600 Ruby Developers Go Startup Crawling in San Francisco

The first annual Startup Crawl in San Francisco takes place this Friday, November 20, at some of the city's hottest startups -- and Zendesk is on the tour!

Some of the other companies on the Crawl include Scribd, Engine Yard, Pivotal Labs, Justin.tv, Apture, and Yammer. The event organizers are taking advantage of all the Ruby developers in San Francisco for Ruby Conf IX, which is running Nov. 19-21.

Since TechCrunch wrote a story about the Crawl on 13 November the number of RSVPs has shot up from about 150 to over 600. The Crawl buses will be stopping at 5th & Townsend to make visiting Yammer and Zendesk an easy stop: We're both on the 3rd floor of 410 Townsend. Anyone coming from the Valley can consider kicking off the tour at our offices since we're only a block away from CalTrain.

We're glad we had a practice run, hosting the Ruby meetup last week, because it appears this is going to be a meetup on steroids. And yes, in case you were wondering, we are hiring outstanding Ruby developers and the Buddha belly belongs to our mascot and not our staff!

Why Track All Customer Interactions? Ask United Airlines.

Are customer queries ending up unattended because they get lost or misdirected?

It can be a hugely expensive error to let customer support channels go unanswered, as United Airlines are learning these days.

Recently, Armando Alvarez, a vice president at Best Buy, was flying from Dulles International to Connecticut, when he was denied a frequent flyer upgrade to First Class. A gate agent revoked Alvarez' upgrade when he went to board the plane because the agent deemed his Puma track suit 'too causal' for seating in First Class. 

In an interview with MyFoxAtlanta.com, it sounds like Alvarez' (well founded) grievances could have been addressed early on when he reached out to the company by phone and letter.

There's no way of knowing why United Airlines didn't respond to Alvarez' initial outreach to the company, but we do know the end result - we read about his story in Huffington Post and watched the video on MyFoxAtlanta.com.

Having a customer service protocol in place that tracks every customer interaction in an open and accessible system, helps ensure customer service issues are dealt with in a timely and effective manner. Perhaps if Alvarez' complaint had been visible to more United Airlines people, and promptly and adequately dealt with, we wouldn't be writing this post.

In the meanwhile, United Airlines, if you're reading this, we'd be happy to set you up with a Zendesk trial account and walk you through a roll out ;-)

Atlassian Releases JIRA 4. Zendesk Plugin Adds New Features.

Congratulations to Atlassian - the Aussie company specializing in collaboration and development tools for developers - on the public release of JIRA 4. Out of beta and into prime time!

The Atlassian Plugin Exchange is the largest plugin ecosystem of its kind, and earlier this summer we released an open source JIRA/Zendesk integration on the Plugin Exchange. The integration creates JIRA issues based on Zendesk tickets, and keeps the communication on the two in sync by transferring comments back and forth.

Our integration was described by the Atlassian team as delicious peanut butter and jelly sandwich - a combo that just makes sense!

We're continuing to extend the integration, now with public and private comments and support for pushing attachments from JIRA to Zendesk. You can check out the integration on Atlassian's plugin Exchange.

National Customer Service Week

The global economic shakeup has reaffirmed our belief that customer service will be the cornerstone of all companies who continue to thrive in tomorrow's economy. Getting customer service right is more important then ever, but we all still struggle with it. Giving your customer service professionals the best tools to make their job easier is a first step to making the help desk experience a good one for customers. But ultimately it's personal relationships and the human touch that differentiates successful companies, and that's why customer support agents are the most important employees your company has.

Oct 5 - 9 is Customer Service Week and companies all around the country have been celebrating. In 1992 the U.S. Congress proclaimed Customer Service Week a nationally recognized event, celebrated annually during the first full week in October.

Customer Service Week is a national event devoted to recognizing the importance of customer service and to honoring the people who serve and support customers with the highest degree of care and professionalism.

We'd like to offer a special thank-you to all the customer service agents out there for the fantastic work you do - none of us could do what we do without your work. We're spreading good karma during National Customer Service Week and we would like to let our customers know we appreciate their commitment to their customers

A toast, and a pat on the back, for a job well done!

Zendesk Named One of Mighty 36 by SIME Awards

The jurors at the SIME Awards have named Zendesk as one of the Mighty 36 leading up to the November 12, SIME Awards.

The SIME Awards were created in 1996 to honor excellence in online communication, business practice and technology, recognize the individuals and organizations responsible, and inspire the Scandinavian Internet industry to world-class performance.

The SIME Awards team screened hundreds of companies in the Nordic countries (Zendesk's founders are from Denmark) to find the rising stars of the Nordic world. From a group of 150 potential companies, the SIME jury selects 36 companies that are featured in three groups of 12 in the six weeks leading up to the winner announcement at the Nov. 12, 2009 in awards ceremony in Stockholm.

Nikolaj Nyholm, SIME juror, said that Zendesk, "While simple in concept, is extremely well-executed with strong management. Zendesk is surely going to be an on-demand support software brand name."

The Mighty 36 puts us in excellent company and we wish everyone good luck!

A Tech Support Hero is Something to Be

Organic Technology Consultant Adria Richards of Aden Networks, model Zendesk customer and blogger on But You’re A Girl, has a daily web show called Ask Adria.

We've mentioned Adria before (see There are Women Out There that Wants to Wear Your Stuff) when she called us out and made us aware that our tee line was men-only.

This week Adria has received a copy of our new tee line, and has dedicated her Tuesday show to talk about her many years of experience with various help desk systems titled "Be a Tech Support Hero with Zendesk". Get some insight from a person in the know and watch the show. We've embedded it here (it's approx one hour), and love it. Not (only) because Adria is a big Zendesk fan, but also because Adria talks about these things in a way we all can relate to.

Adria, you got some big fans here too!

The Irony of ITIL

The ITIL blogosphere (if such exists) has been abuzz with predictions of ITILs forthcoming demise, fueled by a report from consulting firm BT INS concluding that “ITIL usage has leveled off at just over half of IT organizations, after a big jump between 2004 and 2006.”

Although this may sound alarming to some, facts are that 1) ITIL is by far the most supported IT management method, 2) more than one in two organizations embrace ITIL, 3) 80% of organizations adopting ITIL believe ITIL is critical for their IT management processes and 4) 70% of organizations that haven’t adopted ITIL are planning to do so. These are all figures from the same report. So despite some of the doomsday predictions: ITIL has won and is here to stay.

But the report also points out that “IT organization size (measured by number of employees supported) has a direct correlation with ITIL usage, that is, the larger the IT organization the more likely it is to use ITIL.”. Of course, you might say. But unfortunately the report doesn’t try to correlate organization size with other factors. My assertion is that if real signs of ITIL fatigue exists, you find it in the SMB segment (or in the less-than-a-thousand IT users segment).

SMB organizations gain a lot from the initial implementation of ITIL: a common language, transparency, measurability etc. And any CIO gains a lot from being able to commoditize his job openings and benchmark his performance against that of others. But after having implemented Incident Management with some basic SLA target monitoring, and maybe a teaspoon of Problem and Change Management, the CIO of the SMB doesn’t really need more. After that it gets harder and harder to justify the costs of implementing a process set, getting the systems straight and the staff trained. Not to mention even considering ITIL v3.

The irony of some of the all-the-way ITIL projects is that, after the organization has spent hundreds of thousands and some even million of dollars on getting standard processes and tools for dealing with IT, they discover that they can get the entire operation as an off-the-shelf service from IBM, Cap Gemini or Topnordic. And is it strategic for your business that your IT department can compete with IBM? I doubt it.

So ITIL has won and matured the IT Management industry dramatically in a very short timeframe. But since ITIL is a mean of standardizing and commoditizing IT operations, it’s obvious that outsourcing gets more and more attractive as ITIL gains foothold.

In brief: ITIL will conquer everything and then be forgotten. Hallelujah.

So, You've Implemented ITIL? (Pants on Fire)

When we first designed Zendesk, we had ITIL compliance as a bullet point. We're children of the ITIL era and speak ITIL natively. But when explaining the ITIL complex to IT people outside of the IT management world, we quickly realized that we weren't aiming for ITIL compliance but rather ITIL inherent.

In the current market, labels such as ITIL Compliant, ITIL Verified or ITIL Ready clings to help desk- and ITSM products like bees to honey, implying that these products will support all requirements your ITIL processes will demand. But products that claim their ability to support all ITIL processes are breaking one of the key principles of good product design: you can't be good at everything. The ITIL processes may very well be in family and tightly connected, but that doesn't mean that one tool fits all family members.

Aside the basic Service Desk function and the Incident Management process, 9 out of 10 organizations have close-to-none experience with ITIL processes. And the concept of best practices – not to mention compliance to best practices – on a field with such limited presence, is almost a contradiction of terms. Best practices are based on repeatable procedures that not only have proven themselves over time but also for a large numbers of organizations.

When explaining the concept of e.g. Change- and Release Management to somebody from outside the IT Management world, you quickly realize that these processes are much closer related to traditional project management than they are to Incident Management. Thus, implying that you can cover an organization’s change management requirements with a help desk tool, is a vast exaggeration. At best, you use your help desk to establish the link between Incident-, (Problem-) and Change Management.

We take great pride in not claiming any kind of ITIL compliance. We're ITIL natives and couldn’t dream of building a help desk without speaking ITIL. If you plan to implement wall-to-wall ITIL processes and are looking for a tool, we say "Good luck to you, Bank of America, now go see Cap Gemini or IBM. It’s their core competence, not yours".

The CMDB Trap

The In Vogue acronym in the help desk industry is CMDB. Short for Configuration Management Database. Configuration Management is the art of managing your IT services through control of the changes made to items that constitute the services.

Put simply a CMDB is a relational asset directory with revision controls and the ability to group assets into services. Some ITIL evangelists take it a bit further and wants you to add service contracts and a lot of additional stuff in their too, to make the relations between man, service and machine complete.

In very little time the CMDB has established itself as the key element in an organized IT department. Gladly helped by industry vendors pushing their mega CMDB systems with the help of Gartner and other industry analysts. I have not yet seen a CMDB in production that works or does anything useful. So how come it’s what everybody desires these days?

I fully understand the vision: One system that displays all relations in your IT infrastructure seen from a business perspective, with some sort of Time Machine-ish functionality to roll back and forth to evaluate changes and consequences. But really. It that realistic? And considering the effort and investment required, does it make any sense? The concept of a CMDB is still in its early stages. If you really believe you can build a CMDB as described above, check Serge Thorn's blog and consider if that is the level of commitment you need or want to invest into it. Whoa.

I think a lot of IT departments are under renewed pressure to optimize their IT investments, and in lack of better strategies, they focus on the one thing right under their noses: We buy a lot of stuff, we’re not sure how, we never know where it is or where it ends up, we don’t know how much it costs, how often we provide support on it and how often we repair on it... So they fire up a CMDB project and the 18 months it takes to make it all work forms a welcomed refuge. But when the 18 months are gone and the CMDB doesn't really deliver, the organization realizes that this should definitely not be their core competence and calls IBM or Cap Gemini.

Do you have a well functioning CMDB beyond an asset directory? Then leave a comment and let us in on your secrets.

ITIL Scuba Diving

The other day somebody asked for my advice on a good ITIL v3 upgrade course. I'm the wrong guy to ask about that, but of course he couldn’t know that. To explain why I need to talk a little bit about one of my hobbies, scuba diving.

I scuba dive in my spare time and have a PADI certification. Actually I'm a Rescue Diver, which means that I've first taken an Open Water Course, then an Advanced Open Water Course and then a Rescue Diver Course. Total cost approx. $2000. And I could continue the courses: becoming a Dive Master, an Assistant Instructor, a Master Scuba Diver and so on. You get the picture.

The courses are a lot of fun, and there's a good deal of hands-on training. First time you descend to 30 meters below (in the dark Nordic seas) and suffers from the Martini effect it's good to have a trained professional with you. But part of me is also skeptical about the courses and their costs. For every one good thing you pick up, there are 10 things you will never need. Or when you need them you’ve forgot everything about them. A large ingredient in the courses are preparations for multiple-choice questionnaires. This only serves for certification and preparation for the next level. You will rarely learn anything from it. And beside a good deal of hands-on, there's still too much classroom training. It seems like PADI somehow have to justify the price of the course by spending a lot of time on theory. Everybody, including the instructor, are only thinking about getting it over with, so you can suit up and get in.

From my perspective PADI and ITIL training are very similar apart from three things:
1) the ITIL training scheme is much more complex
2) There's no hands-on in ITIL training
3) ITIL training is never ever any fun.

For reference:
http://www.mainroad.pt/images/routemap_training_lg.jpg
http://www.padi.com/padi/common/images/kd/flowchart.jpg