Discover Case Study: How Cardinal Health Uses SaaS Tools to Improve ALM, Quality, Development Productivity

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the experience of Cardinal Health in using software-as-a-service tools from HP to develop and test applications.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas. We're here on the Discover show floor the week of June 6 to explore some major enterprise IT solution trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host throughout this series of HP-sponsored Discover live discussions.

We're now going to look at how software as a service (SaaS) is impacting the application lifecycle through the experience of Cardinal Health. I'm here with Don Jackson, a Senior Engineer in the Testing Center of Excellence within the Performance Engineering Group at Cardinal Health, in Dublin, Ohio. Welcome to the show, Don. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Don Jackson: Thanks for having me.

Gardner: Tell me, from a high-level perspective, why SaaS is appealing to you. Just on general terms, why SaaS, even for applications or in development-testing? What makes it appealing to you?

Jackson: SaaS is a service offering, not just for testing and for development, but as a simple service offering, that allows us to focus on our primary core competencies and on what our clients and customers need, rather than focusing on trying to learn how to handle this particular application that we may have purchased from a vendor like HP. So, we can really focus on those core competencies. [View the slides from Don's HP Discover presentation on Fundamentals of Testing.]

Gardner: And you haven't had any complaints about things like security, performance, or latency. It all it seems work for you?

Jackson: There are some trade-offs, obviously, that you're going to have from a security standpoint, and the HP guys can tell you about this as well. They can go through all the details, but we did go through their security documentation to make sure that it was adequate for what we needed.

If there are compliance issues that you have to take into account, they’ll work with you. It's a very secure environment. So, we were pleasantly surprised when we started looking at that.

Gardner: Before we dig more deeply into how you're doing SaaS and how you've gone involved with it, tell me a bit about Cardinal Health, what kind of organization you are, and maybe even some details about your IT organization.

Industry leader

Jackson: At Cardinal Health, our slogan is "Essential to Healthcare." We want to be a healthcare industry leader providing a diverse, inclusive work environment that reflects the marketplace and communities where we do business, while maximizing our competitive advantage through innovation, profit, and adaptability.

Some facts about Cardinal Health: we’ve got 32,000-plus employees. We are number 17 on the Fortune 500 list. So, we're a very large company. The latest estimate that I saw on our public website cardinalhealth.com was that we'll do about $100 billion in revenue this fiscal year. Our fiscal year ends in June, so we're pretty confident at this point that we're going to hit that number. We deliver to 60,000 different healthcare sites each day.

Think about the healthcare industry. If you go into a hospital say, all the different products that you might consume or use or may be used upon you, whether you're having a procedure done or whatever, that could have been manufactured, developed, or just distributed with some of our suppliers through Cardinal Health.

For example, half of all surgeries in the United States last year, used at least one product of ours. We deliver more than 25 percent of all medications prescribed in the US each day. That’s just to give you a rough example.

Gardner: I certainly can appreciate that the need for scale is there. Tell me about the IT support now and your role in making sure these applications are performing and are safe and reliable. What kind of scale are you dealing with?

Half of all surgeries in the United States last year used at least one product of ours. We deliver more than 25 percent of all medications prescribed in the US each day.

Jackson: We work very tightly with our business analyst community. Our group specifically doesn’t actually interface directly with our customers, but we interface very closely with our business analysts to generate requirements both from the functional and non-functional.

Our group specifically, focuses on non-functional in the performance engineer realm to establish good service level agreements (SLAs) beforehand. On the HP website, there is a webinar that I did for them a year ago, where we talk about back to basics for performance engineering and focusing on planning.

If you don't plan right, your chances of success are very minimal even in a performance realm, and you end up not meeting what the customer or your client needs. Whereas, when you work with them and develop a good non-functional requirements you have the opportunity to deliver really what they need and want instead of what they think they want.

Gardner: Tell me a little bit about first, your experience with HP products, and then second, your experience in moving into SaaS delivery?

Y2K testing

Jackson: I was a former Mercury customer way back in the day. I started in 1997 working on the HP products -- Mercury products back then. I worked on WinRunner 2000, when we're all doing Y2K testing which was an absolute joy -- if you'll pardon the sarcasm -- as you all remember Y2K was for IT folks. It was a lot of work.

It's funny how the general public thinks it was just a big sham because nothing happened. Well, that's because of a lot of IT professionals spent a lot of man-years effort to make it so that that happened.

I've used the functional testing products, functional automation. When I moved into Cardinal, there was a recognized gap. Our network engineers did our performance testing, and network engineering's focus wasn't what we thought it needed to be. So, we took that over and started doing that. With that also came a relationship that we already had with HP's SaaS organization, back when it was called ActiveWatch.

I don't know if you remember that, but ActiveWatch was what today is business process monitoring through a hosted service. I took that over back in late 2002 or early 2003. And initially my reaction was probably what a lot of people listening to this reaction would be when they think about SaaS. What can I do and how quickly can I bring it in-house? That was my initial reaction, and I had a very wise manager at the time. He said, "Just give it six months before you do it." He told me to get myself familiar with it and go from there.

So, I spent six months and I just kind let it be how it was and I got to work with our technical account manager at the time. It became a situation where not only did I feel that it was valuable to keep it that way, but I started realizing that I was able to focus on our core competencies.

Do I have FDA validation concerns? Do I have to put this into a validated environment? Do I have HIPAA compliance concerns? Do I have SaaS compliance concerns?

We went from just having BSM through SaaS. I'm trying to use the current HP acronyms, because they like to change names on us. At the time, it was just BSM that we had through SaaS. Now, we've Quality Center through SaaS, BSM through SaaS, and Performance Center through SaaS.

I spoke here at the conference about how leveraging SaaS, not only can we focus on our core competencies, but time to market is a huge benefit. [View the slides from Don's HP Discover presentation on Fundamentals of Testing.]

When you look at a healthcare industry, you have to look at new applications when you stand them up. Do I have FDA validation concerns? Do I have to put this into a validated environment? Do I have HIPAA compliance concerns? Do I have SaaS compliance concerns? All that kind of stuff.

It's almost at a turnkey level when you work with SaaS, assuming that you've established a good relationship with your sales staff and your client account manager. We were able to stand up Performance Center, which is an enterprise application, in one week. From the time we signed the deal until the time we were live, executing performance tests, was one week, and I think that's very powerful.

Gardner: And of course, upgrades, patches, these things also happen rapidly and without too much thought on your part?

Jackson: Absolutely. I'm sure no one has ever experienced any problems with any upgrades at all because it's such a seamless and easy way to do it.

Another layer of testing

The SaaS organization takes another layer of testing that they do before they even recommend to us that we should start looking at it and potentially upgrade. The SaaS guys work with us very closely, for example, with ALM 11. It's a radical shift from the Performance Center, Quality Center days. It really is, and we're still not on ALM 11. We've chosen that because we want to make sure that it's ready and do our due diligence to make sure that it's ready.

The SaaS organization is doing a lot of testing on it right now to make sure that in a multi-tenant environment it will perform and function the way that we need it to. Once they feel it's ready then they are going to provide a testing environment for us, so that we can do our own testing in-house to make sure it's ready.

All of that stuff, all of that set up, all that conversion is done by them. I don't have to worry about it. I'll have to go through the plan. From my perspective, once they feel it's ready, then we do some testing, and I can scale back the level of testing that I have to do, because a lot of that's already been covered by them, and off we go.

A great example – we upgraded point releases of BSM, when we went from 7.5 to 7.51 to 7.52 and 7.55. I got a notification from them that they were putting in this point release and I wasn't going to have any downtime. I came in Monday morning, and instead of 7.51, it now said 7.55.

That's really powerful, and that goes back to my core competencies. I don't have to focus or be concerned about that. I can let the guys who are specialists and really know in-depth the HP tools, which would be HP, focus on that, and I can focus on what my customers' or clients' need.

SaaS is a type of cloud. It's now new. We're just calling it "cloud."

Gardner: This is probably a question for an enterprise architect, but I'll ask you, given your depth of experience and your trust and results from SaaS. We're hearing a lot about cloud and we're hearing a lot about moving toward dev-ops. Do you think that what work you've done, the experience you've established, would lead to an easier path for you to do more SaaS and perhaps even start using private or hybrid clouds for operations and deployment?

Jackson: It's definitely something that our CIO has been talking about. Let's be honest, SaaS is a type of cloud. It really is a type of cloud. It's now new. We're just calling it "cloud." It's another one of those marketing terms. But, cloud is a huge thing.

Vendors, come in and talk about different capabilities, not just HP but other vendors obviously. We're a big company and we deal with a lot of vendors. We typically will ask them, can this be implemented through SaaS or through a cloud model?

Once again, for the same reasons, you're the expert in your tool. You know your tool. If we think it can bring value to us, let's work on that value realization instead of us trying to become an expert in your tool.

Gardner: Well great. We've been hearing about Cardinal Health and their vision and use of SaaS in the application requirements and development, deployment and test phases, and it sounds like perhaps this is a harbinger of more SaaS and cloud activities for them.

I want to thank our guest, we've been joined by Don Jackson. He is Senior Engineer in the Testing Center for Excellence in the Performance Engineering Group at Cardinal Health. Thanks so much, Don.

Jackson: Thank you again, it was a pleasure. [View the slides from Don's HP Discover presentation on Fundamentals of Testing.]

Gardner: And, I also want to thank our audience for joining this special BriefingsDirect podcast coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 Conference in Las Vegas. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of User Experience Discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the experience of Cardinal Health in using software-as-a-service tools from HP to develop and test applications. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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Discover Case Study: Genworth Financial Looks to HP Executive Scorecard to Improve Applications Management, Reliability, Costs

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect case study podcast on how Genworth Financial uses ALM and Performance Management tools from HP to improve IT's track record.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas. We're here on the Discover show floor the week of June 6 to explore some major enterprise IT solutions, trends, and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host throughout this series of HP-sponsored Discover live discussions.

We're now going to focus on Genworth Financial, and talk about a number of different products used to improve application delivery, performance testing, and also operational integrity. Then, we'll look at the transition to a more comprehensive role for those tools, working in concert, and eventually with the opportunity to have an Executive Scorecard view into operations vis-à-vis these products and solutions.

We're here to talk about Genworth Financial’s experience with Tim Perry, Chief Technology Officer for the Retirement and Protection Division at Genworth Financial in Richmond, Virginia. Welcome to the show, Tim. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Tim Perry: Thanks. Good to be here.

Gardner: Tell me about your stock in trade? What is Genworth Financial and why is technology so important to you?

Perry: Genworth Financial is an insurance company that covers many different areas like life insurance, long-term care insurance, mortgage insurance, wealth management, and things like that, and we're here for a number of reasons. We use HP for helping us just maintain and keep a lot of our applications alive.

Gardner: Could you give us a sense of your operations, the scope of your IT organization?

Perry: Our IT organization is, depending on the division, hundreds of employees, but then we also have contractors that work internationally on our behalf. So, throughout the world, we’ve got developers in different places.

Gardner: How about some metrics around the number or types of applications that you're using?

Perry: We have a gazillion applications, like every big company has, but for our division alone, we have around 50 applications that are financially important, and we track them more than any of the others. So that gives you a feel for the number of applications. There are a lot of small ones, but 50 big ones.

Gardner: Let’s take a tour through the way in which you are using HP products, you have ALM, PPM, Performance Monitoring, and BSM. Give me some perspective on what you are doing with these HP products?

Requirements management

Perry: Let me start with a little bit of a roadmap. We brought in Quality Center, way back before ALM. We brought that in mainly for requirements management and for testing. That one has evolved over the years to the point where we really wanted to get traceability for developers, testers, business analysts, everything. That’s what we're hoping for in the ALM stack of things on its own.

PPM came in for a lot of different reasons. Project Portfolio Management was a piece of it. We had a very raw portfolio of what we are working on. Since then it’s become a service request management within our division, much like what you do with the helpdesk, but for our division in applications, everything from account request to marketing, workflow approvals, things like that. So PPM has taken on life of its own.

The newest one is performance engineering, and performance engineering to us means performance monitoring and performance testing. We’ve had performance testing for a while but we’ve not been great at monitoring and keeping track of our applications as they are living and breathing.

Those are the three big silos for us, and I just want to mention that’s the reason this HP Performance Suite that we are about to talk about is intriguing to us because it starts to glue all of this together.

Gardner: On June 1, HP announced its IT Performance Suite, and a number of people are taking a really deep look at it here at Discover. Tell me what your initial perceptions are and what your potential plans are?

The Executive Scorecard is probably the epitome of it, the top of it, that talks to these executives about where things are, the health of the applications, how we're doing on projects.

Perry: Just like our own internal applications, it felt as if up until now a lot of these suites that HP provides stood on their own and didn't have a lot of integration with each other. What I am starting to see is a lot of synergy around good integrations. The Executive Scorecard is probably the epitome of it, the top of it, that talks to these executives about where things are, the health of the applications, how we're doing on projects, all those things that are the key performance indicators that we live and breathe.

That’s cool, but in order to get the scorecard, that implies data is available to the scorecard and integrations are there in place. That combination is the magic we're looking for.

Gardner: And how about the KPIs? That would bring some standardization and allow you to be able to start doing apples-to-apples comparisons and getting a stronger bead on what is the reality of your IT and therefore, how you can improve on it.

Important indicators

Perry: It appears that HP has looked at 170 or so KPIs that the industry, not just HP, but everybody, has said are important indicators. We can pick and choose which ones are important to us to put them on the scorecard. Those are the ones that we can focus on from an integration standpoint. It’s not like we have to conquer world hunger all at once.

Gardner: I’ve heard folks say that the scorecard is of interest, not just for IT, but to bring a view of what’s going on in IT to the business leadership and the financial leadership in the organization, and therefore, make IT more integral rather than mysterious.

Perry: I have to say this. Our IT organization is part of operations. Last year, at this same event, we had more operations folks here than IT. I think HP should take the IT moniker off and start talking more about "business operations." That’s just my personal view of this, and I agree, this helps us not just roll up information to IT executives, but to our actual operations folks.

Gardner: Do you have any sense of what the integration and the continued evolution of a lifecycle approach to IT and quality has done for you? Do you have any metrics of success, either from a business value perspective or just good old speeds-and-feeds and cost perspective?

The piece that's missing right now is the developer integration, and we just saw a lot of that this week. I'm looking forward to evolving that even more. That’s been a big deal.

Perry: Without having actual numbers in front of me, it’s hard to quantify. But let’s just say this, with Quality Center in particular, it’s helped us a lot with traceability between the business requirements and the actual testing that we are doing. I don’t know how to measure it here, but it’s been a big thing for us. The piece that's missing right now is the developer integration, and we just saw a lot of that this week. I'm looking forward to evolving that even more. That’s been a big deal.

Gardner: Perhaps if I ask you that same question a year from now, at Discover 2012, you’ll have some hard numbers in metrics, right?

Perry: Oh, I’d love to be able to go and have a presentation at one of the sessions that we’ve had such great experience with Performance Suite. I’ll be here talking a lot about it. I’d love to do that.

Gardner: Okay, great. We’ve been talking about how IT performance measurement and application lifecycle management improvements are coming together for a "whole greater than the sum of the parts" and looking forward to more of a scorecard and performance metrics viewpoint and comparison capability in the near future.

We’ve been talking with Tim Perry, Chief Technology Officer for the Retirement and Protection Division at Genworth Financial. Thank you, Tim.

Perry: It’s good to be here, and thank you.

Gardner: And I’d like to thank our audience for joining this special BriefingsDirect podcast coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 Conference in Las Vegas. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of user experience discussions. Thanks again for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect case study podcast on how Genworth Financial uses ALM and Performance Management tools from HP to improve IT's track record. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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Discover Case Study: Sprint Gains Better Control and Efficiency in IT Operations with Business Service Management Approach

Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast from HP Discover 2011 on how Sprint reduced application sprawl and resources redundancy using Business Service Management from HP.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas. We're here on the Discover show floor the week of June 6 to explore some major enterprise IT solutions, trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host throughout this series of HP-sponsored Discover live discussions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Our latest case study focuses on Sprint. We'll learn how Sprint is doing applications and IT in a better way. It's going on a journey to simply and automate, reduce redundancy, and develop more agility as a business solutions provider for their customers, and also their own employees.

So we have two executives from the IT organization at Sprint, Joyce Rainey, Program Manager of Enterprise Services at Sprint. Welcome.

Joyce Rainey: Hello.

Gardner: We're also here with John Felton, Director of Applications Development and Operations at Sprint.

John Felton: How are you?

Gardner: I'm great. Tell me little bit about the beginning of your journey. It seems that you've come a long way, and we'll get into that, but what was the state of affairs that led you to recognize that things needed to change?

Felton: The problem that we had originally had, as any large organization has, were many applications, many of them custom built, many of them purchased applications that now are so customized that the vendor doesn’t even know what to do with it anymore.

We grew those over a long period of time. We were trying, as a way to stabilize, to get it into a centralized, single point of truth and quit the duplication or the redundancy that we built into all these applications.

The goal, as we set forth about a year-and-a-half ago, was to implement the ecosystem that HP provided, the five toolsets that followed our ITIL processes that we wanted to do. The key was that they were integrated to share information, and we'd be able to take down these customized applications and then have one ecosystem to manage our environment with. That's what we've done over the last 14 months.

Gardner: Joyce, what was the goal you had in mind when you started this process?

Making it easier

Rainey: Simplification. We had too many of the same. We had to make it easier for our internal support teams. We had to made it easier for our customers. We had to lessen the impacts on maintenance and cost. Simplification was the key of the entire journey.

Gardner: When you looked at the issue of redundancy, was this about data, applications, network nodes, all the above, or were there certain aspects that you went to first, the low-lying fruit, to reduce that redundancy?

Felton: I'd say it would be all. We had to concentrate on not only making sure that the applications base wasn't duplicated, but also the data. The data is where we ended up having issues. One person's copy may not be as accurate as another person's copy, and then what we ended up spending an enormous amount of time saying whose was right.

What we did was provide one single point of truth, one copy of the truth. Instead of everybody being hidden from the data, we allowed everybody to see it all. They may not be able to manipulate it and they may not be able to change it, but everybody could have visibility to the same amount of information. We were hoping they would stop trying to have their own version of it.

Our biggest culture problem was that everybody wanted to put their arms around their little piece, their little view. At the end of the day, having one view that is customized, where you can see what you want to see, but still keeping the content within a single system, really helped us.

Having one view that is customized, where you can see what you want to see, but still keeping the content within a single system, really helped us.

Gardner: Just to be clear for our listeners, when you say, data, are you talking about the data about the IT systems themselves or the data that is within and it's being supportive of the applications, or perhaps both?

Felton: It's all that. It's the data that supports the application. It's the servers that host the applications. It's the third-party applications that deliver the web experience, the database experience, the back-end experience. It's the ability for us to associate fixed agents to that particular information, so that when I am calling out the fixed agent for an alarm, I'm getting the right person online first, versus having a variety of individuals coming on over time.

Gardner: So, you have some goals about eliminating redundancy in your tools and in your data. You needed to create the single source of truth and you needed to integrate other IT support capabilities in order to get to this automated ability.

What were some of the cultural or organizational issues that you hit? We can talk about technology, but you also have to look at people. They are part of this process. Joyce, how did you look at that and how did you solve that?

Rainey: We continued to work on it. Adoption is a big key in any transformation project. One of the things that we had to definitely look at was making sure that facts can prove to people that their business requirements were either valid or invalid. That way we stop the argument of what do I want, versus what do I need?

A lot of education

We really had a lot of communication, a lot of education along the way. We continue to educate people about why we do this and why we're doing it this way. We engage them in the process by making them part of the decision-making, versus just allowing the tools to dictate whether you can do it.

With the tools, you can do whatever you want. However, you want to customize the product, but should we and for what purpose? So, we had to introduce a lot of education along the way to make sure folks understood why we were going down this path.

Gardner: You've done this fairly quickly, a year and a half. It could be long for some people's horizon, but to me that's a very fast transition of this nature. What is it that was the tipping point that got people to say, "Okay, I'll give up a little bit of my turf, because I'm going to get something else in return?" What was it that they got in return that made this work?

Felton: First of all, we implemented in 12 months. It was 14 months to get the future enhancements of the data quality and all the things we're working on right now. But as to the tipping point, I think the economy had a lot to do with it, the environment that was going on at the time.

You had a reduction in staff. You had downsizing of companies. It made it harder for individuals, to Joyce's point, to protect an application that really had no business value. It might have a lot of value to them, and in their little piece of the world it probably was very valuable, but how did it drive the overall organization?

The economy in any kind of transformational program is a key factor for investing in these kind of products. You're going to make sure that if you're introducing something it's because you're going to add value.

Dan Hesse did a great job in coming in and putting us on a path of making sure that we're fiscally responsible. How are we improving our customer expectations and how are we moving in this direction continuously, so that our customers come to us because we're best provider there could be? And our systems on the back end needed to go that way.

So, to Joyce's point, when you brought them in, you asked "Does this help that goal?" A lot of times, no. And, they were willing to give a little bit up. We said, "You're going to have to give a little bit up because this is not a copy/paste exercise. This is an out-of-the-box solution. We want to keep it that way as much as possible, and we'll make modifications, when we need to to support the business." And, we've done that.

Gardner: So this wasn't nice to have. This really had to happen.

Rainey: Absolutely. The economy in any kind of transformational program is a key factor for investing in these kind of products. You're going to make sure that if you're introducing something it's because you're going to add value. You're going to grow. You're going to mature. For us at Sprint, we want to make sure that we can stop some of the maintenance, the redundant maintenance, when we need to concentrate our resources in the right area.

Having new integrated solutions, bringing our development teams together, we can work under one umbrella. We can deliver more collateral investments across the organization. We can train everyone on many different things, so they are not just siloed like we had before. We were able to retire many products with the introduction of these systems.

Gardner: People are quite familiar with Sprint, but I saw some of the numbers are very impressive. Help us understand the size and scope of applications, customers, and retail outlets.

12,000 servers

Felton: There are thousands of outlets, retail stores. We have our third-party customers as well, like Best Buy and RadioShack. We have about 12,000 servers, about five petabytes of storage. We serve about 39,000 customers internally at Sprint.

We host all that information to make sure that we process about a million change records a month. That information that we're capturing are configuration items (CIs). The actual content that goes in the system was, at one point, in the 24 million range. We dialed that back a little bit, because we were collecting a little too much information.

We have about 1,300 applications that were internally built. Many of those are hosted on other external vendor products that we've customized and put into Sprint. And, we have about 64,000 desktops. So, there is a lot going on in this environment. It's moving constantly and that goes back to a lot of the reasons why, if we didn’t put this in quickly, they'd pass us by.

Gardner: So, for that single version of truth for what's going on in your IT organization with this very significant massive scale, how did you start that journey? What came in handy to start that and where have you taken it?

Rainey: It's important to recognize that data is data, but you really derive information to drive decision making. For us, the ability for executives to know how many assets they really have out there, for them to concentrate their initiatives for the future based on that information, became the reason we needed our data quality to really be good.

It's important to recognize that data is data, but you really derive information to drive decision making.

So, every time that somebody asked John why he went after this product suite, it was because of the integration. We wanted to make sure that the products can share the same information across them all. That way, we can hold truth through that single source of information.

Gardner: What were the products you used and how did that "whole greater than the sum of the parts" come about?

Felton: We started with [IT] asset management. Asset management was really the key for us to understand assets and software, and how much cost was involved. Then we associated that to Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB). How do we discover things in our environment? How many servers are there, how many desktops are there, where they at, how do I associate them?

Then we looked at Business Service Management (BSM), which was the monitoring side. How do I monitor these critical apps and alarm them correctly? How do I look up the information and get the right fix agents out there and target it, versus calling out the soccer team, as I always say? Then, we followed that up with Release Control, which is a way for our change team to manage and see that information, as it goes through.

The final component, which was the most important, the last one we rolled out, was Service Manager (SM), which is the front door for everybody. We focus everybody on that front door, and then they can spin off of that front door by going into the other individual or underlying processes to actually do the work that they focus on.

Early adopter

Gardner: And the latest version of BSM from HP came out right about the time you were starting this. So, you were, in a sense, an early adopter, aggressive. You weren't tentative in using this suite of products from HP?

Felton: We'll even go so far as to say that we were the only one. For just BSM in itself, I'm very proud of our team. We had [another product] in 2009. We went to Business Availability Center (BAC) January 2010. HP said they had this new thing called BSM 9. Would we take it? We said sure, and we implemented it in March of that year. We took three upgrades in less than five months.

I give a lot of credit to that team. They did it on their own. There were three of them. No professional services help and no support whatsoever. They did it on their own, and I think that’s pretty interesting how they did that. We also did the same thing with UCMDB. We are on the 8x platform, about halfway deployed, and HP said they'd like us to go to 9x, and so we turned the corner and we said sure.

We did those things because of the web experience. Very few people on my team would tell you that they were satisfied with the old web experience. I know some people were, and that’s great. But, in our environment, as big as it is and as many access points as we had, we had to make sure that was rock-solid.

And, 9x for all those versions, seemed to be the best web experience we could have, and it was very similar, if I'm looking at BSM. Drop-downs and the menus, of course, are all different, but the flow and the layout is exactly the same as SM, and SM is exactly the same as CMS.

We got a nice transition between the applications that made everything smooth for the customer, and the ability for them to consume it better.

We got a nice transition between the applications that made everything smooth for the customer, and the ability for them to consume it better. I'll go so far as to say that a lot of my executive team actually log into BSM now. That would have never happened in the past. They actually go look up events that happen to our applications and see what's going on, and that’s all because we felt like that platform had the best GUI experience.

Gardner: So, it's a system of record for other systems of record that presents a singular view that a business executive can get to, and enjoy and not be faced with too much technology, but get the right information at the right time.

Rainey: Absolutely. And, if you get your CEOs and your VPs and your directors consuming and leveraging the products, you get the doers, you get the application managers, you get the fix agents, you get the helpdesk team, because they start believing that the data is good enough for decision making at that level of executive support.

Gardner: When you have good data, when you know what it is that your IT organization is comprised of, consists of, and when you can start to eliminate redundancy, be more agile, what do you get? What are some of the metrics of success that you’ve seen?

Felton: We wanted reduction in our [problem resolution time] by 20 percent. Does that really mean you get a reduction? No, it means you get out there, you fix it faster, and the end-user doesn’t see it. By me focusing on that and getting individuals to go out there, and maybe more proactively understanding what's going on, we can get changes and fixes in before there was a real issue. We’re driving towards that. Do we have that exact number? Maybe not, but that’s the goal and that’s what we continue to drive for.

Removing cost

Additionally the costs are huge, having 35 redundant systems. We removed a lot of maintenance dollars from Sprint, a lot of overhead. A lot of project costs sometimes are not necessarily tangible, because everybody is working on multiple projects all at one time.

But, if I've got to update five systems, it's a lot different if I update one, and make it simpler on my team. My team comprised about 11 folks, and they were managing all those apps before. Now, they're managing five. It’s a lot simpler for them. It's a lot easier for them. We’re making better decisions, and we make better changes.

We’re hoping that by having it that way, all of the infrastructure stability goes up, because we’re focused. To Joyce’s point, the executive team pays attention, managers pay attention, everybody sees the value that if I just watch what this thing is doing, it might tell me before there is a customer call. That is always our goal. I don’t want a customer calling my CIO. I want the customer to call my CIO and for him to reply, "Yes, we know, and we’re going to fix that as fast as we can."

Gardner: Maybe it's a bit too soon, but do you have any figures as to what your operational budget has done? What the impact has been?

Rainey: We implemented six months ago, so we’re still going through some of our maturity process. We do know for a fact that the operational cost of those 35 applications removed from the environment was able to be diverted to some other areas of investments, so we can go ahead and repurpose that money into other spaces that we need to start investing in.

We’re hoping that by having it that way, all of the infrastructure stability goes up, because we’re focused.

Gardner: How about the whole help desk function? How has that been impacted?

Felton: Six years ago that help desk had 400 people. As of today it has 44. The reason it does is that we bypass making calls. I don’t want you to call a fix agent to type a ticket to get you engaged. We came up with a process called "Click It." Click It is a way for you to do online self-service.

If I'm having an Exchange problem, an Outlook problem, or an issue with some application, I can go in and open a ticket, instead of it being transferred to the help desk, who then transfers it to the fix agent. We go directly to the fix agent.

We’re getting you closely engaged, hoping that we can get your fix time faster. We can actually get them talking to you quicker. By having this new GUI interface it streamlined it through a lot of wizards that we can implement. Instead of me having seven forms that are all about access, maybe now I have one. Now, there is a drop-down menu that tells me what application I want it for. That continuous improvement is what we’re after, and I think we’ve now got the tools in place to go make that easy for us.

Gardner: And here at Discover, there have been some awards HP has delivered, and you got one. Tell me a little bit about that, Joyce?

Rainey: I am very proud, very proud of Sprint. I'm very proud of the team. I'm very proud of the executive support that we received throughout this journey. The HP Excellence Award was a very big milestone for everyone to remind us that it was well worth it, the time that was spent, the energy that was spent. I'm very glad that HP and our customers have been able to recognize that.

Felton: I'm also very proud of the team, as well, and we also won the CIO 100 Award. So, we’ve been able to take the same platform and the same kind of journey and show a much larger audience that it really was worth it. I think that’s pretty cool.

Gardner: So, you have a little bit of 20/20 hindsight. If I were another organization, a CIO, and I was listening to this podcast, what would you tell me in terms of learning or doing something differently? What's the view from where you are upfront?

Importance of speed

Felton: I think speed. I wouldn’t do it slower. I think 12 months, even though it was very ambitious, helped us, because you didn’t take the focus off of it. You got it in and nobody tried to replace it.

What I might do differently is spread it out a little more, do smaller increments of implementation, versus all at one time. Don’t do the Big Bang Theory. Put in BSM, but always know that it's going to integrate with SM, and SM is going to integrate with CMS, and CMS is going to integrate with AM.

Then, build that plan, so that you integrate them. You get your customers involved in that particular application, and then when you go at the very end and put SM in, this the front door. They’re already familiar with what you’ve already done. That is something we probably didn’t do as well as we could have. It was more of a Big Bang approach. You put it in and you go.

But, at the end of the day, don’t be afraid to re-look at the processes. Don’t necessarily assume that you’re going to copy what you did today. Don’t assume that that is the best way to do it. Always ask the question, what business value does it address for your corporation? If you do that over, and over, and over, individuals will quit asking, because if you ask, these platforms are very flexible.

You can do anything. But when you get them so customized that the vendor can't even help you, then every upgrade is painful, every movement that you make is painful. What we’ve done has given us the flexibility to clean up a lot of stuff that was left over from years ago, an approach that may have not been the best solution, and given us an avenue to now extend and subtract without putting a huge investment in place.

What we’ve done has given us the flexibility to clean up a lot of stuff that was left over from years ago.

Gardner: I have to imagine, too, that this has given you a little bit better perception in terms of IT’s role and value. Have you gone from zero to hero, or is that overstating it?

Rainey: I think it's a little overstating. We need to realize that it's all about incremental improvements. I know that on day one, not everybody was as excited as we were by implementing the product, but along the way we’ve proven that the data quality is better, decision making is better supported. Hopefully we’re starting to create a bigger and more attractive user community that trust that this system is going to do the right things for us.

Felton: One other thing is that we had a really good idea of, "This is our business. Run it that way. You are a part of Sprint." We try to say, "We’re going to make investments that also benefit us, but don’t do them just to do them, because in this space as you look out on that floor and see all the techno wizards that are out there, shiny objects are pretty cool, but there are a lot of shiny objects."

We wanted to make sure that the shiny object we produced is something that was long lasting and gave value back to the company for a long period of time, not just a quick introduction.

Gardner: Well, great. We’ve been hearing about how Sprint has undergone a significant journey in improving their IT operations, their efficiency, getting a grip on their assets, even shifting the culture to improve not only the business’ bottom line, but really the value of IT generally throughout the organization.

I’d like to thank our guests. We’ve been joined by Joyce Rainey, Program Manager of Enterprise Services at Sprint. Thank you.

Rainey: Thank you very much for having us.

Gardner: And also John Felton, Director of Applications Development and Operations at Sprint.

Felton: Thank you again. I really appreciate the time.

Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special BriefingsDirect podcast coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 Conference in Las Vegas. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of User Experience Discussions. Thanks again for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast from HP Discover 2011 on how Sprint reduced application sprawl and resources redundancy using Business Service Management from HP. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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HP's Anton Knolmar Recaps Highlights of Software Universe Conference, Looks to Future

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast with HP's Anton Knolmar on HP announcements and customer reaction from Software Universe conference in Washington, DC.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Washington D.C. We're here the week of June 14, 2010, to explore some major enterprise software and solutions trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions and I'll be your host throughout this series of HP sponsored Software Universe Live discussions.

We're here again with Anton Knolmar, Vice President of Marketing for HP Software & Solutions. Welcome back. How is the show going for you, Anton?

Anton Knolmar: Thank you, Dana. It’s going very well. I'm really excited about having so many customers here. We've been sold out, which is a good sign. Customers are also really interested about sharing their solutions and sharing their information with us. At the end of the day, where we are totally committed is providing value to those customers.

We kicked it off the first day on the main stage, with our new Executive Vice President, Bill Veghte, talking about IT as an inflection point and how, with our solution portfolio, can help our customers provide even greater value for their organizations. That was a good lead-in.

I was even more excited, when we had customers on stage. Delta Air Lines’ Theresa Wise did a fantastic job explaining the challenges they were facing with integrating and acquiring Northwest Airlines, and getting those two companies together using our portfolio.

We got compliments and feedback about Dara Torres and what she was showing on stage here, on how you can compete, independent of what age, if you try to give your best in your personal, private, and business life. This was a good learning experience for all of our customers.

Then, we moved to the next event, our blockbuster product announcement, BSM 9.0, rolling this one out across the world, with different solutions in a single pane of glass, with the automation, and simplification.

It’s not "one solution fits all," and that’s what we are trying to do with our customers as well -- a really customized solution approach.

The feedback we received from our customers is that this is exactly what they've been looking for. And, they are even looking forward to more simplification. The simpler we can make it for them in their complex life, in their complex environment, whatever comes in from cloud, from virtualization, from new technologies, the better they all feel and the better we can serve them.

Gardner: We heard, of course, about the inflection point that you and Bill Veghte referred to -- lots more virtualization, cloud permutations, different types of use, thinking about sourcing, and the the mobility factor. When these come together, it seems to be almost a black hole for some folks. They're a little bit worried about how to deal with it, but they know that they can’t avoid it.

What have you been hearing from the participants in some of the panels and the executive tracks? How are people approaching some of these inflection points?

Knolmar: It wasn't just one customer who had one story to tell. We had to set aside an executive track, where we had a different levels of customers, talking about the problems and how they're facing problems. It’s not "one solution fits all," and that’s what we are trying to do with our customers as well -- a really customized solution approach.

What they're telling us in terms of this broad range of delivery is that it's a huge opportunity for everyone in the cloud. Also, everyone is saying, "We hate the word cloud," but that’s the word everyone uses. The delivery models that are out there at the moment, the new technology, the mobility factor, the growth of the smartphones, the mobile devices, is a big thing, and will be more in the future.

Being future-ready

Our customers are still challenged with their current environment, with their legacy environment. They say, "We still have mainframes to manage and all this new technology is coming in here." What they're trying to do is, and what we are trying to equip them with the current portfolio that we have, is to manage, monitor, and make the best out of the current investments, but also with our solutions portfolio, to be future ready.

So whatever new technology comes out, they're equipped and they can adopt this immediately in their current environment. They should be really happy with what we announced this week to be future ready for their future investments, as well whatever comes up.

Gardner: And, we're here in Washington D.C. with a very large public-sector crowd, as you pointed out earlier, a record-breaking attendance for you. Is there anything in particular from the public sector that you have found here as a takeaway?

Knolmar: A public sector track naturally combines nicely with being in Washington, and I hope we can continue this, even moving a little bit forward for next year. The public sector has similar problems, not too much different from what you hear from our other customers. Naturally there's more governmental, federal interest, in terms of how the budget process works in these areas.

Everyone wants to get the latest technologies deployed and get the best out of them, maximize, be cost efficient, and be effective, as well as serve their business and their lines of business.

But, from the overall topics and overall themes, everyone wants to get the latest technologies deployed and get the best out of them, maximize, be cost-efficient, and be effective, as well as serve their business and their lines of business. We hear similar stories from the public sector customers.

Gardner: As we wrap up Software Universe 2010, where are we going next? Are there some initiatives we should look forward to? It seems that folks are energized. Where can we lead them next in terms of anticipating some new solutions to their problems?

Knolmar: As you said, this was an exciting moment for us, getting our blockbuster out. A new blockbuster is coming, so stay tuned for that. That happens in September. We will also take Software Universe on the road. The next event is happening in Israel in a few weeks. We have a big crowd coming in, 1,500 customers, which is a huge gathering for Israelis.

The other piece is that we have HP TechForum, which is our sister conference, where we get the enterprise business, going on in Las Vegas this week. We're definitely excited. Stay tuned here. We're in Europe, in Barcelona, at the end of November, with our next Software Universe event. Hopefully, we can transmit and tell a bit more stories with you, Dana, from Software Universe, Barcelona. Thank you.

Gardner: Very good. We've been discussing the excitement at Software Universe in Washington and looking forward to some additional rollouts, news, and solutions from the software community at HP.

We've been joined by Anton Knolmar, Vice President of Marketing at HP Software & Solutions. Thanks again for joining.

Knolmar: Thank you.

Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special BriefingsDirect podcast, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Washington D.C. Look for other podcasts from this HP event on the hp.com website, as well as via the BriefingsDirect Network.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of Software Universe Live discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast with HP's Anton Knolmar on HP announcements and customer reaction from Software Universe conference in Washington, DC. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

• HP's Bill Veghte on Managing Complexity Amid Converging IT 'Inflection Points'
  
  
• Delta Air Lines Improves Customer Self-Service Apps Quickly Using Quality Assurance Tools
  
  
• HP's Anand Eswaran on pragmatic new approaches to IT solutions and simplicity for 'everything as a service' era