First of all can I just say how great it is to be back. Sometimes it’s good to try something new if only to prove that you shouldn’t have gone in the first place. And so here I am back in the editor’s chair of VitAL after my brief summer sojourn. Sincere thanks of course to John Hancock for doing such a sterling job during my sabbatical. He did much more than simply keeping the train on the tracks.
The financial chaos is causing problems for under-resourced IT service teams who are often the first to get cut in a crisis. Steve White would rather be shovelling coal on the Titanic.
The downgrading of the US credit rating from AAA to AA+ had a huge (some might argue unprecedented) effect on trading volumes in the few days following. It could be considered as a change in environment (Cretaceous -Tertiary extinction event?) where only the fittest could survive. Some companies had near death experiences. Of the two separate instances that came to my attention, the ultimate root causes were the same.
When rail operator East Coast Main Line split from National Express it needed to get its improved Service Desk up and running pronto. With parts of the IT estate hurtling around the country at 120mph though, the East Coast Service Desk presented some unique challenges. Matt Bailey spoke to Service Desk manager David Wilson.
The concept of cloud computing has been around for so long now, it is inevitable that all of us are using it to some degree but can we be sure of the service we are receiving and does it really meet our requirements? Associate IT director for Infrastructure at Aston University, Trevor Bayliss finds out.
This issue Noel Bruton says it’s time to climb mount backlog and get the support group’s workflow under control.
Having a backlog of outstanding support jobs is not uncommon. In fact, it is almost necessary to have some backlog in order to guarantee a smooth flow of work through the support group and maximise return on resources investment. But when the backlog starts to contain, or even be dominated by work that is impeding user productivity, then you have a major problem.
Over the last three years outsource Service Management supplier The Internet Group has been scaling up its services to add the mid-market to its existing portfolio of SME clients. In the process it has had to tackle SDI and ITIL and fundamentally shift up a gear in the way it does business. Matt Bailey spoke [...]
A familiar name in the world of ITIL, Pink Elephant has been at the forefront of IT management best practise for over 30 years. Caroline Wyatt, Head of Corporate Development explains the company’s approach and offers an example of how its ‘classroom in the cloud’ approach to training is helping one of its clients.
At a recent seminar, the delegates chose the Service Catalogue as their focus. With this in mind, Cherwell Software’s Tony Probert, sets out to explore the business benefits for an organisation of developing and implementing a Service Catalogue.
Christine Headford, product director at RMS Services explains why continual service improvement (CSI) must evolve to include business intelligence (BI) and how HEROes – highly empowered and resourceful operatives can help. ITIL has been around a long time; it is 20 years since the first ITIL manuals started appearing on desks and IT professionals started [...]