BMC Helix

A specific example of how I used it for incident management is that whenever we received a call or request from an internal customer and something was not working, they would send an email to the IT service desk at the company domain. This would log an incident and our team would pick up the ticket, start working on it, and try to resolve the issue. The main reason why a ticketing tool is important is to record the conversations and create a history for the user, for the specific device, or for a specific configuration item so that it can be referred to at a later stage.

When I talk about change management, the recordings were very important. Different IT teams would come up with requested changes. However, the impact on other teams would sometimes be critical. For example, the network team would want to upgrade their Ruckus switches while the support team had an event at the same time. The importance of change management is that when a change management ticket would be raised, every team would get to provide its input. If no one had any queries on it, the ticket would pass automatically. However, if there were queries, the teams would come together to discuss it. Documenting all of this was very important, especially for historical reasons and for reverting back if something went wrong.

When we were launching an ERP for the company, we had several modules. For example, Fusion has an HR module, a finance module, and supply chain modules. These would fall into the product categories, with the business application as the major category, then the ERP, and then Oracle Fusion. These nine categories were different and helpful to us because when we added the operational category, we added issue or request. Under issue, we would add dashboard, reporting, how to, and queries. Then there would be a third tier category. For example, in dashboards we would have dashboard a, dashboard b, and dashboard c. That all helped us a lot at the end of the reporting. We would know where we had major issues, where we had major requests, and we could deploy our resources to those areas accordingly.

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management was a very good tool overall. Their feature of having an incident table separate and a request table separate was great, as well as the GUI part where you can enable the cost, enable the hours, and tier a service as gold, silver, and so on. Those features were also quite good.

When I talk about a particular team, such as the IT support team, the IT infrastructure team, the network team, or the IT security team, the impact was not much because they were coordinating and working among each other seamlessly. But when you talk about the interrelationships between these teams, there was a very big impact when BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management came into play so that everyone had visibility. The teams were coordinating with each other, and tasks and subtasks were assigned to each team so that they contributed to the large organizational goals. Another main thing which came up is when we introduced the HR modules into BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management. We ended up adding services and agents, with limited view on it. That helped us a lot because in the end, we were responsible for the system and HR was responsible for the policies.

I would say the resolutions were much more controlled. The SLAs were much more controlled because of BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management's dashboard features. The managers and the CIOs would have a clear view, and it was easy to track the SLAs. It is important to know how many of these are going to be breached in ninety minutes. All these things helped us a lot. We had fewer breaches, ninety-nine percent service uptime, and all these features were very good.

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management was very good when it comes to achieving services fast, reducing the incident time, and keeping the services up. When multiple incidents are raised from multiple locations and we come to know a service is down, we concentrate on that and it would help us faster. Instead of reducing the number of resources, it was about managing them more properly, which was the best example I can give.

I kept my rating at seven out of ten because, as a user, apart from the interrelated tables of incident and service request, I do not have any other comments. I kept it at seven because there are other tools in the market which offer better licensing capacity, such as concurrent modules. At that time, BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management did not have an option to reduce the concurrent module timing less than ten minutes, which would be good on the pricing module.