Learning to do more with less

IT has had to adapt to the changing economic climate and customer demands, focusing on what it can deliver and how to do more work with less resources and tighter budgets; Redstor MD Paul Evans reports.

What challenges are businesses facing in IT right now? Business is all about how to make money and save money and the recent recession has had a drastic impact on how businesses go about doing this while ensuring ongoing customer loyalty and satisfaction. Economists define a recession as six consecutive months of negative growth in gross domestic product (GDP). Whatever definition you use the economic results are always the same: job losses, a decline in real income, a slowdown in industrial production and manufacturing and a slump in consumer spending.

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Professionalism and the importance of standards-based certification

Developments in technology such as cloud computing mean the certification of IT professionals is more important than ever. Despite this, unless certifications are developed and standardised so they reflect real-world experience they will fail to help boost professionalism. Steve Philp, marketing director of The Open Group’s ITAC and ITSC certification programmes, addresses some of the top issues surrounding IT certification today.

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Do you speak geek?

If Spanish is the new French where does that leave Geek? Sean Glynn, VP marketing at Credant Technologies explains the latest IT security lingo.

The IT industry loves its acronyms, why is anyone’s guess – maybe it’s a speed thing, perhaps it’s the whole idea of writing code or overcome language barriers, I’ve even heard “it’s to do with saving bandwidth”, whatever! What I do know is it’s confusing for those on the outside to keep up when the IT crowd are in full flow – a typical discussion would be ‘what’s the difference between SED and FDE and which is better?’ If you found you reworded the question to ‘what is’ then read on – I’m going to give you a sneak peek inside the mind of a geek.

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Deploying the IT service desk

As the global economy begins its recovery and with costs being more analysed and managed than ever before, every organisation is being asked to deliver more, with less resources and for lower costs. A real differentiator is the quality of service and support and if these can be more automated and efficient, the business benefits can make the difference between success and failure as Cherwell managing director Tony Probert explains.

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Successful negotiation

When it comes to negotiation, David Freedman, sales director, Huthwaite International says it’s time for a more organised approach.

At a recent conference, a senior executive at a Global 500 company was overheard to say: “If only we could pick up all the money we are spilling in negotiation. It’s a huge number, definitely in the tens of millions.” He went on to describe how his company was in the early stages of negotiation development and still lacked a consistent approach. He could not disguise his real concern: “Our failure to develop the skill of our negotiators across the company will not be evident until it is too late.”

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