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BMC Software, which has made business service management software for back-end systems for more than a generation, branched out into a new market Oct. 30 with the launch of its first end-user software product—one that smoothes out relations between the IT department and a company’s employees.
BMC’s MyIT takes the help desk to a new level of usefulness and user-friendliness within an enterprise. The social media-like software gives employees the power to get the IT services and other information they need at any time of day and from any device, whether or not a service desk is open.
Help desk personnel and overworked admins in IT departments generally have never earned high ratings for user-friendliness. Forrester Research has reported that a mere 35 percent of business decision makers say IT provides “high-quality, timely end-user support.” As a result, employees increasingly are working around their IT organizations in search of faster IT support and problem resolution.
Frustration With IT Service Is Common
As one might expect, frustration with getting IT fixes done in a timely manner is evident in social media channels. A recent online search using Salesforce’s Radian 6 showed more than 3.8 million posts emanating from people seeking help or expressing frustration regarding corporate IT issues they were experiencing. And that was in only one week.
“This is targeted at the end user, not the IT worker. What we’re looking at here with this product is delivering a consumer-like experience for end users inside their enterprise, related to the IT department,” said Jason Frye, a mobility and cloud computing strategist at Houston-based BMC. “No longer is it OK for the IT department to have this high level of friction around having to open a service desk ticket and take an extraordinary amount of time to do a very simple task.”
MyIT puts the user in control of their notifications and lets them subscribe to and obtain information about IT within their enterprise, based on who they are and the device they are using, Frye said.
MyIT, which has native applications for Apple iOS and Android devices and on HTML 5 for everything else, is Web-based and location-aware. For example, it can provide maps of office sites that answer requests as simple as where office printers, open conference rooms and restrooms are located.
MyIT users can choose how to be notified about a request as it goes through a process—via email, text, phone or device-level notices. “Users don’t have to pick up the phone, call IT, describe who they are, what they do, what they need done—it’s already in the MyIT system and doesn’t have to be repeated each time,” Frye said. “That’s part of the friction in current systems.”
Twitter-Like Interface
The software has a Twitter-like service that keeps the user up-to-date on the progress of his or her IT request in language they can understand.
“The IT people and non-IT people sometimes talk two different languages, and it’s hard to cross that barrier. In fact, a lot of times there’s this unfounded fear of IT because the users typically don’t get the information they need, or don’t understand it when it is given to them,” said Robert Stinnett, a senior analyst at Carfax. “MyIT solves this universal problem.”
BMC MyIT offers a personalized portfolio of technology and services to each individual employee, including a content locker, mobile corporate app store, and other location-aware services and solutions. It integrates with the BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite.
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