Real-world example

For example, recording time—We’d love to say that working on several tasks simultaneously, we remember exactly when we started, stopped, or paused our work, but it’s just not general reality. IT providers generally account for 60-90% of their overall time. Considering we work on tasks concurrently and round time up, time recovery should be closer to 100–110%. Even if you’re an all-you-can-eat MSP, this time needs to be recorded for demonstrating value to your clients.

So how do we solve this problem, or even automate it? How do we improve the accuracy of time tracking, yet make it so we don’t have to think about it? These are the types of problems we’re trying to solve, and we haven’t really seen them solved in any industry—yet.

It’s important to get these workflows pretty right before we start running with them. This is still very much a crawl-walk-run thing, and I expect we’ll be in a feedback cycle with Pilot clients for a chunk of this year.

Now is probably a good time to say thank you so much to these Pilot clients who have provided the first rounds of feedback, and joined in on the problem-solving with us ❤️.

Licorice v1.0 progress

While we’ve been doing this, Licorice’s amazing devs have been rewriting the code that had “evolved as we were problem-solving”. While the code worked, it reflected the growth in our thinking, which is not ideal.

The new Licorice code is robust, mature, fast, extensible, and scalable. Licorice now has:

• A complete multi-threaded engine
• Server scaling and distributed execution
• A language engine ready for translation into other languages
• Region isolation, so you can host your Licorice in a specific country/region for data sovereignty
• A mature, self-documenting API
• Unit tests (in case you care about quality control)
• A translation engine to enable speaking to different ITSM software packages (or non-IT software 😉)
• A full React front-end
• The ability to work with multiple ITSM software packages simultaneously
• Security hardening
• 2 Factor Authentication (2FA)

These changes will allow a solid foundation and to be able to implement our roadmap and respond rapidly to your feedback.

What happens next?

They say best-laid plans never survive first contact with the enemy, so we know we’ll have challenges as we go. However, this is a serious effort to improve the IT support software interface significantly. We will be doing this as openly as possible and in true collaboration with you, the industry.

Important influencers in the industry are becoming interested and involved, and this is what we need. It’s worthwhile being clear—Licorice is about front-end IT service management. We exist to ensure engineers everywhere are truly valued by their clients for all their hard work.

In our opinion projects, inventory, VCIO, and other areas of IT support have received a lot of attention, so we’re not about those. Front-end service is still a major source of pain in daily life and this is something we know how to improve, and this is our focus.

When will Licorice implement AI?

We do get a lot of questions about when we will implement AI into Licorice, so now is a good time to clarify this.

As I’ve mentioned—the workflows in Licorice are new. We’ve developed and tested them at a real MSP, implemented them into software, and are now testing them at many IT providers. This is really about finding methods for software to work naturally the way we work, rather than forcing people to follow a particular software workflow.

However, the Licorice workflows as they exist already work completely without AI. In fact, when we invented them, AI was in its infancy. So it’s much more important for us to get these workflows right because this is where you will save most of your time as an engineer.

With that said, we are starting to look for a next-level AI/machine-learning developer, if you happen to know anyone. 😉

Once again, we are currently a small team of 4 (really amazing) people. We have a lot to do and will make mistakes, so please bear with us, but we WILL get there. This is an important milestone for the IT industry as a whole and needs to be done. If you want to be part of the Pilot program, please let us know. 😊

All my best,

Samantha Glocker, CEO