Josh Caid, Director of Product Management at Cherwell Software writes:
A few days ago, Jarod Greene posted the first of two blogs about how exciting Cherwell Software’s mApp™ solutions are and how others in the industry think so as well. Jarod might have refrained from having to pull a Kanye at Pink15, but allow me, for a minute, to play the role of ‘hype man’.
While we are honored to receive the Innovation of the Year award from Pink Elephant, from my perspective, mApp solutions are one of the most innovative offerings to enterprise software for three simple reasons:
- Cherwell does not require customers to write code to extend Cherwell Service Management® software, and our mApp technology demonstrates this by allowing customers to extend capabilities as easily as adding applications to a smartphone.
- Legacy solutions are hard to extend. When this is done, it is at great expense and requires significant overhead.
- mApp solutions seamlessly blend into existing installations and customizations which both add value to — and protects — your Cherwell investment through updates. This means the broader community of Cherwell customers and partners can join in the fun, by building and sharing capabilities beyond IT. We’re basically crowdsourcing innovation with the mApp Exchange.
Having been with Cherwell since very (very) early on, I can vouch for the fact that creating technology to move ‘beyond IT’ has always been at the core of what we do. That said, it’s entirely possible that our definition of ‘beyond IT’ doesn’t necessarily match other definitions you may have come across recently. As an example, one of our esteemed colleagues in the ITSM industry stated that IT organizations are grossly overstaffed and that products aim to move beyond IT – with the connotation that they can somehow bypass/defund/get rid of IT along the way. I will admit that the nature of IT is changing and has to change with the times, but when a company looks at moving ‘beyond IT’ as a literal means to get IT out of the picture – well, that’s just not how we think about it.
The real value of IT is when the group becomes a strategic enabler of the possible, as opposed to the reactive back office overburdened with firefighting and keeping the lights on. IT becomes infinitely more valuable when approached as a true partner to the business, seen as a valued business analyst that assesses and assists. The new IT department shores up and enhances the bottom line of the company, rather than trying to demonstrate value to the business through an endless series of server implementations.
And that’s where the real value of mApp solutions comes into play. When an IT group is already using a Cherwell system to provide a single-pane-of-glass view into the services they offer, one of the benefits they can bring to their organizationis to expand that view to act as a broker for services from other business units or even external suppliers. This is simple when utilizing Cherwell Service Management’s codeless configuration and workflow engine in conjunction with mApp technology. When another department comes to IT with a request, such as HR time tracking, a training registration system, or Facilities request management, the IT group can easily extend their CSM solution to provide these capabilities with mApp Solutions. This, in itself, can dramatically reduce the current business practice of finding a shadow solution to meet their needs.
mApp solutions and our definition of ‘beyond IT’ are all about empowerment. Cherwell aims to empower IT organizations to move beyond the slow speed and limitations of a configuration that requires developers and coding. Cherwell wants to empower business units to do nearly anything they can dream of, absent of technical restraints. Cherwell seeks to empower employees to get to the services they need in an intuitive and familiar fashion. Finally, Cherwell seeks to empower its customers to share their best practices with each other and other organizations to take advantage of those best practices.
Empowerment was a clear theme amongst the finalists for the Pink Innovation of the Year award. We are very proud of this award win and are taking good care of this very cool trophy. But most importantly, we consider ourselves enablers of empowerment. Empowerment can help your IT organization become innovators of the year for IT excellence.
While mApp solutions have always been designed to move ‘beyond IT’, perhaps a better way to look at it is to say that the mApp technology was designed to move ‘IT beyond’. Beyond the limitations of other software, beyond serving the “MOOSE” and beyond the all too common perception of being the department where the business’ dreams go to die.
There’s a lot more that Jarod and I want to share with you about mApp technology. Please consider learning more about mApp solutions with our upcoming webinar series, details of which will soon follow.
Source: http://blog.cherwell.com/mapp-solutions-move-service-management-beyond-it
