Create Cross-Team Workspaces

Ac�vi�esProjectsProcessesScenarios

EnvironmentAnalyses

Ac�ons

“To benefit from trends such as

automation, cloud computing,

DevOps, and big data,

infrastructure and operations

(I&O) professionals need

trustworthy information more

than ever.”

“Reinvent the necessary but

obsolete CMDB,”

Glenn O’Donnell,

Forrester Research

IT now directly impacts how fast businesses can adapt, seize new opportunities, and serve

customers. With today’s multi-tiered applications and complex infrastructure environments,

it takes a cross-functional team of experts to effectively develop, deploy, and support the

services IT delivers for the business.

Over the last twenty years there have been many IT management software products that have

attempted to improve the effectiveness of project work and our understanding of IT environments

but these approaches have fallen short because they don’t effectively engage the right people

with the right information and reinforce siloed teams.

Cross-team Workspaces help IT work across teams.

Bring the right people, tools, information, and analysis together to help teams do their jobs more effectively

ITinvolve brings together the right people, tools, information and analysis to get work done more effectively

• Activities – provide a collaborative workspace for project, process, scenario, or environment analysis activities

• People – identify and engage the right stakeholders and experts• Tools & Information – deliver the information and analysis the team needs to do their work• Facilitation – help the team make necessary decisions and document planned actions

ITinvolve is the first application

built to create cross-team

workspaces for IT.

Less searching, less guesswork, and fewer silos

Capturing Tribal Knowledge is Key

“ITinvolve is the first we’ve seen

that offers embedded social

knowledge collaboration to build

collective intelligence without

adding an administrative burden.

Teams can use this contextual

information to better support

incident, problem, change,

configuration and release

management processes. The

ITinvolve approach can also

aid other areas that would

benefit from collaboration and

an up-to-date understanding

of the environment, such as

data center infrastructure

management, disaster recovery

planning or DevOps functions.”

“Cool Vendors in IT Operations

Management, 2013”

J. Brooks, J. Greene et al,

Gartner, Inc

Apr. 18, 2013

Third Party

Third

Party

Third Party

Service Manager Dri�

Man

ager

Agility Manager

WorkspacesTM

ITinvolve WorkspacesCreates environment analysis workspaces:• Bring together and visualize scattered IT information from SharePoint sites, CMDBs

and IT tools, automation scripts, and more

• Ensure peer review and continuous validation of information so it’s trusted

• Capture critical, but often undocumented expert tribal knowledge

• Model dependencies and relationships across infrastructure, applications, policies,

and more

Creates scenario workspaces: • Analyze risk and help teams model what-if scenarios

ITinvolve Agility Manager™ creates project workspaces that bring business

stakeholders, developers, QA, and operations personnel together to review and validate

requirements, track and manage milestones, collaborate on deployment plans, and

facilitate DevOps.

ITinvolve Drift Manager™ extends environment analysis workspaces to visualize,

identify, and help teams correct drift for all tiers of the application stack in order to

improve service stability and deployment success rates.

ITinvolve Service Manager™ creates incident, problem, change, and request process

workspaces and offers a unified self-service portal for requests, help, and information to

improve service support and service quality.

ITinvolve runs on the industry’s #1 secure and scalable SaaS platform – salesforce1.

Key Benefits• Improve project delivery times and release quality

• Increase deployment success rates

• Avoid unexpected issues from changes while increasing change volume

• Delight business leaders and users with how reliably services perform

• Put compliance in line with daily operations

Transformational and Targeted• Evolve from ticket-centric ITSM 1.0 to people-centric ITSM 2.0

workspaces

• Solve CMDB 1.0 accuracy and trust issues with a collaborative CMDB

2.0 validated by experts

• Eliminate Data Center Change 1.0 risks with situational, environment-

aware Data Center Change 2.0 workspaces

• Expand from an automation-centric DevOps 1.0 to collaboration-centric

DevOps 2.0 workspaces

• Move beyond Compliance 1.0 with after the fact audits to inline

Operational Compliance 2.0 with policy awareness

RecognitionITinvolve was selected as a Gartner ‘Cool Vendor’ in IT Operations

Management for 2013. The ITSM Review awarded ITinvolve Best-in-Class

for Change, Config, & Release Management in 2014 and Knowledge

Management in 2013. Pink Elephant named ITinvolve a finalist for the

prestigious Innovation of the Year Award for 2012.

What ITinvolve Customers Have to Say

“Having a solution that proactively engages the right experts and self-documents activities makes it easier and faster to get everyone onboard with the process so we can make better-informed decisions”

Dave Colesante,

Senior Vice President of Product Development and CTO

AlertLogic

“We were heading down the path of building our own IT knowledge management system when I came across ITinvolve and realized they had not only built what we were seeking, but could also provide social collaboration capabilities that could take us even further.”

Matt Estes, Director of Strategic Initiatives

TaxAudit

“ITinvolve is truly unique, provides significant value from day one and is a product I’d highly recommend to any IT executive who wants to dramatically improve change management.”

Jeff Pollard, Senior Business Strategist

Jalasoft

ITinvolve delivers agility with stability and quality through People Powered IT™

Cool Vendors in IT Operations Management, 2013”, J. Brooks, J. Greene et al, 18 April 2013

Make environment knowledge capture and collaboration easier; proactively deliver what’s needed to those who need it

Combine your existing data and information with the knowledge of your greatest assets — your people — to provide a comprehensive, accurate, and trusted view of your IT environment.

Import or federate existing data so that teams are

able to continue to use SharePoint sites, CMDBs,

Wiki sites, and other sources as before, while also

gaining a comprehensive view of all relevant information,

relationships, and knowledge.

ITinvolve presents information in the context of

the objects and relationships IT manages such as

applications, servers, databases, network devices,

policies, automations, and more.

Figure 3: A 1-degree Environment Analysis Workspace

View environments and relationships from your own– and others’–points of view

Provides personalized visualization to help your teams view and manage your IT environment based on what they are responsible for or what is most important to them.

With ITinvolve, your team members can see all relevant

relationships and quickly understand dependencies from

any angle – whether an application, a policy, a storage

device, a server, or any other object.

Figure 4: Environment Analysis Workspaces help team members view your IT environment from their own and others’ vantage points

Application Administrator Perspective

Exchange Administrator Perspective

Security Administrator Perspective

Environment Analysis Workspaces

Ensure collaborations are always in the right contextEnable IT operations, developers, and business stakeholders

to engage in open, shared communications.

Our collaboration approach leverages familiar social media-

style formats to ensure the right people are effectively

communicating, but most importantly are doing so in the

context the environments they follow. This helps them

make faster and more informed decisions.

We eliminate the noise inherent in other social tools by

targeting the discussion to only those that need to be

involved. We also ensure information and learning gained

through collaboration is captured for future reference.

Figure 5: Collaborate in-context with familiar social media style communications

Scenario Workspaces

Make fast and accurate cross-functional decisionsEasily plan for scenarios that are difficult and time-consuming using traditional techniques. Engage the right business, development, and operations stakeholders to plan and assess risk for many types of decisions.

Scenario Workspaces support a wide range of common IT

decisions including change impact analysis, data center

moves, disaster recovery planning, root- cause analysis of a

recurring problem, resolution of major incidents, assessing

the impact of a new or modified policy and more.

Figure 6: With Scenario Workspaces, teams can make fast and accurate decisions involving all relevant stakeholders

Define and Align Business Goals, Requirements, Initiatives, Projects, and ReleasesMany project team members don’t fully understand the business goals that are driving the project effort. Improve transparency and alignment by visually mapping your business goals to initiatives, projects, requirements, and releases. Enable project team members from the business, development, and operations to collaborate on and validate requirements and obtain a real-time view into the state of projects and releases.

As goals and requirements change, ITinvolve proactively notifies all relevant team members and supports discussion and engagement

through in-context social collaboration. With ITinvolve, no longer is an important update overlooked because someone missed a meeting

or an email got lost in an inbox.

Figure 7: ITinvolve makes it easy to understand how Business Goals align with Projects, Requirements, and Releases

From business requirements to project delivery, communication handoffs produce gaps in information and distortion. This often results

in project deliverables delivered later than desired, that fall short of business expectations, and services that don’t perform as expected.

The lack of shared visibility on the state of requirements, releases, and environments creates unnecessary confusion, delays, and project

team frustration. Poor communication using ad hoc methods, like email and conference calls, means changes in requirements are often

missed. The result of all this is that every project “go live” can be a nail-biting experience.

ITinvolve Agility Manager was developed to help you adopt Agile and DevOps principles with cross-team Project Workspaces.

Improve Project Delivery Time and Release Quality by Facilitating DevOps

Increase agility with real-time alignment from requirements to development, test, and deployment

• What are the business goals and requirements?• How do goals and requirements map to projects and releases?• What are the relevant environments, data and information sources?• Who are the relevant stakeholders and experts across business, development, testing, security, and operations?• How do we manage work in process and monitor the status of milestones?

Establish and Track Milestones for Initiatives and Projects

ITinvolve makes it easy for you to establish and track milestones for initiatives and projects, including defining phase exits for each milestone and managing approvals as required.

With ITinvolve, both management and project team members have

full transparency into project status, whether milestones are being

achieved, and can collaborate in context to ask questions, raise any

concerns, and coordinate on adjustments to plans for initiatives and

projects in-flight.

Manage Releases, Iterations and Tasks

Use ITinvolve to create relationships between requirements and development iterations, then assign and track tasks for your development teams.

Every object in ITinvolve provides the ability to collaborate in-context

with other team members, including the ability to collaborate on

iterations as well as at the release or project level. What’s more,

ITinvolve’s unique Channel functionality helps facilitate Scrums and

daily stand ups with agenda setting and action assignment.

With ITinvolve, business stakeholders are more involved in the

development process and can easily understand which release will

include a given requirement, providing the opportunity to engage

with project team members if there are questions or concerns or

and to approve if necessary.

ITinvolve makes it easy to import or federate existing project

management data, and also provides native Gantt chart functionality

to ensure project managers, development managers, and project

teams are all on the same page

Figure 8: ITinvolve helps you define and track milestones and phase exits in cross-team Project Workspaces

Figure 9: ITinvolve helps you manage Releases, Iterations and Stories with cross-team Project Workspaces

Understand Work in Process and Identify Bottlenecks

ITinvolve provides Kanban boards to help track work across the project lifecycle from initial requirements all the way to deployment.

Identify constraints caused by both people and physical IT resources so you can take appropriate action.

Figure 10: ITinvolve Project Workspaces include Kanban boards to track work and identify constraints

Figure 11: Easily visualize production and pre-production environments and drill into specific settings

Keep Environments in Sync

One of the biggest challenges in any project is keeping environments synchronized between production and pre-production. Pre-production configurations change quickly and environments often need to be rebuilt. Meanwhile, production environments don’t stand still either. This makes problem free deployments to each environment very difficult to achieve.

Communicating changing operational requirements from the project team to production operations and communicating changes in

production back to those responsible for pre-production is critical to ensuring seamless testing and deployment.

ITinvolve’s Environment Workspaces help you compare environments, visually identify where infrastructure and configuration settings

are out of sync, and manage drift before it impacts your deployment.

Leverage Existing Configuration InformationITinvolve enables you to manage Configuration Elements and Configuration Element Groups by importing or federating information from your existing scripts, automations, discovery tools, and CMDBs. In addition to centralizing and providing full visibility into configurations and binary file settings, we also provide full visibility into system-level attributes (e.g. registry settings) and product versions.

Regardless of whether multiple scripts or automation tools

interact with the same configuration element, you can view

everything from one Workspace in ITinvolve. We can even

tokenize details for security purposes or to denote run-time

changes to settings (e.g. a script may specify the need for an

IP address but the actual IP address is assigned at run time).

Figure 12: Visualize Configuration Element Relationships

Configuration drift can lead to many problems including security, compliance, performance, and availability issues that can have

a material impact on your business. This, along with the high labor cost of manually managing configurations, has driven many

IT organizations to use scripts or purpose-built automation tools to do the job for them. In theory, this should reduce drift because

the infrastructure settings will revert back to their approved configurations the next time the scripts or automations run.

In practice, however, it isn’t possible to keep infrastructure configurations completely consistent relying on scripts or automation tools alone.

ITinvolve Drift Manager extends Environment Analysis Workspaces to help you detect, compare, visualize and manage configuration

settings and files for all tiers in the application stack.

Improve Service Stability and Deployment Success Rates by Identifying and Correcting Configuration Drift

Quickly answer questions and take actions on your configuration settings:• How should the environment be configured?• Is there drift between expected and actual configurations?• Is the drift occurring in configuration files, binaries, versions, and/or system attributes? • How can we be sure the right people know what automations we have in place to manage configurations?• How do we broadcast configuration changes to the right individual(s) before they’re made?• What policies govern our configuration settings?

Compare the Current State Against What’s Expected

ITinvolve provides Drift Management views and dashboards that help you see at a glance whether actual configurations match what’s expected using a simple but powerful green, yellow, and red traffic light approach. From these views, you can drill into details as necessary to compare specific files, attributes, or versions.

Once the drift has been investigated, you can choose to raise an incident to track and resolve the drift or “snooze” the drift if the out of

sync state is permitted (e.g. the drift was caused by an emergency change that has not yet been approved through the formal change

management system.)

Figure 13: Understand configuration drift at a glance in ITinvolve and easily drill into details as necessary

Figure 14: Visualize dependencies and drill into current state configurations

Ensure Everyone Knows About Existing Scripts and Automations

Proactively avoiding drift means ensuring team members know about existing scripts and automations that govern your configuration settings. All too often this information is only known to those who created the scripts and automations in the first place, and they may no longer be in the same positions or work at the same organization.

ITinvolve Environment Analysis Workspaces provide visibility into

the relationships and dependencies between scripts, automations,

infrastructure, applications, and policies in your environment.

Through our social following capabilities, we help team members

become aware of planned changes to scripts and automations as

well as the infrastructure they run on. In this manner, we help your

organization proactively assess potential configuration changes

that may not be in line with what your scripts and automations

are set to enforce. This helps ensure scripts and automations are

updated so they don’t overwrite planned configuration settings

and, that planned configuration changes aren’t made if they are

going to conflict with scripts and automations.

Cloud computing, virtualization, and BYOD are making greater demands on service management tools and processes.

Unfortunately, commoditized service desk tools offer little more than ticketing and more “enterprise class” products are process-

heavy and difficult to configure. The discovery tools and CMDBs that underpin these ITSM offerings are also limited in what they

can discover “off the wire” and are often untrusted by those expected to use them. What’s more the collaboration capabilities

they contain lack the context required for effective engagement.

Current service management tools are used for little more than systems of record that document the “real work” done elsewhere.

ITinvolve challenges this status quo with Process Workspaces that engage the right people and give them the right information to

improve service support and ensure service stability.

Transforming IT Service Management with a Unique, Breakthrough Approach

Engage the right people and give them the right information in context of process activities:

• What is the process we’re focused on (e.g. incident, problem, change, or request management)?• What are the relevant environments, data, information, and knowledge sources (e.g. services, apps, infrastructure, policies, settings, knowledge articles)?• Who are the relevant experts and stakeholders?• How can we quickly identify common symptoms, analyze root-causes, assess risk and fulfil requests effectively across teams?

Figure 15: ITinvolve’s Service Portal provides a consumer-friendly look and feel for self-service requests, support, and knowledge access

Measurable Results• Reduce the time to resolve issues and restore service by 50% or more

• Reduce the number of changes that have unintended consequences by 70% or more

• Enhance end user satisfaction

• Improve cross-team coordination

Provide a unified portal for requests, help, and informationITinvolve provides a unified, self-service portal so your end users and business partners can access self-help information, request services, and also ask for help on an issue.

Easily configurable without coding, ITinvolve’s service portal

enables you to publish a catalog of services that are visible only to

the entitled roles or entities.

Respond to incidents faster and more effectively

ITinvolve provides full support for incident process management that you have come to expect from leading service desk solutions.

ITinvolve also provides Incident Workspaces that empower service support personnel with relevant knowledge for impacted objects

(e.g. an application that a user may be calling to report an issue with). ITinvolve’s Incident Workspaces support collaboration between IT

and end users so users can provide useful information for diagnosis as well as check in with assigned IT resources for status updates.

Figure 16: ITinvolve presents relevant knowledge for with impacted objects

Figure 17: ITinvolve provides convenient social collaboration capabilities between IT and users

Figure 18: ITinvolve provides Incident Channel Workspaces where relevant incident stakeholders can share information and access knowledge from past incidents

Manage incident queues and coordinate incident responseIncident Channel Workspaces help responders from the service desk, application, infrastructure, network, security, and other teams resolve incidents faster and more effectively by providing a virtual meeting space where incidents are routed, collaboration is facilitated, action

items can be assigned, and meeting agendas planned.

Response teams can create virtual “war rooms” and be

automatically presented with related incident records along

with all related knowledge, policies, and key settings that

have been previously created and linked to objects in the

IT environment. This enables responders to take advantage

of accumulated knowledge and apply that knowledge

immediately to the incident at hand – significantly

reducing MTRS. Incident Channel Workspaces also give

management and other IT users the ability to monitor SLAs

and prioritize incidents.

Innovation that speeds change planning and avoids unintended consequencesITinvolve provides full support for change process management that you have come to expect from leading ITSM solutions.

This includes the ability to create change records, define change

plans, visually calendar changes and blackout dates, and manage

change approval workflow across all stakeholders. ITinvolve

also provides highly visual impact analysis and collaborative

stakeholder risk assessment to accelerate change planning and

avoid unintended consequences.

Leverage collective insights to understand root causes and resolve recurring problems

ITinvolve Problem Workspaces help IT members from the help desk, application, infrastructure, network, and security teams learn from prior incidents and provides a virtual meeting space where knowledge is automatically available, action items can be assigned, and meeting agendas planned to drive new levels of collaboration for identifying permanent fixes.

With comprehensive visibility into your IT environment and

dependencies along with innovative tagging of common symptoms

and the capability to model scenarios and test possible root-

causes, ITinvolve Problem Workspaces help you quickly find fixes

for your recurring problems. Fixes are easily documented in the

context of the recurring problem and its related objects so that

IT team members can use this knowledge in future change and

incident activities.

Figure 19: ITinvolve’s change calendar helps organize and coordinate changes among team members

Figure 20: ITinvolve Problem Workspaces show relevant relationships and dependencies to provide insight into root-causes of problems

ITinvolve works with existing IT management software and runs on the industry’s #1 secure and scalable SaaS platform – salesforce1. Salesforce1 makes it easy to import or federate your existing data and

information through bulk data loading as well as more real-time data exchange

through web services APIs. We can even hyperlink to your existing data

sources. Wherever your data physically lives, ITinvolve makes it easy for you

to bring it all together, visualize it, and collaborate to deliver agility with stability

for your business.

Getting started with ITinvolve is straightforward and the time to value is fast – in just days, not weeks or months.

1. Use Case Definition – We start by working with you to define your key use

case(s). Perhaps you want to have more comprehensive visibility into IT

environment configurations, are looking to reduce change related risks, or

want to improve collaboration for new application releases, etc.

2. Assessment and Discovery – Next we identify, assess, and discover the

existing data and knowledge sources necessary to support your use

case(s).

3. Import, Federate, and Capture Objects – In this step, we either import

your existing data and knowledge or federate your existing sources. Then

we open up the ITinvolve solution to crowd-sourcing and peer review to fill

in the gaps, enrich the information with your teams’ expertise, and bring

everything up to date so it’s trusted.

4. Create Environment Workspaces – Finally, we work with you to create

personalized role-based Environment Workspaces that help individual

team members quickly view and collaborate what’s most relevant to their

roles.

Most of our clients identify a key application, service, or project to guide their

initial efforts. Others choose to start with a class of technology objects such

as Windows servers or Oracle databases. Regardless of your approach, the

above tasks can be quickly executed – often in a week or less. Once you have

completed these steps for a few applications, projects, or technology object

types, you will be on your way to expanding use across your entire organization.

Getting Started is Easy –Value in Days Not Weeks or Months

“Our help desk system was antiquated and our technicians were unable to easily assign and reassign tickets or update multiple users. Moreover, our change management approach was conducted via spreadsheets, e-mail and team meetings. Now with ITinvolve, our service desk trouble tickets can be seen by multiple users which improves our overall visibility and end user satisfaction. We also avoid outages or degradations and the unintended consequences originating from any given change; we don’t waste time double-checking incidents and changes by e-mail; and ITinvolve’s social IT platform is easy to use, which we expect will contribute to greater job satisfaction and top talent retention.”

Dion Record, IT Director, Meyer Corporation

“I’ve been using manual change management approaches and ITIL processes for twenty years and found ITinvolve’s approach to be fresh with an appealing SaaS model that helped us get up-and-running fast and cost effectively.”

Dave Colesante, Senior Vice President of

Product Development and Chief Technology

Officer, AlertLogic

www.ITinvolve.com

MAIN 877-741-8944FAX 832-201-8104WEB www.itinvolve.comEMAIL info@itinvolve.com

11200 Richmond Avenue, Suite 350Houston, Texas 77082

Learn more about how ITinvolve can help bring agility with stability and quality to your IT department and your business at www.itinvolve.com

“ITinvolve helps us reduce errors and improve quality so we’re in a position to get

to revenue quicker and more reliably.”

Dave Colesante, Senior Vice President of

Product Development and CTOAlertLogic