Chances are, in an average day, you are not accomplishing as many tasks as you would like … and neither are your colleagues or your employees. What is mystifying about that statement is that it seems today’s workforce is putting in more hours and more effort than ever before coinciding with an increased adoption of IT devices and applications designed to improve user productivity. In fact, this has been a key driver for organizations to enable workforce mobility – to provide flexibility in accessing business IT resources (applications, data, email, and other services) from any device at any location at any time in order to improve overall business performance. But even the most accomplished business professionals must admit there are days when little gets done despite herculean efforts.
The Real Reason Your Workforce Is Not As Productive As It Should Be
ITSM Futures: A Closer Look at Mobile and Unified Endpoint Management
In my last blog, I discussed how IT service management (ITSM) roles (and rules) are becoming more operations-aware. The blog examined a number of key game-changers for ITSM, including a growing requirement for shared analytics; the rise (not the demise) of the CMDB/CMS and service modeling; cloud as both a catalyst for innovation and a [...]
Office 365: To Cloud or Not to Cloud—That IS the Question!
It’s time to take a serious look at Office 365. The cloud edition of Microsoft’s broadly adopted business productivity suite – which bundles such popular packages as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft Outlook – has been both heavily praised and heavily criticized since its introduction in 2011. While the adoption rate of the traditional software edition of Microsoft Office is currently in no danger of being overtaken by its cloud-hosted cousin, recent adoption rates for Office 365 have substantially accelerated. Businesses, in particular, have shown increased interest in the cloud-based platform, and many are carefully considering whether to make the transition after existing Enterprise Agreement (EA) licenses expire.
Cisco’s Big Data Analytics Vision: Some Data Will Be Distributed Forever
Champions of big data analytics extoll the virtues of massive data stores. Enterprises have so much unstructured data that could help them improve operations and generate new revenue, they say. The more bytes, the better. Some might assume that enterprises will simply push every byte they can find into a Hadoop cluster or data warehouse. [...]
Is Your Organization Ready for Windows 10?
Here we go again. New releases of Microsoft’s flagship operating system are typically greeted with a combination of angst, curiosity, confusion, and dread in equal measure. It seems just as folks have gotten used to a particular Microsoft version, a new one is released with a completely different interface and requiring a whole new set of operational practices. Even worse, upgrading large numbers of desktops to the new edition in a large enterprise environment is a daunting task often avoided by IT operations teams until and unless it is absolutely necessary to perform a mass migration. More often, new OS platform adoption occurs due to device attrition (i.e., replacing old devices hosting old OS versions with new devices hosting the new OS version). The upcoming, late-July release of Windows 10 will likely be no exception to this.
The Future of ITSM: How Are the Roles (and the Rules) Changing?
Both the “rules” and the “roles” governing IT service management (ITSM) are evolving to support a far-broader need for inclusiveness across IT, and between IT and its service consumers. Recent EMA research, “What Is the Future of IT Service Management?” (March 2015), exposed a number of shifting trends that might surprise many in the industry. [...]
Open network management is the focus on spring ONUG meeting
The Open Networking User Group (ONUG) is a community of IT executives that are using their combined buying power to influence the networking industry. Members hail from companies such as Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Fidelity Investments. ONUG’s goal is to specify requirements and reference architectures for products that are open, more affordable and more agile than what vendors traditionally offer.
Over its first two years of existence, ONUG has focused on software-defined WAN (SDWAN), network virtualization overlays and network service virtualization (also known as network functions virtualization or NFV). Last week, ONUG convened its spring meeting at Columbia University, where its focus expanded into network management and operations. ONUG introduced three new working groups that will specify open networking requirements and begin testing vendor solutions in various management areas.
SDN and Network Management at ONUG
As an analyst who focuses on network management research, I am particularly intrigued by software-defined networking (SDN). As SDN architectures are deployed in data centers, local area networks and WANs, network management practices will have to evolve. For instance, SDN may make it easier for cloud administrators to provision network services and connectivity for a new application, but how do you ensure that your new programmable network remains compliant with configuration controls and policies? Is your performance management tool able to model and monitor an SDN controller? If you have traditionally relied about appliance-based load balancers and firewalls in your data center, how do you monitor and manage those network functions when they become virtualized services that are as mobile and dynamic as the workloads they serve?
Best Practices for Maximizing Efficiencies – Governance and Optimization
In my last blog, I talked about “IT Cultural Transformation and the Elimination of Technology Silos.” That blog keyed on four key areas of advice, which also provide a useful foundation for the topic of “Governance and Optimization.” These key areas include: Standing in the middle of the storm –This means looking at the interdependencies [...]
Rewarding Impatience with User Self-Service
There seems to be a direct correlation between how successful business professionals are and their level of impatience. While I am not familiar with any studies on this particular subject, it is simple logic that the most productive employees are those who most frequently demand rapid response to service requests. From my past experience managing and providing IT administrative support, I can attest that these individuals are usually the most irritating—constantly requesting access to new applications, data, and other business resources with expectations of an immediate response. Begrudgingly, I must acknowledge that these are the folks who are also most likely to close deals, beat deadlines, increase revenues, and win awards. In the modern world of highly competitive markets and increased organizational requirements, impatience may actually be a virtue.
