Are you experiencing unwanted friction?

As BMC points out, the success of IT depends on effectively aligning IT with the needs of business users. It has come up with a little tool to help you identify common areas of friction between your business users and IT, in your organisation. Obviously, this is intended to sell you tools that will address the friction points you have. Nevertheless, although the tools may well be useful, this may also be missing the point a bit.

If you are currently living with major areas of friction between IT and business users, might I suggest that you probably have serious cultural governance issues, wasteful siloisation of IT and so on? You probably need to transition to an organisational culture in which all stakeholders in the automated business (including IT and business users, but also Ops, Compliance and so on) are encouraged to take part in the feedback loops around developing and maintaining automated services. Check out DevOps at scale, perhaps. Once you are committed to cultural change, only then should you be looking at buying tools to reduce friction in the associated processes. Friction is, usually, not so much an issue in itself but a symptom of further, serious, underlying issues.

That said, BMC’s little quiz does usefully highlight areas that some companies overlook and may act as a wake-up call to many companies. Once you’ve woken up and thought about why you have (and, presumably, are tolerating) friction between IT and end-users; and looked at what management is prepared to do about it (cultural change usually doesn’t come free; even training costs money); and at how your culture will cope with breaking down any silos, by all means look at whether BMC’s toolset (probably AppZone, for creating an appstore, MyIT for self-service and RemedyForce ‘helpdesk as a service’ will be suggested—all look like interesting tools to me) can help you.