TECO Energy’s vision for its enterprise resource planning (ERP) project was to consolidate its existing financial, materials management (supply chain management), and human resource management applications and systems onto a single integrated platform across TECO Energy’s businesses. This...
Tag(s): case study, business alignment, process management, support center
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016
L.L.Bean, a leading clothing and outdoor recreation equipment retailer, was built on a legacy of high-quality products and impeccable customer service. Founded in 1912, today the company generates about $1.5 billion in sales worldwide, thanks to the efforts of 5,000 year-round employees. After...
Tag(s): business of support, infrastructure change management, IT-business alignment, support operations, case study
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016
RedSeal Networks provides proactive enterprise security management solutions that continually assess and fortify organizations’ cyberdefenses while automating compliance. Its engineers provide global, round-the-clock support, troubleshooting any obstacles to the analysis and improvement of...
Tag(s): continual service improvement, security management, metrics and measurements, customer service
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016
Customer experience management (CEM) is a strategy that focuses the business on managing all interactions with a customer throughout his or her entire experience with a product or service. The ideal customer experience is one in which the business communicates its vision, distinguishes its...
Tag(s): customer service, customer experience, continual service improvement
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016
Technology and technology people are strange and fickle. We like to play with our toys and “techy things.” We like to use models, frameworks, and systems (each with its own landscape and jargon). We spend a lot of time agonizing over and then eulogizing “management,” “processes,” and...
Tag(s): continual service improvement, ITIL, ITSM
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016
Whenever there’s a one-to-one relationship between release and change management (i.e., one release for each change), it makes sense to combine the change and release workflows. As a combined process, change and release are easier to manage, and there’s less chance of slippage between the two...
Tag(s): change management, ITIL, release management
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016
While BYOD and broader consumerization trends may be turning the corporate IT world upside down, such factors have long been a reality in the campus IT environment. But that doesn’t mean that university IT departments are immune to the changing expectations of today’s empowered device owners.
Tag(s): case study, byod, desktop support, service desk, security management
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016
As more organizations adopt ITIL best practices or pursue ISO/IEC 20000 certification, the number of BRMs continues to rise. Gartner predicts that the percentage of IT personnel dedicated to relationship management and change leadership functions will reach nearly 15 percent by the end of 2013,...
Tag(s): business alignment, ITIL, IT-business alignment
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016
For more than twenty years, the technical service and support industry has been trying to arrive at a common understanding of IT/business alignment. But why is this subject so important? Well, IT/business alignment has long been seen as one of the keys to synching IT’s goals with the business’s...
Tag(s): business alignment, incident management, ITIL, service desk, service level management
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016
A self-assist solution is one in which a person doesn’t directly rely on any other person to resolve their problem. No phone call needs to be placed. No chat window needs to be opened. No email needs to be exchanged. True self-assist (sometimes called self-service) is similar to how gas stations...
Tag(s): practices and processes, knowledge management, self-service tools, KM
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016