Implement Systems Management to Improve Availability and Visibility
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Without sound systems management practices, you don’t control outages, they control you.
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Use DevOps to Respond Faster to End Customers
Rapid customer response and efficient development are critical to creating a positive customer experience and remaining relevant in today’s marketplace.
The business puts significant pressure on development and operations teams to achieve these business objectives. DevOps is a popular approach to alleviate this pressure.
Critical Insight
Development and operations are traditionally siloed departments. Communication is limited to hand-offs and optimization efforts are focused locally. Cross-department collaboration is often discouraged.
Operational concerns are not accommodated early in the development lifecycle, leading to costly post-release fixes and poorly performing systems.
Focus only on your most impactful development and operations pain points. Trust your empowered teams to leverage the right DevOps practices to achieve quicker deployment throughput and better customer service.
Collaborate on the development and implementation of DevOps practices. Merging development and operations perspectives can help alleviate the tension between these two groups and initiate regular communication.
Impact and Result
There are many factors that may derail your DevOps initiatives, such as lack of management buy-in. Understand the current state of your development and operations teams to determine the focus of your efforts:
Conduct retrospectives: discuss experiences with previous projects amongst development and operations managers to identify issues that need to be addressed.
Complete a root cause analysis: review your development and operations metrics and processes to pinpoint the cause of your throughput inefficiencies, execution inconsistencies, and other pain points.
Develop customized solutions: there is no silver bullet. Each team and project may encounter different problems during their iterations. Tailor your solutions to the context of each team and regularly review their effectiveness.
World Class Operations: IT Governance
Create business value and meet organizational objectives through IT Governance
Your Challenge
Un-managed and ad hoc approaches to Governance cause:
Misconceptions about business and IT goals and priorities between the various management and personnel levels.
Long decision-making cycles.
Conflicting guidance around prioritization.
Limited scope for the management of risk process.
Absent or incomplete management of portfolios – no lifecycle approach.
Undocumented, incomplete knowledge and information, and no formal knowledge transfer.
Delayed or accelerated project implementations.
Duplicated effort and technology redundancies between departments.
IT/technology focused reporting instead of business focused.
Shutting IT out of key IT decisions, and increased likelihood of “shadow IT.”
Optimize Systems Management to Improve IT Resilience and Proactivity
The document provides advice for optimizing systems management by focusing on people, processes, and technology. It emphasizes that technology should support processes driven by people, and that organizations should implement systems management incrementally with a focus on quick wins, skills gaps, and user needs. Mature organizations prioritize service delivery over just keeping systems running by understanding business priorities and ensuring clear processes and communication between teams.
Select and Implement a Next Generation Endpoint Protection Solution
Your Challenge
As the market evolves, capabilities that were once cutting edge become default and new functionality becomes differentiating.
Vendors use a lot of marketing jargon, buzzwords, and statistics to sell their solutions, making objective evaluation rather difficult.
The endpoint protection (EPP) market is overcrowded and fragmented, resulting in information overload and consequently, a difficult vendor assessment.
Disparate product solutions are being bundled into one-off solutions or suites, often resulting in less efficient solutions than the more niche players.
Imminent obsolescence is an issue. Previous EPP solutions have not adapted with the rapidly evolving threat landscape and are no longer relevant, resulting in breaches or vulnerabilities.
Critical Insight
Don’t let vendors and market reports define your endpoint protection needs. Identify the use cases and corresponding feature sets that best align with your risk profile before evaluating the vendor marketspace.
Your security controls are diminishing in value (if they haven’t already). Develop a strategy that accounts for the rapid evolution and imminent obsolescence of your endpoint controls. Plan for future needs when making purchasing decisions today.
Endpoint protection is a matter of defense in depth and risk modelling, there is no silver bullet protection and mitigation solution. As end-client-technology providers release regular product/software updates, security tools will become outdated. Multiyear endpoint protection commitments will leave you playing a constant game of catch up.
Impact and Result
The solution is a holistic internal security assessment that not only identifies, but satisfies, your desired endpoint protection feature set with the corresponding endpoint protection suite and a comprehensive implementation strategy.
Use this blueprint to walk through the steps of selecting and implementing an endpoint protection solution that best aligns with your organizational needs.
Create a Winning BPI Playbook
Your Challenge
Companies understand the importance of business process improvement (BPI) and recognize the touted benefits: cost savings, waste elimination, and process efficiency.
With this said, 70% of companies that embark on process improvement initiatives fail.
The high probability of failure is attributed to a number of factors, including lack of continuous improvement and failing to define measurable outcomes.
Our Advice
Adopt a forward-facing outlook. Don’t focus solely on the current state, set improvement targets upfront to drive the initiative.
Break problems down into root-cause variables. Don’t look at the symptom, dive deeper and alleviate the root cause.
Empower business analysts. Create a practical process improvement methodology that your analysts can follow.
Impact and Result
Kick off process improvement by identifying the goals and defining the improvement targets.
Start by referring to the operating model and identifying level 1, 2, and 3 processes. Once the team understands the relationship between processes, they can begin to map a level 3 process using a standard mapping notation.
Use qualitative and quantitative techniques for analyzing the root cause rather than the symptoms.
Ensure the design is aligned with the initial improvement targets. Focus on value-added activities.
Consistently monitor the process and assess the root-cause variables to gauge the success of the process improvements.
Master Contract Review and Negotiation For Software Agreements-sample
Your Challenge
Internal stakeholders usually have different – and often conflicting – needs and expectations that require careful facilitation and management.
Vendors have well-honed negotiating strategies. Without understanding your own position and leverage points, it’s difficult to withstand their persuasive – and sometimes pushy – tactics.
Software – and software licensing – is constantly changing, making it difficult to acquire and retain subject matter expertise.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Conservatively, it’s possible to save 5% of the overall IT budget through comprehensive software contract review.
Focus on the terms and conditions, not just the price.
Learning to negotiate is crucial.
Impact and Result
Look at your contract holistically to find cost savings.
Guide communication between vendors and your organization for the duration of contract negotiations.
Redline the terms and conditions of your software contract.
Prioritize crucial terms and conditions to negotiate.
Optimize Change Management
This document discusses Info-Tech Research Group and change management. It provides an overview of Info-Tech as a global leader in IT research and advice. It then discusses the importance of balancing risk and efficiency in change management processes. Having too onerous of a process can lead to changes being implemented without proper review, while not having any process can increase risk. The document emphasizes having a right-sized change management process that incorporates adequate review and approval without being overly burdensome. It also stresses the importance of staff buy-in, tools to track changes, and management support for effective change management.
Improve IT Business Alignment With An Infrastructure Roadmap
Your Challenge
Infrastructure, by focusing on the reliability, availability, and serviceability of existing platforms, is perceived as a cost center rather than a business enabler.
Business stakeholders look to external vendors, rather than Infrastructure, to exploit emerging technologies. This leads to duplication of effort, inconsistent standards, and ineffective IT governance.
Infrastructure directors are unable to draw a line showing how their activities directly support the overall business goals.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Think of the roadmap as a service, not a product. Its value is inversely proportional to the time since its last update.
Alignment perception issues can be addressed by having the infrastructure practice formally engage and communicate with business stakeholders.
Shadow IT can provide business-ready initiatives that need only to be tweaked to align with Infrastructure’s internal goals.
Impact and Result
This blueprint will help you build:
A formal channel and way of communicating value bottom-up and top-down between IT and the executive team.
A methodology to prioritize and create projects that generate business value.
A tool that can produce multiple outputs of value for different audiences using the same data.
An ongoing roadmap process, rather than a static document, that is able to adjust and react to evolving business circumstances.
Recommended
Use DevOps to Respond Faster to End Customers
Rapid customer response and efficient development are critical to creating a positive customer experience and remaining relevant in today’s marketplace.
The business puts significant pressure on development and operations teams to achieve these business objectives. DevOps is a popular approach to alleviate this pressure.
Critical Insight
Development and operations are traditionally siloed departments. Communication is limited to hand-offs and optimization efforts are focused locally. Cross-department collaboration is often discouraged.
Operational concerns are not accommodated early in the development lifecycle, leading to costly post-release fixes and poorly performing systems.
Focus only on your most impactful development and operations pain points. Trust your empowered teams to leverage the right DevOps practices to achieve quicker deployment throughput and better customer service.
Collaborate on the development and implementation of DevOps practices. Merging development and operations perspectives can help alleviate the tension between these two groups and initiate regular communication.
Impact and Result
There are many factors that may derail your DevOps initiatives, such as lack of management buy-in. Understand the current state of your development and operations teams to determine the focus of your efforts:
Conduct retrospectives: discuss experiences with previous projects amongst development and operations managers to identify issues that need to be addressed.
Complete a root cause analysis: review your development and operations metrics and processes to pinpoint the cause of your throughput inefficiencies, execution inconsistencies, and other pain points.
Develop customized solutions: there is no silver bullet. Each team and project may encounter different problems during their iterations. Tailor your solutions to the context of each team and regularly review their effectiveness.
World Class Operations: IT Governance
Create business value and meet organizational objectives through IT Governance
Your Challenge
Un-managed and ad hoc approaches to Governance cause:
Misconceptions about business and IT goals and priorities between the various management and personnel levels.
Long decision-making cycles.
Conflicting guidance around prioritization.
Limited scope for the management of risk process.
Absent or incomplete management of portfolios – no lifecycle approach.
Undocumented, incomplete knowledge and information, and no formal knowledge transfer.
Delayed or accelerated project implementations.
Duplicated effort and technology redundancies between departments.
IT/technology focused reporting instead of business focused.
Shutting IT out of key IT decisions, and increased likelihood of “shadow IT.”
Optimize Systems Management to Improve IT Resilience and Proactivity
The document provides advice for optimizing systems management by focusing on people, processes, and technology. It emphasizes that technology should support processes driven by people, and that organizations should implement systems management incrementally with a focus on quick wins, skills gaps, and user needs. Mature organizations prioritize service delivery over just keeping systems running by understanding business priorities and ensuring clear processes and communication between teams.
Select and Implement a Next Generation Endpoint Protection Solution
Your Challenge
As the market evolves, capabilities that were once cutting edge become default and new functionality becomes differentiating.
Vendors use a lot of marketing jargon, buzzwords, and statistics to sell their solutions, making objective evaluation rather difficult.
The endpoint protection (EPP) market is overcrowded and fragmented, resulting in information overload and consequently, a difficult vendor assessment.
Disparate product solutions are being bundled into one-off solutions or suites, often resulting in less efficient solutions than the more niche players.
Imminent obsolescence is an issue. Previous EPP solutions have not adapted with the rapidly evolving threat landscape and are no longer relevant, resulting in breaches or vulnerabilities.
Critical Insight
Don’t let vendors and market reports define your endpoint protection needs. Identify the use cases and corresponding feature sets that best align with your risk profile before evaluating the vendor marketspace.
Your security controls are diminishing in value (if they haven’t already). Develop a strategy that accounts for the rapid evolution and imminent obsolescence of your endpoint controls. Plan for future needs when making purchasing decisions today.
Endpoint protection is a matter of defense in depth and risk modelling, there is no silver bullet protection and mitigation solution. As end-client-technology providers release regular product/software updates, security tools will become outdated. Multiyear endpoint protection commitments will leave you playing a constant game of catch up.
Impact and Result
The solution is a holistic internal security assessment that not only identifies, but satisfies, your desired endpoint protection feature set with the corresponding endpoint protection suite and a comprehensive implementation strategy.
Use this blueprint to walk through the steps of selecting and implementing an endpoint protection solution that best aligns with your organizational needs.
Create a Winning BPI Playbook
Your Challenge
Companies understand the importance of business process improvement (BPI) and recognize the touted benefits: cost savings, waste elimination, and process efficiency.
With this said, 70% of companies that embark on process improvement initiatives fail.
The high probability of failure is attributed to a number of factors, including lack of continuous improvement and failing to define measurable outcomes.
Our Advice
Adopt a forward-facing outlook. Don’t focus solely on the current state, set improvement targets upfront to drive the initiative.
Break problems down into root-cause variables. Don’t look at the symptom, dive deeper and alleviate the root cause.
Empower business analysts. Create a practical process improvement methodology that your analysts can follow.
Impact and Result
Kick off process improvement by identifying the goals and defining the improvement targets.
Start by referring to the operating model and identifying level 1, 2, and 3 processes. Once the team understands the relationship between processes, they can begin to map a level 3 process using a standard mapping notation.
Use qualitative and quantitative techniques for analyzing the root cause rather than the symptoms.
Ensure the design is aligned with the initial improvement targets. Focus on value-added activities.
Consistently monitor the process and assess the root-cause variables to gauge the success of the process improvements.
Master Contract Review and Negotiation For Software Agreements-sample
Your Challenge
Internal stakeholders usually have different – and often conflicting – needs and expectations that require careful facilitation and management.
Vendors have well-honed negotiating strategies. Without understanding your own position and leverage points, it’s difficult to withstand their persuasive – and sometimes pushy – tactics.
Software – and software licensing – is constantly changing, making it difficult to acquire and retain subject matter expertise.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Conservatively, it’s possible to save 5% of the overall IT budget through comprehensive software contract review.
Focus on the terms and conditions, not just the price.
Learning to negotiate is crucial.
Impact and Result
Look at your contract holistically to find cost savings.
Guide communication between vendors and your organization for the duration of contract negotiations.
Redline the terms and conditions of your software contract.
Prioritize crucial terms and conditions to negotiate.
Optimize Change Management
This document discusses Info-Tech Research Group and change management. It provides an overview of Info-Tech as a global leader in IT research and advice. It then discusses the importance of balancing risk and efficiency in change management processes. Having too onerous of a process can lead to changes being implemented without proper review, while not having any process can increase risk. The document emphasizes having a right-sized change management process that incorporates adequate review and approval without being overly burdensome. It also stresses the importance of staff buy-in, tools to track changes, and management support for effective change management.
Improve IT Business Alignment With An Infrastructure Roadmap
Your Challenge
Infrastructure, by focusing on the reliability, availability, and serviceability of existing platforms, is perceived as a cost center rather than a business enabler.
Business stakeholders look to external vendors, rather than Infrastructure, to exploit emerging technologies. This leads to duplication of effort, inconsistent standards, and ineffective IT governance.
Infrastructure directors are unable to draw a line showing how their activities directly support the overall business goals.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Think of the roadmap as a service, not a product. Its value is inversely proportional to the time since its last update.
Alignment perception issues can be addressed by having the infrastructure practice formally engage and communicate with business stakeholders.
Shadow IT can provide business-ready initiatives that need only to be tweaked to align with Infrastructure’s internal goals.
Impact and Result
This blueprint will help you build:
A formal channel and way of communicating value bottom-up and top-down between IT and the executive team.
A methodology to prioritize and create projects that generate business value.
A tool that can produce multiple outputs of value for different audiences using the same data.
An ongoing roadmap process, rather than a static document, that is able to adjust and react to evolving business circumstances.
Build a Business-Driven IT Risk Management Program
Your Challenge
Risk is an unavoidable part of IT. And what you don't know, can hurt you. The question is, do you tackle risk head-on or leave it to chance?
Get a handle on risk management quickly using Info-Tech's methodology and reduce unfortunate IT surprises.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
1. IT risk is business risk.
Every IT risk has business implications. Create an IT risk management program that shares risk accountability with the business.
2. Risk is money.
It’s impossible to make intelligent decisions about risks without knowing what they’re worth.
3. You don’t know what you don’t know.
And what you don’t know can hurt you – so find out. To find hidden risks, you need a structured approach.
Impact and Result
Stop leaving IT risk to chance. Transform your ad hoc IT risk management processes into a formalized, ongoing program and increase risk management success by 53%.
Take a proactive stance against IT threats and vulnerabilities by identifying and assessing IT’s greatest risks before they happen.
Involve key stakeholders including the business senior management team to gain buy-in and to focus on IT risks that matter most to the organization.
Share accountability for IT risk with business stakeholders and have them weigh-in on prioritizing investments in risk response activities.
Standardize the Service Desk
Your Challenge
Service desk managers with immature service desk processes struggle with:
Low business satisfaction.
High cost to resolve incidents and implement requests.
Confused and unhappy end users.
High ticket volumes and a lack of root-cause analysis to reduce recurring issues.
Wasted IT time and wages resolving the same issues time and again.
Ineffective demand planning.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Don’t be fooled by a tool that’s new. A new service desk tool alone won’t solve the problem. Service desk maturity improvements depend on putting in place the right people and processes to support the technology.
Service desk improvement is an exercise in organizational change. Engage specialists across the IT organization in building the solution, and emphasize how everyone stands to benefit from the initiative.
Organizations are sometimes tempted to track their work under a single ticket type. Unfortunately, the practice obscures the fact that incidents, requests, and projects require radically different amounts of time and resources, and can create the impression that IT is underperforming. Distinguish between incidents, requests, and projects, and design specific processes to support and track the performance of each activity.
Remember, the value of any IT service management (ITSM) tool is a function of the processes it supports and the adoption of those processes. The ITSM tool with the best functionality is worth little if you do not build the right processes, configure the tool to support them, and work to improve tool adoption in your organization.
Impact and Result
Increase business satisfaction.
Reduce recurring issues and ticket volumes.
Reduce average incident resolution time and average request implementation time.
Increase efficiency and lower operating costs.
Enhance demand planning.
Optimize Project Intake Approval and Prioritization
Your Challenge
Companies are approving more projects than they can deliver. Most organizations say they have too many projects on the go and an unmanageable and ever-growing backlog of things to get to.
While organizations want to achieve a high throughput of approved projects, many are unable or unwilling to allocate an appropriate level of IT resourcing to adequately match the number of approved initiatives.
Portfolio management practices must find a way to accommodate stakeholder needs without sacrificing the portfolio to low-value initiatives that do not align with business goals.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Failure to align projects with strategic goals and resource capacity are the most common causes of portfolio waste across organizations. Intake, approval, and prioritization represent the best opportunities to ensure this alignment.
More time spent with stakeholders during the ideation phase to help set realistic expectations for stakeholders and enhance visibility into IT’s capacity and processes is key to both project and organizational success.
Too much intake red tape will lead to an underground economy of projects that escape portfolio oversight, while too little intake formality will lead to a wild west of approvals that could overwhelm the PMO. Finding the right balance of intake formality for your organization is the key to establishing a PMO that has the ability to focus on the right things.
Impact and Result
Eliminate off-the-grid initiatives by establishing a centralized intake process that funnels requests into a single channel.
Improve the throughput of projects through the portfolio by incorporating the constraint of resource capacity to cap the amount of project approvals to that which is realistic.
Silence squeaky wheels and overbearing stakeholders by establishing a progressive approval and prioritization process that gives primacy to the highest value requests.
Modernize Communications and Collaboration Infrastructure
This document provides information from Info-Tech Research Group regarding modernizing communications and collaboration infrastructure.
[1] It recommends following a three phase methodology to modernize communications - assess current infrastructure, define the target state, and advance the project. Various tools and templates are provided to help with each phase.
[2] It emphasizes that the project scope and assessment phase takes more time than anticipated and is critical for defining requirements. Both business and IT perspectives should be considered.
[3] A hybrid deployment model combining on-premises and cloud solutions is recommended to modernize infrastructure over time without requiring a full replacement of existing systems.
Optimize the IT Operating Model
Your Challenge
Organizations have to adapt to a growing number of trends, putting increased pressure on IT to move at the same speed as the business.
The business, seeing that IT is slower to react, looks to external solutions to address its challenges and capitalize on opportunities.
IT and business leaders don’t have a clear and unified understanding or definition of an operating model.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
The IT operating model is not a static entity and should evolve according to changing business needs.
However, business needs are diverse, and the IT organization must recognize that the business includes groups that consume technology in different patterns. The IT operating model needs to support and enable multiple groups, while continuously adapting to changing business conditions.
Impact and Result
Determine how each technology consumer group interacts with IT. Use consumer experience maps to determine what kind of services consumer groups use and if there are opportunities to improve the delivery of those services.
Identify how changing business conditions will affect the consumption of technology services. Classify your consumers based on business uncertainty and reliance on IT to plan for the future delivery of services.
Optimize the IT operating model. Create a target IT operating model based on the gathered information about technology service consumers. Select different implementations of common operating model elements: governance, sourcing, process, and structure.
Info-Tech Membership Overview
Info-Tech is the most innovative firm in the industry, and we pride ourselves on delivering better research than anyone.
Become a member and unlock a range of data-driven tools and resources to drive systematic IT improvement.
Define an EA Operating Model
Your Challenge
It is difficult to start the project, engage the right people, and find the necessary requirements to drive the value of an enterprise architecture operating model.
It is challenging to navigate the common enterprise architecture (EA) frameworks and right-size them for your organization.
The EA practice may struggle to effectively collaborate with the business when making decisions, resulting in outcomes that fail to engage stakeholders.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
The benefits of an EA program are only realized when all components of the operating model enable the achievement of the program goals and objectives. Many times organizations overplay the governance card while ignoring the motivational aspects that can be addressed through the organization's structure or stakeholder relations.
Info-Tech’s methodology ensures that all components of an EA operating model are considered to optimize the performance of the EA program.
Impact and Result
Place and structure your EA team to address the needs of stakeholders and deliver on the previously created strategy.
Create an engagement model by understanding each relevant process of COBIT 5 and make stakeholder interaction cards to initiate conversations.
Recognize the need for governance and formulate the appropriate boards while considering various policies, principles, and compliance.
Develop a unique architecture development framework based on best-practice approaches with an understanding of the various architectural views to ensure the creation of a successful process.
Build a communication plan and roadmap to efficiently navigate through enterprise change and involve the necessary stakeholders.
Become a Transformational CIO
Your Challenge
Business transformations are happening, but CIOs are often involved only when it comes time to implement change. This makes it difficult for the CIO to be perceived as an organizational leader.
CIOs find it difficult to juggle operational activities, strategic initiatives, and involvement in business transformation.
CIOs don’t always have the IT organization structured and mobilized in a manner that facilitates the identification of transformation opportunities, and the planning for and the implementation of organization-wide change.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Don’t take an ad hoc approach to transformation.
You’re not in it alone.
Your legacy matters
Impact and Result
Elevate your stature as a business leader.
Empower the IT organization to act with a business mind first, and technology second.
Create a high-powered IT organization that is focused on driving lasting change, improving client experiences, and encouraging collaboration across the entire enterprise.
Generate opportunities for organizational growth, as manifested through revenue growth, profit growth, new market entry, new product development, etc.
Craft an End-to-End Data Center Consolidation Strategy to Maximize Benefits
Info-Tech Research Group provides IT research and advice to help organizations address their full spectrum of IT concerns. The document discusses Info-Tech's services for data center consolidation, including actionable insights and templates to help plan and execute consolidation projects. It emphasizes that 12-18 months of planning is key to consolidation success in order to properly inventory equipment, address requirements, and mitigate risks and unexpected costs.
Build and Information Security Strategy
Your Challenge
Organizations are struggling to keep up with today’s evolving threat landscape.
From technology sophistication and business adoption to the proliferation of hacking techniques and the expansion of hacking motivations, organizations are facing major security risks.
Every organization needs some kind of information security program to protect their systems and assets.
Organizations today face pressure from regulatory or legal obligations, customer requirement, and now, senior management expectations.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Performing an accurate assessment of your current security operations and maturity levels can be extremely hard when you don’t know what to assess or how to assess it.
Alignment can be a difficult area for security to get right when it’s trying to balance both regular IT and the business.
Communication is needed between the business leaders, IT leaders, and the security team for an effective security strategy to be in place.
Impact and Result
Info-Tech has analyzed and integrated regulatory and industry best practice frameworks, combining COBIT 5, PCI DSS, ISO 27000, NIST SP800-53, and SANS to ensure an exhaustive approach to security.
Through this process, a comprehensive current state assessment, gap analysis, and initiative generation ensures that nothing is left off the table.
This project will elevate the perception of the security team from being a hindrance to the organization to an enabler.
Build an Application Integration Strategy
Your Challenge
Even though organizations are now planning for Application Integration (AI) in their projects, very few have developed a holistic approach to their integration problems resulting in each project deploying different tactical solutions.
Point-to-point and ad hoc integration solutions won’t cut it anymore: the cloud, big data, mobile, social, and new regulations require more sophisticated integration tooling.
Loosely defined AI strategies result in point solutions, overlaps in technology capabilities, and increased maintenance costs; the correlation between business drivers and technical solutions is lost.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Involving the business in strategy development will keep them engaged and align business drivers with technical initiatives.
An architectural approach to AI strategy is critical to making appropriate technology decisions and promoting consistency across AI solutions through the use of common patterns.
Get control of your AI environment with an appropriate architecture, including policies and procedures, before end users start adding bring-your-own-integration (BYOI) capabilities to the office.
Develop a Project Portfolio Management Strategy
Your Challenge:
As Portfolio Manager, you’re responsible for communicating portfolio results and future capacity to your steering committee.
Business and IT leaders need more accurate information on project status and resource availability to decide when to start and stop projects.
You need to better understand the needs of the PMO and assess the costs and benefits associated with different tools and approaches to PPM.
Our Advice - Critical Insight:
PPM is a practice, not a tool. Before succeeding with a commercial tool, you need to establish discipline and trust around reporting processes, which can be done using spreadsheets and other simple tools.
Portfolio management is separate from project management. Think of it as the accounting department for time. Project managers report into the portfolio and are held accountable to it, but it isn’t simply an extension of project management.
Our Advice - Impact and Result:
Decrease the wasted portfolio budget by reducing the number of cancelled projects and other sources of efficiency.
Establish the portfolio as the “one source of truth” for project reporting by increasing rigor around project status updating and reporting.
Align project intake with resource capacity to improve throughput, quality of estimates, and stakeholder satisfaction.
Implement an enterprise service bus revised
This document provides advice for implementing an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) by highlighting important considerations. It emphasizes that an ESB is a platform to deliver solutions and must be implemented as part of broader initiatives to be successful. It also stresses the importance of people, processes, technology, governance and change management for a functioning ESB.
Implement a Shared Services Model
Your Challenge:
Implementing a shared services model is a difficult process to undertake, and is comprised of many different components. Becoming a shared services provider is comparable to becoming a vendor and most IT groups don’t have the capabilities to easily make the transition.
Most companies look to achieve cost reductions through offering a shared services model. Adopting a shared services model doesn’t always result in these intended cost reductions. Simply combining the operations of two IT organizations doesn’t necessarily result in economies of scale and cost efficiencies. Before leaping forward with your shared services implementation, determine if the project will deliver value to your organization.
Our Advice - Critical Insight:
Implementing a shared services model needs to be viewed as more than simply extending a current service to other sites. The organization providing services essentially turns into a vendor. As a vendor, think of the IT service you’re offering as the “product.”
Remember that there are people, process, and technology capability pre-requisites to successfully becoming a shared services provider. These capabilities are not typical for the average IT shop, and need to be taken into consideration when you look to transition to a shared services model.
Our Advice - Impact and Result:
Before jumping into the implementation of your shared services project, assess your customer requirements and your current people, process, and technology capabilities to assess whether your organization is ready to implement a shared services model.
Understand the financial implications of moving to a shared services model prior to implementing. Make sure there is a strong case for implementation.
Assess and Optimize EA Capability
Your Challenge:
Situation
Enterprise Architecture increases the organization’s ability to provide consistent services, accessible information, scalable infrastructure, and flexible technology integration on demand. It helps bridge the gap between business and IT and creates a shared enterprise vision.
Complication
EA programs that are run without the required EA capability level are prone to failure.
EA capability optimization and EA operating model design skills are not common, as they are not everyday tasks.
Our Advice:
Critical Insight
Using this research while assessing and optimizing your EA capability will help you:
Architect the EA capability by applying four architectural perspectives: Contextual, Conceptual, Logical, and Physical. Develop an EA Operating Model starting at the contextual level, and proceeding through to the physical.
Develop a sponsored mandate for EA capability. Identify and engage EA capability stakeholders. Determine organizational scope, i.e. responsibility and authority of EA. Identify business drivers for optimizing an EA capability. Analyze organizational context. Secure executive support and authorization to execute.
Establish EA capability purpose and strategic direction. Write EA capability vision statement. Craft EA capability mission statement. Define EA capability goals and measures. Create EA principles. Assess current and determine target EA capability level.
Document EA management process. Define EA management practices. Define interactions between EA management and other processes. Define EA capability performance and value measurement approach.
Design EA organization and roles. Design EA organization structure. Define EA roles. Define required skills and proficiency levels for EA roles. Determine required EA staff capacity.
Standardize EA tools and work products. Establish an EA repository. Decide on EA tools to be used. Define EA artifacts and work products.
Develop an EA capability improvement plan. Consolidate and refine steps required to roll out the target EA operating model and improve EA capability. Draw an EA capability improvement roadmap.
Survive an Impending Audit
Your Challenge:
Impending audits intimidate CIOs and business executives – and for good reason.
A failed audit can result in punitive fines and injunctions that disrupt continuing operations until violations are resolved.
These highly visible failures are best prevented through auditor-enterprise collaboration and pragmatic audit management.
Our Advice:
Critical Insight
Shift the audit paradigm: auditors need to be enabled, not resisted.
Auditors provide a value-added service that you are paying for. Establishing an effective relationship and enabling the audit team can ensure you get value from the engagement. However, you must also be vigilant in mitigating the risk of damaging findings
.
Impact and Result
Effective audit management means acting with kindness to establish an effective relationship and taking vigilant, calculated steps to reduce the risk of adverse findings.
Clarify the audit scope and prepare documentation in advance.
Start off on a positive note and enable the auditor.
Manage audit logistics to minimize business disruption.
Dispute unwarranted findings.
Continuously improve your auditability.
Stay on Top of Today’s and Tomorrow’s Mobile App Trends
Mobile applications need to offer innovative solutions to remain competitive as basic capabilities are no longer sufficient. Businesses use mobile to provide improved services and the mobile landscape is constantly evolving, requiring a focus on security, performance, and APIs. Key trends include location-based services, near field communication, and mobile smart objects. Developers must strengthen competencies like security, performance optimization, and API development to ensure apps can scale with trends. While native device access remains important, mobile apps also increasingly connect to backend services and data sources.
Fast track critical leadership skills
Your Challenge:
Leadership training can be unsuccessful and expensive. More than 14 billion dollars was spent on corporate leadership development in the US in 2013, yet less than 15% of these programs were effective.
The longer you wait to improve leadership skills, the longer it will take to improve your managers' reputations with their teams – and improve performance, retention, and engagement.
Our Advice:
Critical Insight
Get results from your leadership training by holding your teams accountable through team-based development and support.
Focus on quick-wins or “low-hanging fruit” to see leadership skill improvements fast, and make teams more effective and engaged today.
Apply training immediately and iterate as you go. By doing so, participants are significantly more likely to use techniques and get value from the training.
Impact and Result
Use Info-Tech’s collaborative team-based approach to leadership development. Our proven methodology and process focus on easy-to-implement tactics that will achieve results for your leaders within two months. This blueprint focuses on improving skills in six critical areas:
Leadership brand
Communication
Inspiring staff
Meeting effectiveness
Conflict resolution
Strategic time management
Enterprise mobility management
Your Challenge:
- With the complexity of mobility increasing in most organizations, enterprise mobility management (EMM) is becoming necessary to manage devices, as well as all aspects of mobility.
- While EMM might seem simple from the outside, it has many moving parts. It covers devices, applications, data, security, policies, financial management, and help desk management.
- Without a detailed implementation plan to mitigate issues such as missing components, an unprepared IT department and help desk, and low end-user adoption, IT will find it difficult to ensure a successful launch.
Our Advice:
Critical Insight
- Mobility within organizations continues to grow more complex, and requirements for managing mobility now extend far beyond the device itself.
- As BYOD continues to grow and new products are released into the market, EMM will become a necessary tool for long-term sustainability and effective use of mobility.
- Without a proper implementation plan in place, organizations will find it difficult to achieve a suitable, unified solution for short and long-term sustainability of mobile management.
Impact and Result
- Prepare the organization for mobility by developing an implementation plan that covers EMM from start to finish, including selecting a vendor, managing help desk changes, engaging users, and developing an actionable timeline.
- Create a tailored solution for the unique needs of your organization.
Create a right sized disaster recovery plan
Your Challenge:
Traditional DRP templates are onerous and result in a lengthy, dense plan that might satisfy auditors but is not effective in a crisis.
Similarly, the myth that a DRP is only for major disasters and should be risk-based leaves organizations vulnerable to more common incidents.
The increased use of cloud vendors and co-lo/MSPs means you may be dependent on vendors to meet your recovery timeline objectives.
Our Advice:
Critical Insight
DR is about service continuity — that means accounting for minor and major events.
Remember Murphy’s Law. Failure happens, so focus on improving overall resiliency and recovery, rather than basing DR on risk probability analysis.
Cost-effective DR and service continuity starts with identifying what is truly mission critical so you can focus resources accordingly. Not all systems require fast-failover capability.
Impact and Result
Create an effective DRP by following a structured process to discover current capabilities and define business requirements for continuity, not by completing a one-size-fits-all traditional DRP template. This includes:
Defining appropriate objectives for maximum downtime and data loss based on business impact.
Creating a DR project roadmap to close the gaps between your current DR capabilities and recovery objectives.
Documenting an incident response plan based on a tabletop planning walkthrough that captures all the steps from event detection to data center recovery.
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Build a Business-Driven IT Risk Management Program
Your Challenge
Risk is an unavoidable part of IT. And what you don't know, can hurt you. The question is, do you tackle risk head-on or leave it to chance?
Get a handle on risk management quickly using Info-Tech's methodology and reduce unfortunate IT surprises.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
1. IT risk is business risk.
Every IT risk has business implications. Create an IT risk management program that shares risk accountability with the business.
2. Risk is money.
It’s impossible to make intelligent decisions about risks without knowing what they’re worth.
3. You don’t know what you don’t know.
And what you don’t know can hurt you – so find out. To find hidden risks, you need a structured approach.
Impact and Result
Stop leaving IT risk to chance. Transform your ad hoc IT risk management processes into a formalized, ongoing program and increase risk management success by 53%.
Take a proactive stance against IT threats and vulnerabilities by identifying and assessing IT’s greatest risks before they happen.
Involve key stakeholders including the business senior management team to gain buy-in and to focus on IT risks that matter most to the organization.
Share accountability for IT risk with business stakeholders and have them weigh-in on prioritizing investments in risk response activities.
Standardize the Service Desk
Your Challenge
Service desk managers with immature service desk processes struggle with:
Low business satisfaction.
High cost to resolve incidents and implement requests.
Confused and unhappy end users.
High ticket volumes and a lack of root-cause analysis to reduce recurring issues.
Wasted IT time and wages resolving the same issues time and again.
Ineffective demand planning.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Don’t be fooled by a tool that’s new. A new service desk tool alone won’t solve the problem. Service desk maturity improvements depend on putting in place the right people and processes to support the technology.
Service desk improvement is an exercise in organizational change. Engage specialists across the IT organization in building the solution, and emphasize how everyone stands to benefit from the initiative.
Organizations are sometimes tempted to track their work under a single ticket type. Unfortunately, the practice obscures the fact that incidents, requests, and projects require radically different amounts of time and resources, and can create the impression that IT is underperforming. Distinguish between incidents, requests, and projects, and design specific processes to support and track the performance of each activity.
Remember, the value of any IT service management (ITSM) tool is a function of the processes it supports and the adoption of those processes. The ITSM tool with the best functionality is worth little if you do not build the right processes, configure the tool to support them, and work to improve tool adoption in your organization.
Impact and Result
Increase business satisfaction.
Reduce recurring issues and ticket volumes.
Reduce average incident resolution time and average request implementation time.
Increase efficiency and lower operating costs.
Enhance demand planning.
Optimize Project Intake Approval and Prioritization
Your Challenge
Companies are approving more projects than they can deliver. Most organizations say they have too many projects on the go and an unmanageable and ever-growing backlog of things to get to.
While organizations want to achieve a high throughput of approved projects, many are unable or unwilling to allocate an appropriate level of IT resourcing to adequately match the number of approved initiatives.
Portfolio management practices must find a way to accommodate stakeholder needs without sacrificing the portfolio to low-value initiatives that do not align with business goals.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Failure to align projects with strategic goals and resource capacity are the most common causes of portfolio waste across organizations. Intake, approval, and prioritization represent the best opportunities to ensure this alignment.
More time spent with stakeholders during the ideation phase to help set realistic expectations for stakeholders and enhance visibility into IT’s capacity and processes is key to both project and organizational success.
Too much intake red tape will lead to an underground economy of projects that escape portfolio oversight, while too little intake formality will lead to a wild west of approvals that could overwhelm the PMO. Finding the right balance of intake formality for your organization is the key to establishing a PMO that has the ability to focus on the right things.
Impact and Result
Eliminate off-the-grid initiatives by establishing a centralized intake process that funnels requests into a single channel.
Improve the throughput of projects through the portfolio by incorporating the constraint of resource capacity to cap the amount of project approvals to that which is realistic.
Silence squeaky wheels and overbearing stakeholders by establishing a progressive approval and prioritization process that gives primacy to the highest value requests.
Modernize Communications and Collaboration Infrastructure
This document provides information from Info-Tech Research Group regarding modernizing communications and collaboration infrastructure.
[1] It recommends following a three phase methodology to modernize communications - assess current infrastructure, define the target state, and advance the project. Various tools and templates are provided to help with each phase.
[2] It emphasizes that the project scope and assessment phase takes more time than anticipated and is critical for defining requirements. Both business and IT perspectives should be considered.
[3] A hybrid deployment model combining on-premises and cloud solutions is recommended to modernize infrastructure over time without requiring a full replacement of existing systems.
Optimize the IT Operating Model
Your Challenge
Organizations have to adapt to a growing number of trends, putting increased pressure on IT to move at the same speed as the business.
The business, seeing that IT is slower to react, looks to external solutions to address its challenges and capitalize on opportunities.
IT and business leaders don’t have a clear and unified understanding or definition of an operating model.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
The IT operating model is not a static entity and should evolve according to changing business needs.
However, business needs are diverse, and the IT organization must recognize that the business includes groups that consume technology in different patterns. The IT operating model needs to support and enable multiple groups, while continuously adapting to changing business conditions.
Impact and Result
Determine how each technology consumer group interacts with IT. Use consumer experience maps to determine what kind of services consumer groups use and if there are opportunities to improve the delivery of those services.
Identify how changing business conditions will affect the consumption of technology services. Classify your consumers based on business uncertainty and reliance on IT to plan for the future delivery of services.
Optimize the IT operating model. Create a target IT operating model based on the gathered information about technology service consumers. Select different implementations of common operating model elements: governance, sourcing, process, and structure.
Info-Tech Membership Overview
Info-Tech is the most innovative firm in the industry, and we pride ourselves on delivering better research than anyone.
Become a member and unlock a range of data-driven tools and resources to drive systematic IT improvement.
Define an EA Operating Model
Your Challenge
It is difficult to start the project, engage the right people, and find the necessary requirements to drive the value of an enterprise architecture operating model.
It is challenging to navigate the common enterprise architecture (EA) frameworks and right-size them for your organization.
The EA practice may struggle to effectively collaborate with the business when making decisions, resulting in outcomes that fail to engage stakeholders.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
The benefits of an EA program are only realized when all components of the operating model enable the achievement of the program goals and objectives. Many times organizations overplay the governance card while ignoring the motivational aspects that can be addressed through the organization's structure or stakeholder relations.
Info-Tech’s methodology ensures that all components of an EA operating model are considered to optimize the performance of the EA program.
Impact and Result
Place and structure your EA team to address the needs of stakeholders and deliver on the previously created strategy.
Create an engagement model by understanding each relevant process of COBIT 5 and make stakeholder interaction cards to initiate conversations.
Recognize the need for governance and formulate the appropriate boards while considering various policies, principles, and compliance.
Develop a unique architecture development framework based on best-practice approaches with an understanding of the various architectural views to ensure the creation of a successful process.
Build a communication plan and roadmap to efficiently navigate through enterprise change and involve the necessary stakeholders.
Become a Transformational CIO
Your Challenge
Business transformations are happening, but CIOs are often involved only when it comes time to implement change. This makes it difficult for the CIO to be perceived as an organizational leader.
CIOs find it difficult to juggle operational activities, strategic initiatives, and involvement in business transformation.
CIOs don’t always have the IT organization structured and mobilized in a manner that facilitates the identification of transformation opportunities, and the planning for and the implementation of organization-wide change.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Don’t take an ad hoc approach to transformation.
You’re not in it alone.
Your legacy matters
Impact and Result
Elevate your stature as a business leader.
Empower the IT organization to act with a business mind first, and technology second.
Create a high-powered IT organization that is focused on driving lasting change, improving client experiences, and encouraging collaboration across the entire enterprise.
Generate opportunities for organizational growth, as manifested through revenue growth, profit growth, new market entry, new product development, etc.
Craft an End-to-End Data Center Consolidation Strategy to Maximize Benefits
Info-Tech Research Group provides IT research and advice to help organizations address their full spectrum of IT concerns. The document discusses Info-Tech's services for data center consolidation, including actionable insights and templates to help plan and execute consolidation projects. It emphasizes that 12-18 months of planning is key to consolidation success in order to properly inventory equipment, address requirements, and mitigate risks and unexpected costs.
Build and Information Security Strategy
Your Challenge
Organizations are struggling to keep up with today’s evolving threat landscape.
From technology sophistication and business adoption to the proliferation of hacking techniques and the expansion of hacking motivations, organizations are facing major security risks.
Every organization needs some kind of information security program to protect their systems and assets.
Organizations today face pressure from regulatory or legal obligations, customer requirement, and now, senior management expectations.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Performing an accurate assessment of your current security operations and maturity levels can be extremely hard when you don’t know what to assess or how to assess it.
Alignment can be a difficult area for security to get right when it’s trying to balance both regular IT and the business.
Communication is needed between the business leaders, IT leaders, and the security team for an effective security strategy to be in place.
Impact and Result
Info-Tech has analyzed and integrated regulatory and industry best practice frameworks, combining COBIT 5, PCI DSS, ISO 27000, NIST SP800-53, and SANS to ensure an exhaustive approach to security.
Through this process, a comprehensive current state assessment, gap analysis, and initiative generation ensures that nothing is left off the table.
This project will elevate the perception of the security team from being a hindrance to the organization to an enabler.
Build an Application Integration Strategy
Your Challenge
Even though organizations are now planning for Application Integration (AI) in their projects, very few have developed a holistic approach to their integration problems resulting in each project deploying different tactical solutions.
Point-to-point and ad hoc integration solutions won’t cut it anymore: the cloud, big data, mobile, social, and new regulations require more sophisticated integration tooling.
Loosely defined AI strategies result in point solutions, overlaps in technology capabilities, and increased maintenance costs; the correlation between business drivers and technical solutions is lost.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Involving the business in strategy development will keep them engaged and align business drivers with technical initiatives.
An architectural approach to AI strategy is critical to making appropriate technology decisions and promoting consistency across AI solutions through the use of common patterns.
Get control of your AI environment with an appropriate architecture, including policies and procedures, before end users start adding bring-your-own-integration (BYOI) capabilities to the office.
Develop a Project Portfolio Management Strategy
Your Challenge:
As Portfolio Manager, you’re responsible for communicating portfolio results and future capacity to your steering committee.
Business and IT leaders need more accurate information on project status and resource availability to decide when to start and stop projects.
You need to better understand the needs of the PMO and assess the costs and benefits associated with different tools and approaches to PPM.
Our Advice - Critical Insight:
PPM is a practice, not a tool. Before succeeding with a commercial tool, you need to establish discipline and trust around reporting processes, which can be done using spreadsheets and other simple tools.
Portfolio management is separate from project management. Think of it as the accounting department for time. Project managers report into the portfolio and are held accountable to it, but it isn’t simply an extension of project management.
Our Advice - Impact and Result:
Decrease the wasted portfolio budget by reducing the number of cancelled projects and other sources of efficiency.
Establish the portfolio as the “one source of truth” for project reporting by increasing rigor around project status updating and reporting.
Align project intake with resource capacity to improve throughput, quality of estimates, and stakeholder satisfaction.
Implement an enterprise service bus revised
This document provides advice for implementing an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) by highlighting important considerations. It emphasizes that an ESB is a platform to deliver solutions and must be implemented as part of broader initiatives to be successful. It also stresses the importance of people, processes, technology, governance and change management for a functioning ESB.
Implement a Shared Services Model
Your Challenge:
Implementing a shared services model is a difficult process to undertake, and is comprised of many different components. Becoming a shared services provider is comparable to becoming a vendor and most IT groups don’t have the capabilities to easily make the transition.
Most companies look to achieve cost reductions through offering a shared services model. Adopting a shared services model doesn’t always result in these intended cost reductions. Simply combining the operations of two IT organizations doesn’t necessarily result in economies of scale and cost efficiencies. Before leaping forward with your shared services implementation, determine if the project will deliver value to your organization.
Our Advice - Critical Insight:
Implementing a shared services model needs to be viewed as more than simply extending a current service to other sites. The organization providing services essentially turns into a vendor. As a vendor, think of the IT service you’re offering as the “product.”
Remember that there are people, process, and technology capability pre-requisites to successfully becoming a shared services provider. These capabilities are not typical for the average IT shop, and need to be taken into consideration when you look to transition to a shared services model.
Our Advice - Impact and Result:
Before jumping into the implementation of your shared services project, assess your customer requirements and your current people, process, and technology capabilities to assess whether your organization is ready to implement a shared services model.
Understand the financial implications of moving to a shared services model prior to implementing. Make sure there is a strong case for implementation.
Assess and Optimize EA Capability
Your Challenge:
Situation
Enterprise Architecture increases the organization’s ability to provide consistent services, accessible information, scalable infrastructure, and flexible technology integration on demand. It helps bridge the gap between business and IT and creates a shared enterprise vision.
Complication
EA programs that are run without the required EA capability level are prone to failure.
EA capability optimization and EA operating model design skills are not common, as they are not everyday tasks.
Our Advice:
Critical Insight
Using this research while assessing and optimizing your EA capability will help you:
Architect the EA capability by applying four architectural perspectives: Contextual, Conceptual, Logical, and Physical. Develop an EA Operating Model starting at the contextual level, and proceeding through to the physical.
Develop a sponsored mandate for EA capability. Identify and engage EA capability stakeholders. Determine organizational scope, i.e. responsibility and authority of EA. Identify business drivers for optimizing an EA capability. Analyze organizational context. Secure executive support and authorization to execute.
Establish EA capability purpose and strategic direction. Write EA capability vision statement. Craft EA capability mission statement. Define EA capability goals and measures. Create EA principles. Assess current and determine target EA capability level.
Document EA management process. Define EA management practices. Define interactions between EA management and other processes. Define EA capability performance and value measurement approach.
Design EA organization and roles. Design EA organization structure. Define EA roles. Define required skills and proficiency levels for EA roles. Determine required EA staff capacity.
Standardize EA tools and work products. Establish an EA repository. Decide on EA tools to be used. Define EA artifacts and work products.
Develop an EA capability improvement plan. Consolidate and refine steps required to roll out the target EA operating model and improve EA capability. Draw an EA capability improvement roadmap.
Survive an Impending Audit
Your Challenge:
Impending audits intimidate CIOs and business executives – and for good reason.
A failed audit can result in punitive fines and injunctions that disrupt continuing operations until violations are resolved.
These highly visible failures are best prevented through auditor-enterprise collaboration and pragmatic audit management.
Our Advice:
Critical Insight
Shift the audit paradigm: auditors need to be enabled, not resisted.
Auditors provide a value-added service that you are paying for. Establishing an effective relationship and enabling the audit team can ensure you get value from the engagement. However, you must also be vigilant in mitigating the risk of damaging findings
.
Impact and Result
Effective audit management means acting with kindness to establish an effective relationship and taking vigilant, calculated steps to reduce the risk of adverse findings.
Clarify the audit scope and prepare documentation in advance.
Start off on a positive note and enable the auditor.
Manage audit logistics to minimize business disruption.
Dispute unwarranted findings.
Continuously improve your auditability.
Stay on Top of Today’s and Tomorrow’s Mobile App Trends
Mobile applications need to offer innovative solutions to remain competitive as basic capabilities are no longer sufficient. Businesses use mobile to provide improved services and the mobile landscape is constantly evolving, requiring a focus on security, performance, and APIs. Key trends include location-based services, near field communication, and mobile smart objects. Developers must strengthen competencies like security, performance optimization, and API development to ensure apps can scale with trends. While native device access remains important, mobile apps also increasingly connect to backend services and data sources.
Fast track critical leadership skills
Your Challenge:
Leadership training can be unsuccessful and expensive. More than 14 billion dollars was spent on corporate leadership development in the US in 2013, yet less than 15% of these programs were effective.
The longer you wait to improve leadership skills, the longer it will take to improve your managers' reputations with their teams – and improve performance, retention, and engagement.
Our Advice:
Critical Insight
Get results from your leadership training by holding your teams accountable through team-based development and support.
Focus on quick-wins or “low-hanging fruit” to see leadership skill improvements fast, and make teams more effective and engaged today.
Apply training immediately and iterate as you go. By doing so, participants are significantly more likely to use techniques and get value from the training.
Impact and Result
Use Info-Tech’s collaborative team-based approach to leadership development. Our proven methodology and process focus on easy-to-implement tactics that will achieve results for your leaders within two months. This blueprint focuses on improving skills in six critical areas:
Leadership brand
Communication
Inspiring staff
Meeting effectiveness
Conflict resolution
Strategic time management
Enterprise mobility management
Your Challenge:
- With the complexity of mobility increasing in most organizations, enterprise mobility management (EMM) is becoming necessary to manage devices, as well as all aspects of mobility.
- While EMM might seem simple from the outside, it has many moving parts. It covers devices, applications, data, security, policies, financial management, and help desk management.
- Without a detailed implementation plan to mitigate issues such as missing components, an unprepared IT department and help desk, and low end-user adoption, IT will find it difficult to ensure a successful launch.
Our Advice:
Critical Insight
- Mobility within organizations continues to grow more complex, and requirements for managing mobility now extend far beyond the device itself.
- As BYOD continues to grow and new products are released into the market, EMM will become a necessary tool for long-term sustainability and effective use of mobility.
- Without a proper implementation plan in place, organizations will find it difficult to achieve a suitable, unified solution for short and long-term sustainability of mobile management.
Impact and Result
- Prepare the organization for mobility by developing an implementation plan that covers EMM from start to finish, including selecting a vendor, managing help desk changes, engaging users, and developing an actionable timeline.
- Create a tailored solution for the unique needs of your organization.
Create a right sized disaster recovery plan
Your Challenge:
Traditional DRP templates are onerous and result in a lengthy, dense plan that might satisfy auditors but is not effective in a crisis.
Similarly, the myth that a DRP is only for major disasters and should be risk-based leaves organizations vulnerable to more common incidents.
The increased use of cloud vendors and co-lo/MSPs means you may be dependent on vendors to meet your recovery timeline objectives.
Our Advice:
Critical Insight
DR is about service continuity — that means accounting for minor and major events.
Remember Murphy’s Law. Failure happens, so focus on improving overall resiliency and recovery, rather than basing DR on risk probability analysis.
Cost-effective DR and service continuity starts with identifying what is truly mission critical so you can focus resources accordingly. Not all systems require fast-failover capability.
Impact and Result
Create an effective DRP by following a structured process to discover current capabilities and define business requirements for continuity, not by completing a one-size-fits-all traditional DRP template. This includes:
Defining appropriate objectives for maximum downtime and data loss based on business impact.
Creating a DR project roadmap to close the gaps between your current DR capabilities and recovery objectives.
Documenting an incident response plan based on a tabletop planning walkthrough that captures all the steps from event detection to data center recovery.
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Build a Business-Driven IT Risk Management Program
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During the hour, we’ll take you through:
Guest Speaker Segment with Hannah Barrington: Dive into the world of dynamic real estate marketing with Hannah, the Marketing Manager at Workspace Group. Hear firsthand how their team generates engaging descriptions for thousands of office units by integrating diverse data sources—from PDF floorplans to web pages—using FME transformers, like OpenAIVisionConnector and AnthropicVisionConnector. This use case will show you how GenAI can streamline content creation for marketing across the board.
Ollama Use Case: Learn how Scenario Specialist Dmitri Bagh has utilized Ollama within FME to input data, create custom models, and enhance security protocols. This segment will include demos to illustrate the full capabilities of FME in AI-driven processes.
Custom AI Models: Discover how to leverage FME to build personalized AI models using your data. Whether it’s populating a model with local data for added security or integrating public AI tools, find out how FME facilitates a versatile and secure approach to AI.
We’ll wrap up with a live Q&A session where you can engage with our experts on your specific use cases, and learn more about optimizing your data workflows with AI.
This webinar is ideal for professionals seeking to harness the power of AI within their data management systems while ensuring high levels of customization and security. Whether you're a novice or an expert, gain actionable insights and strategies to elevate your data processes. Join us to see how FME and AI can revolutionize how you work with data!
AI 101: An Introduction to the Basics and Impact of Artificial Intelligence
Imagine a world where machines not only perform tasks but also learn, adapt, and make decisions. This is the promise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), a technology that's not just enhancing our lives but revolutionizing entire industries.
Essentials of Automations: The Art of Triggers and Actions in FME
In this second installment of our Essentials of Automations webinar series, we’ll explore the landscape of triggers and actions, guiding you through the nuances of authoring and adapting workspaces for seamless automations. Gain an understanding of the full spectrum of triggers and actions available in FME, empowering you to enhance your workspaces for efficient automation.
We’ll kick things off by showcasing the most commonly used event-based triggers, introducing you to various automation workflows like manual triggers, schedules, directory watchers, and more. Plus, see how these elements play out in real scenarios.
Whether you’re tweaking your current setup or building from the ground up, this session will arm you with the tools and insights needed to transform your FME usage into a powerhouse of productivity. Join us to discover effective strategies that simplify complex processes, enhancing your productivity and transforming your data management practices with FME. Let’s turn complexity into clarity and make your workspaces work wonders!
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 5
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 5. In this session, we will cover CI/CD with devops.
Topics covered:
CI/CD with in UiPath
End-to-end overview of CI/CD pipeline with Azure devops
Speaker:
Lyndsey Byblow, Test Suite Sales Engineer @ UiPath, Inc.
Microsoft - Power Platform_G.Aspiotis.pdf
Revolutionizing Application Development
with AI-powered low-code, presentation by George Aspiotis, Sr. Partner Development Manager, Microsoft
Climate Impact of Software Testing at Nordic Testing Days
My slides at Nordic Testing Days 6.6.2024
Climate impact / sustainability of software testing discussed on the talk. ICT and testing must carry their part of global responsibility to help with the climat warming. We can minimize the carbon footprint but we can also have a carbon handprint, a positive impact on the climate. Quality characteristics can be added with sustainability, and then measured continuously. Test environments can be used less, and in smaller scale and on demand. Test techniques can be used in optimizing or minimizing number of tests. Test automation can be used to speed up testing.
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One such alternative that has garnered significant attention and acclaim is Nitrux Linux 3.5.0, a sleek, powerful, and user-friendly Linux distribution that promises to redefine the way we interact with our devices. With its focus on performance, security, and customization, Nitrux Linux presents a compelling case for those seeking to break free from the constraints of proprietary software and embrace the freedom and flexibility of open-source computing.
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