Reader Questions: What am I up to?

I recently received this question from a reader, and as I cannot figure out how to reply directly, I will be answering it here.

So, can you update us on how you are doing with Remedy these days? I understand you don't do just Remedy, but have you done an ITSM 6 to 7 upgrade yet?

I'll answer this in two parts, specific to non-specific.

I haven't done an ITSM 6 to 7 upgrade yet. I count myself lucky that I left the consulting biz before all that action blew up. I had a client that had just completed a v4 to v6 upgrade of ITSM, with vast simplifications of the new features in version 6. Understandably, I advised them to save time and money and stick with version 6 for a while, because version 7 contained so many differences that it would require either many hours of consulting to change it, or many hours of re-training their staff with new work processes. My current company has independently installed ITSM v7, with a few bumps along the way, and seems pretty happy with it. Personally, I saw Change Management v7 on a new installation and really didn't like it. It could be fear of change, of course. Easy customizations that we had done many times for many clients suddenly became difficult and time-consuming. We had to learn whole new ways of "undoing" things, as BMC had completely re-architected the solution. It wasn't always obvious why.

We have done an upgrade here on custom applications from v6 to v7 and that went really smoothly.

As far as Remedy goes, we continue to use it here. Rapid application development is one of Remedy's strengths and we use it for many custom applications. it is much faster to bring up a workflow application in Remedy than it would be to use Savvion or ASP.Net paired with SQL. The only drawback of course are the inevitable licenses, for people who may have been used to to the "free" licenses for SQL/ASP.NET applications, to realize that they need to buy licenses to use Remedy products. For the most part though, we are doing well with floating licenses that serve multiple departments as few people use Remedy applications all day long.

We did replace our Facilities Help Desk application, built in Remedy, with a total solution from Infor called Infor EAM 8. I am currently in the middle of user acceptance testing for this product and we will be doing training and rollout in the next few weeks - at last! The solution isn't as customizable as Remedy, but it is built for Facilities Maintenance Management so it already had most of the required features built in, including asset management.

Currently I am working on rolling out the Environmental Health and Safety suite that I created for my company worldwide. In a few weeks, I will be flying off to Manila to deploy it in the Philippines. To see this product come to fruition has been really wonderful for me. It has been my "baby" since I started developing it as a consultant to this company, and to see it come this far has been truly rewarding.

I'm also working on a huge Savvion deployment, a product that has not won my complete approval. I pity the Savvion consultant who has to work with it all day long. It is not a mature product yet, perhaps like Remedy was in version 3. Thank heavens I am not the project manager for this one! It reminds me of one of the most FUBAR'ed projects I had to deal with as a consultant, all of the classic mistakes have been made, despite all of the best intentions.

And my other HUGE project that I've mentioned in this blog is a Stockroom application, written in ASP.net 1.1 on a SQL 2003 database. It serves as a front-end to SAP, allowing people to easily get materials from the stockroom. Soon we'll be adding a piece that will have a handheld scanner, and people will be able to scan the parts that they are taking. Very exciting! But also very challenging, as I am managing an offshore team in this endeavor, as well as having to work with our SAP developers in Ireland.