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Intuitive solutions. These are things many IT operations managers and executives alike spend much energy pursuing— often unfruitfully. Although there are a number of robust IT service management solutions floating around the ether, many are remarkably hard to navigate, erecting undue obstacles along an otherwise clear path.
We are aware of this issue and have put forth a concentrated effort to reverse the trend.
When speaking generally, the difficulty the IT operations industry faces is simple: as needs become increasingly diverse, the core technology that serves as a solution often remains somewhat antiquated. Therefore, over time, processes begin to show signs of a weak foundation on both the front and back ends. Unless the technology is constantly revisited, updated, and patched, the demands quickly begin to overwhelm a solution’s capabilities.
Greenlight Group experienced a similar problem when the termination of Adobe Flash Player was designated for 2020. At the time, our Service Manager Self Service Portal (SRC) was reliant on Flash Player and would no longer be supported by Micro Focus by that same year’s end. Because of this, we needed to make a transition— a lasting change, very quickly.
Ultimately, it was decided to migrate the service catalog and its associated approval processes into Micro Focus’s latest IT service management tool, SMAX.
This transition opened up a valuable opportunity to focus on the re-design of the service catalog, provide mobile application functionality, and bring the user community into modern times, boosting their perception and customer satisfaction.
While working through the immediate needs, there also needed to be a solution that could maintain synchronization of requests submitted into SMAX and the agent queues and process that remained in Service Manager’s respective request, incident, and change modules.
The answer to this problem was to leverage the internal APIs of both tools and build a custom node.js container that would maintain synchronization of the user requests submitted via the SMAX Service Portal with the agent processes remaining in Service Manager.
Through architecture deployment, application installation, system integrations, corporate communication strategies, end-user training, and other unforeseen curveballs, this new corporate system rollout was successfully implemented. After the identification of a few hurdles of confusion, the desired outcomes were adjusted with our partner and we were able to launch the new Service Portal.
This seemingly small victory was anything but. The implementation of this user portal has provided many positive results including:
This isolated achievement speaks to the mission of Greenlight Group and how we approach the world of IT Operations and Enterprise Service Management. We are constantly working to refine solutions, creating a remedy for the ills caused by overcomplicated, archaic technologies. As we seek to reduce the unproductive noise, our hope is to leave behind powerful technology that most soundly mingles flexibility and simplicity.
