Dhiraj Gupta
The recent popularity of ITIL has led IT organizations to invest in the delivery, support, and management of services, an aspect of IT that is generally overlooked. IT-based Powerful Service Management Offices (SMOs), dedicated to the implementation of ITSM is on the rise, have aided in ITIL growing at an unprecedented pace, and the knowledge and experience with ITIL is now becoming a prerequisite in the IT industry. This activity has resulted in the emergence of a strong ITSM industry to help IT organizations with the delivery and support of IT services.
Dhiraj Gupta
In his seminal article “IT Doesn’t Matter,” Nicholas Carr argued that IT is becoming a commodity, very much like many other broadly adopted technologies, like railways and electrical power. Carr’s predictions proved controversial at the time, but the steady trend of IT outsourcing and the emergence of utility computing—cloud computing and SaaS—are proving the basic premise of Carr’s argument to be true. So, in a corporate environment where “IT is shifting from being an asset companies own to a service they purchase,” what is the role of ITSM?
Dhiraj Gupta
Through my 6 years of experience, I have been able to identify popular ITSM implementation patterns, spotted a few emerging trends, and learned a couple of extremely valuable lessons. This article is my quick attempt to document those findings, and although they contain broad generalizations and are not based on scientific research, they nevertheless offer value to organizations looking to start on ITSM journey of their own, as well as those looking to validate their implementation approaches.
Julie L. Mohr
In this article, we discuss the new edition of ITIL. Although this article does not provide a detailed look at all the changes, it identifies their major modifications, and each of the books in the library is examined for what has changed in the new release. The summaries should help all current ITIL practitioners evaluate the new version’s content and value.
Julie L. Mohr
Frameworks like ITIL are not new. Frameworks existed before there was technology. So why is it that so many IT organizations have only now begun to evaluate and adopt them? The basic answer is structure. In order to manage a complex system or value network, organizations need to adopt a structured environment that will enable it to achieve operational efficiency and effectiveness, as well as to measure performance and continuously improve.
Julie L. Mohr
In the IT industry today, information is our primary asset: we provide to businesses and it is critical to the IT organization’s success at providing valuable services. Knowledge is key to making the right decisions on how to guide the organization and drive a competitive edge. Knowledge management is a shared strategy between the IT service provider and users, and when done right, can be integrated into the organization and enhance the performance of both the provider and the business. However, organizations need to see knowledge management as a strategy, not something that is done in addition to service management.
Julie L. Mohr
Incident categorization is a challenge for many organizations. Whether it is due to culture, politics, complexity, or an inability to agree, every organization, at some point, runs up against incident categorization. Why does it cause so much difficulty? Every organization is different. Their products and services are different. Their service levels are different. Their customers are different and their knowledge is different. Even their reports are different. Each one of these distinctive factors affects how incidents are tracked and monitored. Thus, there can be no master categorization scheme because each organization must figure out what works best in their unique environments.
Omega Management Group Corp
No matter what industry or market your organization is in, you play by four irrefutable and hierarchical laws of the jungle when it comes to achieving the goal of sustainable profitability. This white paper introduces the concept of “The CEM-DNA Playbook Strategy,” a twelve-step process designed to help any business consistently maximize the quality of experience for customers, prospects, suppliers, partners, and employees. After all, it takes satisfied, loyal employees to deliver consistently outstanding experiences to your external stakeholders.
Rob England
This white paper presents a review of twenty-three studies on current state of ITIL. Some of the findings include: no consistent definition of “using ITIL,” between 30 and 60 percent of organizations use ITIL, and two studies suggest that only ten percent of organizations surveyed strictly or thoroughly use ITIL. Our hope is that this survey leads to a wider understanding of the current extent and growth of ITIL adoption, and the benefits that organizations can gain from adopting and adapting ITIL.
Ray Cornelious
Cloud computing is the future of IT; a recent survey of 481 CFOs across the United States concluded that 83% believe their companies expect to rely on cloud-based services in the next three to five years. Many innovated solution providers have reshaped how businesses think about their current IT infrastructure by introducing a much more efficient platform to deliver computer software over the internet at lower cost. Cloud computing allows businesses to dramatically reduce their operating and capital costs by transferring these infrastructure and support responsibilities to a third-party service providers.
Ray Cornelious
Many innovated solution providers have reshaped how businesses think about their current IT infrastructure by introducing a much more efficient platform to deliver computer software over the internet at lower cost. IT services, supporting daily operations, accessed at a much lower cost and with higher performance, greater reliability, and improved disaster recovery capabilities. Transferring application, infrastructure, and platform services “off-premise” to lower cost outsourced services, can free up over-tasked team members. These new services require far less of the traditional “on-premise” technology human resource requirements.
How Does Your Service Desk Stack Up?
By Jeff Rumburg and Eric Zbikowski
Effective benchmarking enables you to quantify service desk performance, compare your service desk to others in your industry, identify performance gaps, and define necessary actions to close those gaps. By studying the competition and adopting practices from the top service desks, successful benchmarking is a skill that will help you improve performance at a revolutionary pace.
How Does Your Desktop Support Stack Team Up?
By Jeff Rumburg and Eric Zbikowski
The best practices for level 1 support are well documented and well understood; however, level 2 desktop support is not equally valued. Though this critical support function has historically received far less attention than the help desk, for most IT organizations, it represents a fertile opportunity for performance enhancement.
How Does Your Service Desk Stack Up?
By Jeff Rumburg and Eric Zbikowski
First level resolution is a critical cost metric that every service desk should track and trend, as it is the key to minimizing the total cost of ownership for end-user support. In our research and benchmarking experience, TCO for end-user support correlates with the cost of escalation defects, often resulting in costs that exceed the entire operating cost of the level 1 service desk!
By Jeff Rumburg
Many desktop support organizations are not staffed properly because they do not follow any sort of proven methodology when it comes to making headcount decisions. Additionally, many desktop support groups do not follow a strict single-point-of-contact support model, and thus end up handling large numbers of incidents that might otherwise be easily resolved by the level 1 service desk.
How Does Your Service Desk Stack Up?
By Jeff Rumburg and Eric Zbikowski
Assuming that valid service desk benchmarking data must include only companies from your specific industry, we are often asked, “How many companies do you have in your database from my industry?” and “Do you have companies ABC and/or XYZ in your database?” The fact is that there are many other factors besides industry affiliation that are more important—sometimes far more important—when selecting a peer group for benchmarking comparison.
How Does Your Service Desk Stack Up?
By Jeff Rumburg and Eric Zbikowski
Today’s service desk technologies and reporting packages make it easy to capture copious amounts of performance data…but what does it all mean? Despite all the data that service desk managers have at their fingertips, most cannot answer a very basic question: how is my service desk performing? An increasing number of progressive service desks recognize that when it comes to performance metrics, less really is more. In this white paper, learn about the 80/20 rule as it applies to service desk performance measurement.
By Jeff Rumburg
Most companies believe that the cost of desktop support consists entirely of the personnel, technology, and facilities that comprise the desktop support organization. However, there are many other costs (some might deem call them “hidden” costs) that must be taken into account when determining the true cost of desktop support, including the cost of defects, the “penalty cost” for not following a single-point-of-contact support model, and workload costs that are a direct result of the IT environment itself.