Business Relationship Management: Standards, Best Practices, and Practical Implementations

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,...
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016

BYOD on Campus: Tips for Security, Success, and Sanity

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.
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016

Change and Release Management: Should They Be the Same Process?

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...
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016

Beyond "Just Doing" CSI: Let's Be Excellent

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...
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016

CEM: The Road to Customer Satisfaction

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...
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016

Top Down and Bottom Up: Performance Metrics That Count

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...
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016

The Art of Managing IT Transformation

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...
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016

ERP@TECO: A Case Study

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...
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Power of Metrics for Optimal Performance

Without clear objectives, metrics are just a pile of numbers. The good is when we beat our targets, the bad is when we fail to hit those targets, and the ugly is when we fail to set challenging objectives. Remember, like baseball, the only thing that really matters in the end is whether or not...
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016

Bridging the Gap: A Service Lifecycle Approach to Implementing Knowledge Management

Service providers have come to the realization that their departments simply are not sharing information as well as they could. There are just too many silos, which inhibit the free exchange of shared knowledge, ideas, and experience. The result? Poor decision making, agility, and knowledge...
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016