It was recently my pleasure to participate in a webinar hosted by one of our North American partners, KOHO Software. I would like to thank KOHO for organising the event (linked below), in which a selection of top IT service and asset management vendors each had a short time to position their solutions to an … Continue reading Webinar recording – ITSM and ITAM Process Glue
IT Asset and Service Management – conflicting objectives? IT Asset Management and IT Service Management continue to exist as independent disciplines, serving different objectives and occasionally coming into conflict as a result. With asset management under pressure to reduce costs, and service management under pressure to maximize service availability, perhaps some tensions are inevitable. That … Continue reading ‘ITASM’ – long overdue…..
Software Inventory – still a core requirement Until recently, optimizing software licensing and maintenance costs started with collection of a robust inventory of application installations across the network. Configuration lockdown provided some safeguard against individuals using their company credit card to download their preferred applications but is hard to administer except perhaps as a by-product … Continue reading Cloud services and software asset management
Responding to market interest in subscription models for ITAM/ITSM tools. Recent discussions with service provider partners has stimulated a fresh look at the ways in which the tools necessary for supporting ITAM and ITSM activities can be charged out on a pay-per-use basis. I’m happy to share these notes with you and welcome any comments … Continue reading Subscription Models for an integrated ITAM/ITSM suite
One topic I’ve had in mind recently was whether a move toward adopting cloud-oriented IT will have any impact on the support team on the typical organization’s IT help desk, and whether our own HelpDesk product will need to develop new functionality. Attending the 451 Group’s recent conference on hosting and cloud transformation in London … Continue reading Cloud Strategy: implications for the Help Desk?
IT infrastructure management. . . We have often asked questions on this blog about the sequence in which the components of IT infrastructure management get assembled. For example, whether the IT asset database comes first, whether license or change management is the next essential item. These questions reflect what we find in our customer base, … Continue reading Business Process Management: foundation for IT infrastructure management
We were recently reviewing our investment options for our next business year. Having been lean enough to come through the crunch much better than many of our larger competitors, the discussion was proceeding along the lines of how to balance new spending on expanded development resource and expanded marketing and lead generation. Another option arose, … Continue reading Use the help desk to focus investment into your customers
IT help desks – opportunities for specialization Your IT help desk needs to meet all its SLAs, and excel in user feedback surveys, at the lowest possible staffing level. In the small to medium size organization, that probably means recruiting great quality support staff, all capable of dealing with any problems that the user community … Continue reading What-if? modelling on the HelpDesk
ITAM+ITSM = ?? This blog usually takes its subject matter seriously, but with the UK (where I’m based) gripped in the coldest and snowiest start to winter on record, you will excuse me for appearing lighthearted in the title to this post. Sometimes, a theme can suddenly become popular in our industry, and in the … Continue reading ITAM / ITSM / SAM / … – another acronym in time for Christmas?
Helpdesk and ITAM tools – measuring effectiveness We talk a lot about using surveys to gauge customer satisfaction with the service provided by the IT support help desk. What we don’t talk about so much is how we involve the analysts in assessing the effectiveness of the tools that we provide them with. A post on this blog a … Continue reading Help Desk analysts – valued for their views?