Recent White Papers

Can You Really Get ITIL Out of the Box?
Author: Malcolm Fry and Ken Turbitt
May 23, 2007
IT organizations are under intense pressure to reduce the cost of managing IT and ensure that decisions are based on business value and business priorities. Many are turning to the ITIL for guidance on how to meet these demands. But ITIL isn't a panacea; it's a set of guidelines. It’s left up to each organization to translate those guidelines into workable and effective ITIL implementations for their specific environment. Specifically, ITIL is a best-practice process road map based on real-world customer experiences in managing IT to achieve business objectives and realize business value.

May 21, 2007
Attracting and retaining the best people requires a corporate culture that values mutual trust and openness. This white paper presents four leadership strategies for building open and collaborative relationships in the workplace.

When you shop online, you probably gravitate toward those vendors that provide a catalog of requestable services listing all of the products they offer. Usually, this catalog includes a brief description of each item, its price, and its delivery time. From the catalog, you easily drill down for more details on any product, just by clicking on it. Then, when you find the product you want, you simply select it and your order is automatically placed. Finally, you can return to the online site at any time to determine the status of your order. If only the employees in your organization could have that same level of convenience in finding the services they need, requesting those services, and tracking the status of their requests.

Apr 24, 2007
What would you do if you had to develop and deliver personalized training to 900,000 employees, located in 34,000 different locations globally, with a complex set of variables that changed training on a location-by-location basis? The key is Reusability 2.0. While technology-delivered training has become mainstream in many organizations, most are still not fully leveraging the power of reusable learning content to meet their instructional needs.

If you haven't figured out a meaningful way to measure each strategic goal and supporting initiative, it doesn't belong in your plan. If you're not tracking it via your scorecard, don't keep it. If it's not worth the time to measure and track, it doesn't belong in your strategic plan.

Performance management creates the greatest value when it drives your strategic plan. The challenge, however, is that most organizations find day-to-day performance driven by any number of items or urgent requests, but not strategy.

There are lots of variables and issues to address when deployment a performance management system across a small or large business. There are two questions that are critical to your success, regardless of the size or nature of your business.

Apr 18, 2007
Setting up a performance management system can deliver tremendous results. We’ve seen it deliver hundreds of millions of dollars in value in months. Today it has become an important tool in building an organizational culture of choice, and delivering great results.