Yesterday, BMC CEO Bob Beauchamp and BMC SDE Director Greg Myers shared the Dreamforce stage with Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff. Bob and Mark announced a strategic partnership to deliver BMC Service Desk Express solutions on the Force.com platform.

"The alliance between salesforce.com and BMC will accelerate IT management success with cloud computing," said Benioff. "Customers can now leverage enterprise-class IT management completely in the cloud with Force.com and BMC Software." This exciting new SaaS service desk offering is designed for customers looking for strong IT-business integration and rapid time-to-value. In fact, Greg Myers demonstrated a prototype version at Dreamworld that he said was developed on the Force.com platform in less than two months. He pointed out that this new offering would be available in the second quarter of 2010.

Although Salesforce.com is widely accepted as a standard for sales force automation, no dominant Software as a Service (SaaS) solution has emerged for service management. Service-now.com is the best known SaaS service desk competitor but they have only an estimated 250 customers and approximately 80 employees. Service-now.com offers customers an ITSM application that is licensed for use as a service provided to customers on a subscription basis, usually paid annually. Unlike BMC’s SDE or Remedy ITSM, Service-now.com does not require on-site servers, software maintenance contracts, or ongoing software patches. Several years ago, BMC created a SaaS group with the intention of rolling out on-demand versions of SDE and Remedy. Lower demand than expected caused BMC to quietly dissolve the SaaS group. However, BMC just recently began offering a hosted version of Remedy on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Organizations will benefit from this partnership with the availability of SDE on both a SaaS (subscription based) and perpetual basis. They will be able to choose if they want the ease of a cloud enabled service desk, or whether they want to perpetually own the software and run and support it in their own environment. Whatever the choice, as BMC’s #1 Service Desk Express partner RightStar will be there to help meet their service management needs.

In my ITIL v3 Foundation classes, students new to the terminology of formal IT service management often struggle to wrap their arms around the concept of the Service Catalog. Most IT staff can understand a category tree or a category-type-item schema. They look at the services they support from an IT point of view. But when IT needs to communicate to their customers, it’s important that the Service Catalog also have a business face. And IT should understand which external facing services are impacted by the business services they support.

For example, I buy books from Amazon.com. Books and the shipping that sends those books to my door are the services I buy from the business. The business in turn depends on order fulfillment and tracking systems, among others, to ensure accurate and timely delivery for me. In this example, “books” and “delivery” are the external services, which link to “fulfillment” and “tracking” systems in the Business Service Catalog. Those systems in turn link to “database”, “server” and “network infrastructure” in the IT Service Catalog.

It’s important that items in the Service Catalog be defined in simple terms with accompanying detailed descriptions so that the service definitions are widely understood. According to ITIL, the Service Catalog should define:

Of note here is the reference to supported services. Most services or systems, for example, will require network infrastructure. One challenging aspect of defining the service catalog is defining and recording the dependencies and relationships among services and components or configuration items (CIs). This is also, however, an exercise that offers great returns and benefits to the IT organization. If IT can identify relationships among services and CIs, then they can make more informed decisions when planning service outages and changes to the infrastructure.

What is your ITIL maturity level? At almost every RightStar monthly webinar, we poll the audience on whether they use ITIL as an organizational framework for service management. We’ve found that an ever increasing majority insist that ITIL is their de facto service management standard.

When we arrive on-site for implementation or upgrade services, however, we discover that there is rarely any thought given to the ITIL framework as it applies to the technology tool set, i.e., BMC Service Desk Express or BMC Remedy ITSM. This shows me that ITIL exists in theory more than in practice for most organizations.

It’s understandable that putting ITIL into practice doesn’t always make the “short list” given the demands IT organizations face. However, if an ITIL rollout can be done without a large outlay of time and money, it will quickly enable the organization to better deliver what the business wants and expects. Here are three steps to help jump start ITIL in your organization:

Invest in ITIL training, but don’t go overboard. We have often seen ITIL Foundation training being promulgated from the top to everyone in the IT organization. While the certification is valuable, that on its own does not guarantee service management success. Certification may be an indication that the holder can use the ITIL terminology and understand the processes, but it doesn’t provide the exact steps necessary for process rollout. A better use of your organization’s training dollars might be to begin with a small subset of ITIL champions, and then roll out training to all as an exact ITIL blueprint is defined.

Begin with Incident Management and build from there. Change and Configuration Management should follow, with Problem Management not far behind. Service Level Management is also essential.

Look at “ITIL in a box” solutions such as the Alignability Process Model (APM) for Service Desk Express and BMC Service Management Process Model (SMPM) for Remedy ITSM. These product toolsets allow organizations to quickly roll out an ITIL-based software solution. The process model is based upon a set of field-proven process flows and procedures that have been successfully deployed within numerous organizations.

Many organizations I work with have one or two ITIL enthusiasts who promote its adoption throughout IT. These champions often face indifference, ignorance, or outright resistance. To help them overcome these internal challenges, I encourage the ITIL promoters to start small and focus on ITIL’s tangible benefits.

Industry trends prove that ITIL works and is now the worldwide standard for how IT does business. As a result, unenlightened IT workers and departments ignore ITIL at considerable career and organizational risk.

At a minimum, IT staff at every level should pursue ITIL Foundation certification. This can be achieved with a three-day class. If the time or budget for this isn’t available, however, there is certainly no shortage of ITIL information on the internet. RightStar and BMC Software offer many ITIL-related articles and materials for educational reference. In fact, with all the information out there, the ITIL body of knowledge can quickly become overwhelming.

To make ITIL seem more manageable, I encourage IT departments to start with Roles and Responsibilities. This applies to IT departments of all sizes and helps groups within IT to narrow their focus. Most companies already have many of the ITIL process owner roles formally defined, such as Service Desk (a.k.a. Help Desk) Manager. Most also already know who would be responsible for many of the other roles (Problem Manager, Change Manager, Configuration Manager, Release and Deployment Manager, etc.) even if those people don’t have the actual ITIL titles.

It's also important to note that there are typically distinct and separate roles for process managers and process owners or sponsors. Many managers, especially within small- to medium-sized organizations, will take on more than one role.

Breaking the ITIL framework down into the individual processes and related roles will help IT departments identify their easiest starting points. Focus on the quick wins, and that will pave the way towards eventually adopting the full ITIL lifecycle.