In 2010, TECO Energy, one of the largest energy and utility companies in Florida, faced a computing infrastructure of aging hardware and obsolete software that created stability and performance problems and hindered business productivity. Most of the company’s 2,800-plus desktop and laptop...
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
Consider this example of a type of incident that most, if not all, service desks have encountered in the past, and probably will in the future: Mary, an employee at Bank of America (BofA), locked her Dell laptop with a BIOS password, which she then forgot. Without her password, she can’t reboot...
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
As today’s organizations proceed with upgrades to Windows 7 and Office 2007 or 2010, many are finding that the action plans they need are very different from the plans they used for previous upgrades, with particular regard to the migration of users to the new applications. Of course, there are...
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
It all started in the spring of 2009, after coming in as the runner-up for the HDI Team Excellence Award. We knew we were delivering great service to our customers, making recommendations to be more effective, and creating a great working environment, but there was something missing. After...
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
We often hear of the importance of managing the risks associated with making personal investments. Until we understand investing well enough to weigh equity against the level of tolerable risk, we risk making uninformed decisions that could have devastating results. The same principle holds true...
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated February 25, 2016
When it comes to customer service, it really is only as good as the customer says it is. But what do you do when your customers think your service is great, but you know it could be a whole lot better? Think Lean! We did, and we were able to reduce our abandoned call rate from 28 percent to 9...
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
Call it the cloud. Call it converged infrastructure. Call it hybrid delivery, or whatever the marketers come up with next. The fact is, the world of IT has changed. It’s the “new IT.” But let’s be honest: it’s not altogether new, and it’s not altogether IT. So what is it, and how is it going to...
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
With all of the buzz around strategic planning, it’s understandable that today’s IT manager or CIO, however shrewd he or she may be, might feel overwhelmed by the plethora of definitions on offer. The easy-to-use toolkit presented in this article provides a simple, yet effective, tried-and-true...
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated July 7, 2020
Some will no doubt think this is heresy, but the fact is that ITIL is a process framework. It is not prescriptive (in either ITIL v3 or ITIL 2011, but more on that later), and the books do not actually provide a method for designing services; rather, they provide the (presumably) required processes.
Date Published May 22, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
Date Published - Last Updated March 27, 2025