Product overview
User roles
Use the links listed in the following table to find information quickly that will help you work with BMC Helix ITSM according to your role:
Product role | User type | Where to go |
|---|---|---|
Administrator | System administrators working with existing installations | |
Data Management administrators | ||
Agent | Service Desk users (Incident and Problem Management) | |
Change and Release Management users | ||
Asset Management users | ||
Data Management users | ||
Developer | Developing customizations |
Product features
BMC Helix ITSMprovides simple, easy to implement and use, predictive and industry leading service management capabilities.
- Helps in implementing and aligning organization's IT goals to ITIL best practices.
- Delivers in the cloud, hybrid, or on-premise option.
- Gives you persona-based user experience, which helps you perform effectively in your role.
- Transforms the overall service desk experience through cognitive automation capabilities.
- Contains a built-in Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) that helps with faster and accurate resolution of tickets and request fulfillment.
- Optimizes management of service assets from initial procurement to retirement.
- Helps you achieve comprehensive Change and Release Management with minimum risks.
- Packs data driven insights, visualizations, and reports.
- Helps in effectively managing a single, shared data model.
Additionally, you can effectively manage ITSM processes, such as creating and resolving tickets, fulfilling service requests, viewing and associating related items such as tickets, assets, or knowledge articles, updating profile information, implementing change requests, and managing releases.
Product overview
BMC Helix ITSM: Service Desk (Incident Management and Problem Management)
BMC Helix ITSM: Service Deskacts as a single point of contact for user requests, user-submitted incidents, and infrastructure-generated incidents. BMC Helix ITSM defines and integrates your service desk and operations with standard processes and tools to reduce variation, operational complexities, and inefficiencies, and to manage the support cost.
Incident Managementgets users up and running after disruptions, and Problem Management determines the root cause and corrects it by using BMC Helix ITSM: Change Management processes. The Service Desk application automates the Incident Management and Problem Management processes to ensure reactive resolution of customer questions and issues, and proactive management of problems to prevent recurring issues.
To learn more, see Learning about Incident Management and Learning about Problem Management.
BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management
Asset Managementoffers complete lifecycle management of people and IT assets. Asset Management helps you store information about contracts and software licenses.
Because of the integration with multiple applications and processes, the asset deployment and usage monitoring are easier. By following and automating standard processes, Asset Management provides benefits, such as timely reconciliation and normalization of data, supplier order fulfillment, reduced errors in the configuration of assets, and increased compliance with regulations and standards.
To learn more, see Getting started with Asset Management.
BMC Helix ITSM: Change Management and Release Management Management
BMC Helix ITSM: Change Managementis a system for planning, scheduling, implementing, and tracking changes that need to be completed within your organization. BMC Helix ITSM: Change Management is closely aligned with standard ITIL service management processes.
BMC Helix ITSM: Change Managementworks in conjunction with the Approval Server and the other BMC Helix ITSM applications. Use BMC Helix ITSM: Change Management in combination with these applications to assess the scope of a change, analyze the costs associated with the change, perform impact and risk analysis, and schedule the resources needed to complete the change.
To learn more, see Learning about Change Management and Learning about Release Management .
BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management and Knowledge-Centered Service
BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Managementis a framework for creating, publishing, reviewing, and searching knowledge articles. The application provides service desk analysts with a knowledge base of easy-to-find solutions and gives users self-service search options to help them resolve issues on their own. These self-service options improve service quality through easy access to knowledge and reduce support calls and costs by enabling users to find solutions to their issues without involving the service desk.
To learn more, see Learning about Knowledge Management.
BMC Helix Digital Workplace
BMC Helix Digital Workplace provides end users access to services, knowledge, and policies across lines of business such as IT, HR, Facilities, and more. End users can find what they need using their preferred device, from anywhere, at any time.
BMC Helix Digital Workplace provides administrators with straightforward, highly configurable ways to present the capabilities that end users need to be successful. They can easily customize the experience, via bundles, banners, virtual marketplaces, and more.
To learn more, see and Getting started with Digital Workplace.
Proactive Problem Management
BMC Helix ITSMInsights uses NLP (Natural Language Processing) and AI clustering algorithms to deliver Proactive Problem Management and real-time incident correlation. Problem coordinators run analytics on historic incident data and leverage AI clustering technology to identify patterns of recurring incidents. By identifying frequently recurring incidents and performing a root-cause analysis, Proactive Problem Management helps you improve Service Desk efficiency and preventing these incidents from reoccurring in the future.
Proactive Problem Management seeks out issues, faults, and known errors in IT systems by going through past incidents, networking the monitor data logs, and indicating potential problem areas. Proactive Problem Management activities take place as ongoing activities targeted to improve the overall availability and end user satisfaction with IT services.
BMC Service Level Management
BMC Service Level Management is an application to define service targets and measure the efforts of your support staff as they implement the changes. By using BMC Service Level Management, you can review, enforce, and report on the level of service provided to ensure that adequate levels of services are delivered in alignment with business needs and at an acceptable cost. By using various dashboards, you can achieve your service level goals, such as monitoring targets, performance, compliance for the services, and analysis of service health.
To learn more, see Learning about Service Level Management.
Cognitive automation capabilities
BMC Helix ITSMintegrates cognitive technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning for automatic classification, assignment, and routing of incidents. These capabilities transform the overall service delivery for end users, agents, and developers. By using the cognitive automation capabilities, you automate multiple service desk interactions and repetitive tasks, which results in faster resolution of tickets. By using machine learning capabilities, you provide self-help to your end users by providing them with the links to the most relevant BMC Digital Workplace service catalog or knowledge articles.
To learn more, see Automating-service-management-by-using-cognitive-service.
BMC Helix Dashboards
BMC Helix Dashboards is a SaaS service on the BMC Helix Portal that offers unified reporting and gives you a consolidated view of data from applications across your environment. You can easily create, export, and share interactive dashboards with users within or outside your environment. BMC Helix Dashboards is a web-based report writer for technical and non-technical users. You can use BMC Helix Dashboards to create rich data visualization, interactive charts, and cross-application reports. BMC Helix Dashboards provides reports to quickly scan all the key metrics.
Use dashboards, storyboards, out-of-the-box reports for BMC Helix ITSM applications, and report builder to build simple to complex analytical reports. To learn more, see Getting started with BMC Helix Dashboards.
For an overview of BMC Helix Dashboards, see BMC Helix Dashboards overview.
BMC Helix CMDB
BMC Helix CMDBis a single source of reference for all your IT infrastructure and services that helps you source, store, monitor, and manage the configuration items (CIs) data, including the relationships among them. The common data model of BMC Helix CMDB unifies the representation of Cl data. Product Catalog helps bring alignment with the industry standards for tracking and managing this type of information and maintaining a single product catalog shared among multiple companies. The Normalization Engine in BMC Helix CMDB provides a centralized, customizable, and uniform method of overcoming data consistency problems. Reconciliation in BMC Helix CMDB aims to create an accurate production data set. These BMC Helix CMDB features help you understand your IT environment better.
To learn more, see Getting started with BMC CMDB.
Smart Recorder
The Smart Recorder that is provided with BMC Helix ITSM reduces the amount of time that it takes to register and resolve incidents and work orders, increasing call center productivity, and improving customer satisfaction.
Smart Recorder employs a free form text entry field that frees you, the service desk agent, from having to follow a structured form and instead helps you focus on what the customer is saying. With this method of creating tickets you capture information in real time, directly from the customer, and in their own words. As you enter the details about the issue from the customer, the system uses those details to run background full text searches against people information and asset records to help identify the customer's organization, location, assigned assets, and so on. The results of those searches are presented on-screen as suggested matches. When there is a match, you can associate that information to an incident or a work order with a single click.
Smart Recorder also suggests templates that you can use to create a ticket or service request. The template prepopulates some information in the ticket and saves the details in a structured way that can be searched later and used for reporting.
In addition, Smart Recorder searches other system resources and suggests knowledge articles and similar resolved tickets that might help you resolve the current issue. You can review summaries of these articles and tickets while the customer is still on the phone. If you find a resource that could resolve the issue, you can immediately guide customers through the resolution and then verify with them that the ticket is resolved.
You can also search for an appropriate BMC Digital Workplace service request and submit it by using the catalog.
If your help desk phone system integrates with other web tools, you can configure it to start Smart Recorder directly from the phone system UI.
For more information, see Overview of ticket creation and Handling tickets dynamically with Smart Recorder.
BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker for BMC Helix ITSM
BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Brokeris an add-on offering for BMC Helix ITSM that provides the following features:
- Collaborated and automated incident brokering to address some of the service management challenges faced when you use services from multiple cloud providers.
- DevOps integration features to enable DevOps teams to integrate their agile development tools for better collaboration.
For more information about BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker, see Orientation.
Through BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker, use BMC Helix ITSM as a single point of management for incidents and issues with multiple cloud providers. When you, the service desk agent, create an incident from BMC Helix ITSM, BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker creates a corresponding ticket with the appropriate cloud service provider. Similarly, when a developer creates an issue in an issue tracking system such as JIRA, BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker creates a corresponding ticket that can be viewed in BMC Helix ITSM.
After Service Desk agents create incidents in BMC Helix ITSM, the incidents can be brokered from BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker to cloud service vendors like AWS and Salesforce Service Cloud. When BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker creates a ticket with the cloud service vendor, the BMC Helix ITSM ticket includes the ID of the vendor ticket.
When you add a comment to the incident in BMC Helix ITSM, BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker adds that comment to the corresponding vendor ticket. The fields that are updated in the vendor ticket and the incident in BMC Helix ITSM remain synchronized. Status changes to a vendor ticket are reflected as an activity note on the BMC Helix ITSM incident.
For more information, see Getting started with BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker and Ticket brokering from BMC Helix ITSM into third-party applications.
BMC Helix Service Management solutions
Beyond the core capabilities, BMC provides additional content to accelerate time to value. You can readily load this content in your environment.
Out-of-the-box content packs and sample pages
These help you set up your solution faster by using out-of-the-box content as a starting point.
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BMC Digital Workplace microsite examples—BMC Helix Digital Workplace documentation
- BMC Helix ITSMrequests content pack—Leveraging-the-out-of-the-box-IT-services
HR Service Management content pack—Leveraging the out-of-the-box BMC Helix for HR Service Management content packs
Workplace Service Management content pack—Workplace Service Management documentation
Extensions for BMC Helix ITSM
These extensions are developed to address specific customer problems and you can use these until the capabilities are eventually included in the core product. By deploying these extensions, you can enable some useful features in BMC Helix ITSM. For example:
-
- Asset finder in the Progressive Web Application view (PWA) screens.
- Ability to create outages from Change Management and Incident Management using the PWA forms.
- AR System administrators to view and analyze critical database information for the AR System server.
For a complete list of extensions and their details, see the BMC Community post (login required): https://community.bmc.com/s/news/aA33n0000000S1dCAE/bmc-solution-engineering-architects-leaders-seal-extensions.
Learn more
To watch videos and learn more about the product, see PDFs-and-videos.
For more educational material on BMC Helix ITSM, see BMC Helix ITSM Suite Training.