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

Synergy: Aligning Training, Communications, and Metrics to Optimize Knowledge Management

If your service desk already has a great set of processes in place, good news: with just a little effort, you can reuse many of those same processes to optimize and improve your knowledge management program! After all, reuse is one of the main principles of Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS)....
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016

Six Success Tactics for Supporting Mobile Knowledge Workers

In the mobile world, employees, customers, and IT staff expect to work from anywhere. It’s about freedom of location, device choice, and productive applications. As such, business services must have the capacity to deliver support to mobile devices and their users as well as the ability to...
Date Published - Last Updated July 19, 2018

You Must Have a Service Catalog

Our obsession with the service catalog—just one among many ITSM tools, modules, or capabilities—is over five years old, and it seems every IT organization has either decided or been told that the service catalog is an absolute must-have. However, in my opinion, it’s best to look back before we...
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016

PUT the PAT in the POT: Rebuilding Process Governance at Nationwide Insurance

Nationwide Insurance began its ITSM journey in 2002, starting with change and incident management. With full executive support, a dedicated process staff, and shared objectives across all of IT, the program was a huge success, and we realized as much as a 75-percent improvement in availability...
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016

Process Documentation: Bring It On!

Process frameworks and standards are a guiding light in helping you define processes and assess their maturity, but they won’t lead you to the process Promised Land! These frameworks and standards provide little guidance with regard to process definition, and without defined and documented...
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016

Combining People and Process Management for Optimal Service Management

If you agree with ITIL, successful service management is the result of “an appropriate mix of people, process, and information technology.” While ITIL is touted as a systematic approach that treats all three components equally, in practice it often focuses more heavily on the process side....
Date Published - Last Updated April 19, 2019

O365 + 92% FCR = Supporting Office 365 at the University of New Mexico

Supporting Office 365 is no easy task, especially in a university setting with a diverse audience of end users. But the University of New Mexico Information Technologies (UNM IT) is doing just that—and achieving exceptionally high first contact resolution rates, as well as huge growth in the use...
Date Published - Last Updated February 25, 2016

Agile Service Management

While “agile” is freely used, there’s not a clear definition of what “being agile” actually means, particularly in the context of technical support and service management. In this article, I will provide a high-level overview of Agile concepts, its origins, its primary frameworks, and its value....
Date Published - Last Updated December 1, 2017