Posted in IT Support on 01 December 2011
There are many exciting directions a career path can take when one works in the IT field. This is not exclusive to skill development or career advancements within the same company or field. Many IT people with in-house experience at some point choose to ‘move to the dark side' and embrace the world of consulting. It can be a positive change for a Service Desk-bound professional to finally be able to get to the clients directly without all the layers of sales people, and be able to make good use of the inside knowledge they acquired by advising companies in different fields and with di...
Posted in IT Support on 26 September 2011
Plan-Net has issued a new white paper that guides IT professionals through the essential steps needed to perform a Service Transition with successful results.
Whether the IT Support model is to be transitioned from in-house to Co-Sourced, Co-Sourced to fully Outsourced or in-house to Outsourced, this white paper outlines each important stage of the process, whilst also providing the reader with some tips and further insights into the matter.
This white paper, written by Pete Canavan, Head of Support Services, was conceived to help with the growing need for organisations to change the way ...
Posted in IT Support on 26 June 2011
‘Stay local, act global' is the new mantra for IT departments
With companies becoming increasingly international and IT support more and more remote, the IT Service Desk finds itself dealing with a user base that often extends to an EMEA or global level. The idea of outsourcing to a service provider seems now more than ever a convenient and cost-efficient solution to many organisations - in fact, the IT outsourcing industry in the UK is now generating over £40 billion a year, accounting for 8 per cent of the country's total economic output, an Oxford economics research recently...
Posted in IT Support on 20 June 2011
Thanks to Best Practice frameworks, technological progress and improved knowledge of the potentials of IT, a lot can be done nowadays at Service Desk level to reduce cost, speed up operations and improve service quality - all things that can contribute to achieving business success. However, Service Management initiatives such as role changes and redistribution, adoption of new tools and technologies and the implementation of new processes to follow may not always be welcome by who in the end has to accept and embrace all these changes - Service Desk staff. Do you take into consideration wh...
Posted in IT Support on 11 May 2011
IT support staff are for many companies what vegetables are to your body - essential elements for efficient functioning and critical to avoid major failures. Exactly like cultivating your own greens, having an in-house IT team may give you a sense of trust and control unlike other solutions. However, it is also expensive and time-consuming, therefore not always convenient.
A ‘home-grown' solution may suit larger organisations that either have the need to train analysts to use their self-developed software, have security or strategic reasons to have total control over the IT departmen...
Posted in IT Support on 15 February 2011
How to create cost-efficiencies in the post-Spending Review scenario
After the announcement of 25%-40% budget cuts last year, it is reasonable to expect IT to be one of the departments to suffer the most in public sector organisations. However, cuts in IT support and projects may bring inefficiencies and disruptions, which can then lead to real losses and increasing costs. More than ever, CIOs and IT Directors at public sector organisations are taking various options into consideration, from quick-fixes to farther-sighted ideas, trying to find a solution that will produce savings without ...
Posted in IT Support on 17 December 2010
Do you have a people continuity plan for your IT Support?
Business resilience and continuity planning is becoming more and more important as organisations increasingly understand its value and the position IT has in achieving it. However, in Business Continuity Management not all elements are given the same significance. Many organisations focus on securing their data with constant back-ups, others are more concerned with minimising email or server downtime - but the measures taken might not be so effective if there is insufficient support staff to deal with them. How many organisations ha...
Posted in IT Support on 30 November 2010
High-value users downtime costs firms thousands an hour
High IT availability is nowadays vital to the majority of organisations across all sectors. For the financial sector, so heavily reliant on IT, it is ever more crucial that the business-critical systems work at maximum efficiency and that any downtime and disruptions are minimised. To high-value users, delays, an inability to access data or email and lack of business continuity in any other form have an overall cost that cannot be ignored, especially in an unstable economic environment such as the one we are currently experiencing. If...
Posted in IT Support on 24 November 2010
With the retirement of version 2 of ITIL, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, organisations across all sectors are considering the implications of this change and whether they should think about a possible move to version 3. A reoccurring question is about not just the value of moving towards a V3 aligned approach, but also querying the overall value of the ITIL discipline itself.
There are many doubts regarding the Good Practice framework which is one of the most widely adopted worldwide, and it is not only the CEOs and financial directors who question its effectiveness, RO...
Posted in IT Support on 25 October 2010
Many organisations are moving to a ‘best of both worlds' between insourcing and outsourcing - Managed Services.
Efficient management of IT Support has become a crucial issue for organisations across all sectors. It is being increasingly recognised not only as a means to improve the whole business, but also as an instrument to create strategic advantage and added business value.
Many organisations identify two distinct types of management options for their IT Support - controlled and visible in-sourcing and the apparently cost-efficient outsourcing. But for organisations dealing wit...
Posted in IT Support on 01 September 2010
The term ‘commoditisation' seems to rear its head whenever there is a perceived trend for technology to become standardised and, however unlikely it is to become prevalent, there are often many positives that can be identified from its methods. After all, standardisation should mean technology becomes more affordable and reliable in the first instance and easier and cheaper to support once implemented. However, when this trend spills over into IT Support and Service Delivery, then the positives become much more difficult to identify.
Its stealthy advance into the marketplace is under...
Posted in IT Support on 14 July 2010
No matter the economic climate, or indeed within which industry they operate, organisations are constantly seeking to lower the cost of IT while also trying to improve performance. The problem is it can often seem impossible to achieve one without compromising on the other and in most cases, cost cutting will take prevalence, leading to a dip in service levels.
When things get tough the popularity of off-shoring inevitably increases, leading many decision-makers to consider sending the IT Service Desk off to India, China or Chile as a convenient solution financially - low-cost labour for h...
Posted in IT Support on 11 July 2010
Service Desk efficiency starts from support staff
IT Service Desk efficiency is vital for any organisation to conduct successful business operations, regardless of the sector they operate in. However, many IT Service Desks are far from cost-efficient and still have much work to do in order to reach their full potential. Inefficiencies and excessive costs might be the consequence of one or many factors, for instance the various Service Desk software applications do not fully integrate with one another or there are a lack of clear procedures for change management. But purchasing the latest t...
Posted in IT Support on 24 June 2010
There has been a lot of hoopla in the press in the last couple of weeks regarding Apple overtaking Microsoft's place in the sun. Various commentators have declared that Apple is now the biggest technology company in the world, implying that whilst it is going from strength to strength, Microsoft has become yesterday's news.
The term "biggest", however, is rather ambiguous - what metrics are used to measure it? Most commentators seem to base their claims solely on figures such as their relative Market Capitalisations (or worth). From this point of view, Apple is leader as its Ma...
Posted in IT Support on 15 June 2010
IT professionals can learn from the tough times.
As the UK officially leaves the recession, although, it must be said, staggering instead of marching triumphantly, the IT job market seems to be coming back to life, but with a substantially changed face. IT professionals looking to get back to work after they were made redundant or to make that career move they postponed while things were tough, should take this opportunity to learn from the past twelve months and make a more informed choice when choosing their new employer.
As IT Support and Managed Services acquire larger space in the UK...
Posted in IT Support on 06 May 2010
Budget reduction teaches organisations to prioritise - a lesson to be learnt not only by the public sector.
The recently announced budget has not been kind to public sector IT, just as expected. Large cuts mean that most technology projects will have to be shelved, but this does not make the level of performance the sector is craving for impossible to be reached - on the contrary, budget reduction is the kind of incentive that drives organisations to prioritise and to seek efficiencies, focusing more on operational, rather than capital expenditure. This does not apply exclusively t...
Posted in IT Support on 03 May 2010
The importance of IT, just like that of public transport, seems only to be truly appreciated when it stops working properly and stranded users are left to reflect on the value of a more efficient system. The IT quality issue can become particularly important when inefficiencies and disruptions not only slow down the system and create delays, but get in the way of business operations or, even worse, cause losses. As many organisations might have unfortunately already experienced, an extra minute of downtime might lead to money loss, system malfunction can cause loss of data and lack of prope...
Posted in IT Support on 27 April 2010
When a press release was issued a couple of weeks ago announcing that Microsoft's IT help desk, desk-side services, and infrastructure and application support were to be managed on-premise by Infosys for its branches across the globe, it caused a lot of controversy in the media.
Outsourcing frequently provokes strong opinions, and whilst it is often accepted that outsourcing catering or cleaning is a sensible move, outsourcing IT is often seen in a different light. There can be a supposition that the company in question has somehow lost control of what it is doing and is embarkin...
Posted in IT Support on 22 March 2010
If we look at the number of organisations outsourcing their software development, IT service desk or WAN support to India and other cheap-labour countries, offshoring nowadays seems not only convenient and straight-forward, but as easy as abc. But what the media doesn't seem to cover is an issue that is not at all uncommon: it hit Barclays, Quark, Dell and a large number of other companies - what happens if all is not well and you have to take the offshored back in-house?
The phenomenon has already been dubbed 'backshoring' in the US, where 30% of Fortune 500 companies have experienced it,...
Posted in IT Support on 10 March 2010
Slowly recovering from the crisis and with a more careful eye to the unsteadiness of the market, many organisations across all sectors are considering ways to make their IT Service Desk more cost-efficient, but some ideas decision-makers might have could be partially or totally wrong.So if you are thinking any of the following, you might want to think again:"Our Service Desk is costing us too much. Outsourcing it to [insert favourite low-cost country abroad] can solve the problem."Although outsourcing has it advantages, doing it off-shore is a huge investment and has a lot of hidden co...
Posted in IT Support on 15 February 2010
Off-shoring of IT services and especially Service Desks is gaining popularity as Financial Directors continue to reduce IT spend and headcount. But before a decision as crucial as this can be taken it is important to assess the potential short, medium and long term impact on the user community and ultimately the bottom line.
Although the Service Desk is just a component part of IT as a whole, it remains the 'face' of IT and in most cases, the measurement point of both user perception of IT effectiveness and impact on the user's ability to carry out his or her job. A good or bad Service Des...
Posted in IT Support on 10 January 2007
With the economic upturn driving increased IT investment, how can organisations overcome inflexible outsourcing contracts or internal headcount freezes to guarantee service levels and avoid compromising business integrity?
Co-sourcing is the flexible, cost-effective alternative which enables organisations to flex up or down IT support services in line with business needs.Over the past couple of years, as any IT Manager can attest, costs have been squeezed. The result is that most operations are running at zero spare capacity - support staff illness, for example, can seriously compromise th...
