The fairy godmother who grants three wishes – we’re all familiar with her from fairy tales and stories of fantasy. Once upon a time, we would have wished for the following for our service management:
- a friendly and service-oriented helpdesk
- easy access via a self-service portal, just like with well-known online shops
- an overview of what we actually know – with practical knowledge management
Today, these wishes have largely come true. Most ITSM systems have encouraged us to think in terms of services and to define a service catalogue. Friendliness, of course, remains a matter of personality, but IT users can now find simple and more or less intuitive service portal applications in almost every ITSM software installation. Admittedly, there is often still room for improvement when it comes to knowledge management, but chatbots and automatically indexing search functions have brought about significant gains in convenience and practicality.
IT service management has often evolved into enterprise service management; at the very least, organisations are moving in that direction or planning steps towards it. HR, facilities management and, above all, finance and security matters are now closely linked to IT service management. Naturally, these processes do not only take place within the increasingly complex Enterprise Service Management suites, but are also mapped out in ERP systems such as SAP and in CRM systems such as Salesforce. Essentially, this means there are an increasing number of interfaces, and many documents have to travel through the various system environments via technical APIs to ensure that documents and data from all systems can be accessed. However, this carries the risk that documents and data records may change in one system whilst the changes do not propagate to another system.
What would we wish for if the fairy godmother were to appear today?
- We want to be able to access all data and documents from the wide variety of systems that support our business, so that well-informed decisions can be made.
- We do not want to use the ‘same’ documents, but rather the ‘identical’ documents – meaning that changes to a document are visible across all systems.
- And we want to be able to easily retrieve the documents from the systems – ideally in the way we’re currently getting to know with ChatGPT.
OpenText’s acquisition of the software company Micro Focus may not be a fairy-tale miracle, but it certainly represents a very exciting prospect for the future. On the one hand, it creates one of the world’s largest pure-play software manufacturers; on the other, it brings together elements of the portfolio that give us the impression our fairy godmother has had a hand in it.
The best of both worlds
OpenText is known for its document management system suites, which can not only be used as ‘stand-alone’ solutions but can also serve as a foundation for systems such as SAP and Salesforce. With Micro Focus comes the comprehensive IT operations management portfolio, which also includes Service Management Automation X (SMAX for short). Both companies have AI products that are already successfully integrated into the suites or are even implemented as an integral part of the system suites.
At its current roadshows and customer and partner events, OpenText is already demonstrating what will soon be available on the market: the Enterprise Service Management Suite SMAX, in conjunction with SAP and Salesforce, accesses an OpenText document management engine, thereby enabling all three systems to access one and the same document. Should a change be made to the document, this change is visible in all three systems, as they are all using the same document.
A document management engine as the foundation for enterprise service management software, whilst allowing ERP and CRM systems to access the same data source simultaneously, is certainly a unique selling point for OpenText in the highly competitive market for service management systems.
This means we can tick off the first two items on our current wish list. But what about the third item:
Easily retrieving and combining data from multiple documents
OpenText has already presented a demo for this too: using a large language model, similar to that used by ChatGPT, the chatbot included in SMAX becomes an information hub. A simple question such as ‘How many support contracts do I have with Company X, and how much do they cost me per month?’ would normally require a search across several systems and repositories to locate the contracts and then collate the costs. With the demo system presented by OpenText, the chatbot in SMAX can simply access the documents stored in the document management system and compile the data from them. The answer is therefore provided immediately, rather than after hours of manual research. With a little imagination, one can envisage many further use cases made possible by such technology.
Materna has long been both an OpenText partner and a Micro Focus Platinum Partner, and will retain this status following the merger of the two companies. We are working closely with the partner’s product management team to be able to offer the new technology stack to our customers as quickly as possible and to create added value. SMAX is already available today as a Software as a Service solution, delivered directly from the Materna data centre. It features a German-speaking service desk, the assurance that only administrators based in the European Union have access, and no contractual obligation to a multinational cloud provider or software manufacturer.
