mass of condensed water vapor, when ‘mobility’ referred to physical movement whether by foot, bicycle, or a 1969 Mustang convertible, and the phrase ‘big data’ would have drawn a confused “Huh?” from most people?

The huge amount of data in today’s IT environments, the high change rate of this data and the growing complexity of dependencies between data elements (configuration items) make it hard for IT to deliver on expectations. But there is light at the end of the tunnel – the Discovery solution.

Many IT managers worry about under-compliance when it comes to vendor audits and licenses, and understandably so. However, did you know that statistically more organizations are “over-compliant” when it comes to license-related IT issues? Allow us to address common asset management questions regarding over-compliance.

What is “over-compliance” and how is complying too much with something a bad thing?

So you’ve got HP UCMDB. Now what? What on earth do you do with all that info? You understand having accessible IT information is the key to managing it; however, you’re still unsure of exactly how to get the most value out of all your data. Please allow us to break it down for you.

Three awesome things you can (and should!) do with your UCMDB...

Change Management is one of the most commonly implemented IT service management processes, but effective change management still appears illusive for many organizations.

Years ago, you could find  reports of 70% to 80% in papers or presentations of self-inflicted incidents being due to change unintended consequences.  I haven’t seen the mention of numbers this high for awhile, which could indicate that things are getting better. But, there still appears to be lots of opportunity for improvement.

Please read on to uncover more!