How can enterprises pursue innovation without compromising business continuity and operational stability?
This is a challenge we see with almost every organisation we speak to today. AI and its potential for transformation are part of almost every conversation. However, achieving meaningful progress requires significant time and effort to change the underlying operating model.
IT teams are best positioned to lead this because they have the expertise and experience of adopting new technologies and helping the business embrace them. The challenge is that we are asking these same teams to do all this while also doing more with less and improving efficiency. Many are already operating at maximum capacity.
That is why we are talking to customers about the concept of digital capacity. At BMC Helix, we want to leverage our platform to take on some of the more repetitive, lower-value activities, freeing up highly skilled people to focus on the transformation itself.
We also believe enterprises should not have to replace everything they already have to embrace AI. Rather than being another monolithic platform, Helix follows an open approach. We meet users in the channels they already use, such as Microsoft Teams, and support customers who need a SaaS offering or an on-premises deployment to meet regulatory requirements. They can also bring their own large language model (LLM) strategy and connect the capabilities they already have.
Where do fragmented systems and processes most often hold organisations back, and what does simplification look like in practice?
Silos are among the biggest inhibitors of progress, service quality and efficiency.
I speak with many C-suite executives who face significant challenges with applications and other IT systems. Consider a production system that goes down. The teams come together to investigate, but the network team reports that everything is working perfectly, the monitoring tools show no network issues, and the database team finds nothing wrong. Yet the system remains down.
The problem is that organisations have plenty of tools, but these operate in silos. The connections between them are largely human-driven. Meanwhile, the volume of events, logs and metrics is growing exponentially as organisations adopt new technologies, making it increasingly difficult for people to analyse all this information efficiently.
The same fragmentation affects employees accessing corporate services. Someone with an IT problem must log into one portal to raise a ticket. An issue with a corporate card requires another portal, while a payroll problem may involve yet another system. Navigating these different interfaces creates unnecessary complexity and affects productivity.
Our approach at Helix is to bridge these silos by bringing service management and operations management together on a common platform. Using our AIOps capabilities, an AI agent can correlate data from different technologies to identify the most probable root cause of an issue. This gives teams a clearer picture of what is happening and can significantly reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).
We also simplify how employees access services. Rather than navigating multiple portals, users can interact with an agent in familiar channels such as Microsoft Teams, using natural language to explain a problem or request help across different business functions. Our platform’s Navigator agent enables this experience.
How can business, IT and procurement leaders align their priorities when each is working against different objectives and timelines?
The starting point is to focus on what a technology investment is expected to deliver, rather than adopting technology for its own sake.
We have implemented strong telemetry in our platform to measure technical usage, including which capabilities are being used, as well as the results being achieved. This includes a CFO-oriented dashboard that provides visibility into actual performance. We can also measure how much capacity organisations are creating through digital agents, helping them manage their human and digital workforces more effectively.
This approach is embedded in our sales organisation. When our sales teams begin engagements with new customers and prospects, we establish the value proposition at the beginning of the conversation. Based on our experience, we develop a hypothesis about the potential benefits an organisation could achieve through a transformation project.
That becomes the foundation for the engagement, giving companies a clearer understanding of what they want to achieve before acquiring the technology.
What role should strategic technology partners play beyond implementation, particularly when transformation involves complex operational challenges?
Technology implementation alone means very little today. Simply installing a technology can leave organisations with unused capacity.
For me, the key role of partners, vendors, solution providers and system integrators is to drive adoption. They need to keep sight of the original purpose of the project, initiative or technology.
Their job does not end when the technology is installed. It continues through the adoption journey, ensuring that the intended capabilities are put to use.
Real transformation is where organisations achieve the greatest value. Strategic partners therefore need to look beyond deployment and focus on helping customers embed new capabilities into their operations. It is about enabling transformation, not simply implementing technology.
As technology and market conditions evolve, what leadership priorities are changing most significantly, and how should organisations respond?
AI is clearly one of the biggest trends right now, and companies are increasingly focused on its business impact. I am also seeing growing interest in how AI can be adopted with human oversight and governance.
Let me share an example. At a recent workshop in London, a leading UK company described how it handled software access requests. These requests required approval and processing, and the process occurred thousands of times a year. This created a significant workload for the organisation and frustrated users who had to wait for access.
The company used our platform to create an agent called Vision Trust, designed to handle requests according to their risk profiles.
Low-risk requests are automatically approved and executed. For higher-risk requests, the agent provides a human decision-maker with the relevant information to support the decision. Where the agent does not have all the information needed, the human remains responsible for approving or denying the request. If approved, the request is executed automatically.
This approach streamlines a repetitive process while retaining human oversight for decisions that require it, improving the experience for both employees and the teams managing access.
How can enterprises distinguish between transformation initiatives that deliver lasting business value and those that simply add technological complexity?
Organisations need to start with a clear understanding of the business problem they want to solve. Experimenting with technology simply for the sake of experimentation does not necessarily create business value.
In any major technology disruption, the operating model matters enormously. This is where Helix, as an open service management platform, helps organisations connect business services with applications, infrastructure and assets.
The key is to maintain a service-oriented view when creating AI agents or tracing the different assets involved. An AI agent is one way of delivering a service experience, but the technology itself should not become the objective.
Ultimately, organisations need to consider how services are delivered and how their underlying systems work together. This helps them distinguish meaningful change from technology that adds complexity without addressing the original business need.
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