This document discusses the importance of having a robust technical support strategy to mitigate the risks and costs of downtime. It begins by outlining how downtime can negatively impact organizations through a "ripple effect" as business processes have become increasingly dependent on integrated IT systems. It then presents IBM's framework for a comprehensive technical support strategy covering people, processes, and technology. The document advocates conducting an assessment of an organization's current support maturity level and developing a roadmap to prioritize improvements. Finally, it argues that a managed support solution through a third party can help optimize support more cost-effectively across an organization's entire IT environment.
Over the past five years, companies of all sizes have been under increased pressure to improve IT efficiency and effectiveness.
IDC customer-based studies show that each year, the average midsize company experiences 15–18 business hours of network, system, or application downtime. Causes of downtime vary, but aging systems can have components or software that fail, while network connections and power grids can fail at any time because of external causes (e.g., weather, construction work, or natural disaster). Outages occurring during business hours result in revenue loss, as orders are dropped, customers move on, and employees cannot access critical applications. IDC research found that revenue losses per hour averaged $75,000. However, the adoption of best practices has allowed midsize companies to reduce downtime significantly in recent years. Solutions that improve system management, protect data assets from loss and unauthorized access, strengthen network security, and ensure availability directly reduce these losses at customer sites.
All organizations need a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan, but many are unsure what is appropriate or how to scope the organization’s needs. Operating with an insufficient DR plan leaves organizations vulnerable to negative business impacts in the event of a disaster. Organizations can save time and money by properly scoping their DR plan.
The process of examining your DR plan can be broken down into a series of steps:
* Determine the current DR capability which IT can provide
* Know what DR capabilities the business wants
* Align the business’ and IT’s DR priorities
Use this Storyboard to begin the process of building your organization’s ultimate DR plan.
Consumer technology is invading the enterprise and IT must embrace it in order to encourage employee productivity and satisfaction. Info-Tech recommends that organizations allow personal mobile devices on their corporate networks. This research addresses the following:
•Understand differences in security and management between the three major platforms – BlackBerry, Apple iOS, and Google Android.
•Evaluate the organization's position on the mobile device security scale and determine if third-party infrastructure is necessary.
•Development and enforcement of a personal mobile acceptable use policy to encourage end-user compliance and foster success.
Embrace consumer technology in the enterprise, and focus on end-user compliance to leverage productivity and maximize the potential for success.
Selection of a standard collaboration platform and toolset used to be easy: Microsoft or IBM Lotus. Now there are many competitors in this market, fueled by the rise of Web 2.0 collaboration paradigms, requiring organizations to know what the problem is they are trying to solve.
This storyboard will help you:
•Understand and identify collaboration opportunities that exist within your organization.
•Identify leading vendors and compare capabilities.
•Select the right solution to implement.
Organizations are embracing the need to support teams with enterprise collaboration solutions.
Over the past five years, companies of all sizes have been under increased pressure to improve IT efficiency and effectiveness.
IDC customer-based studies show that each year, the average midsize company experiences 15–18 business hours of network, system, or application downtime. Causes of downtime vary, but aging systems can have components or software that fail, while network connections and power grids can fail at any time because of external causes (e.g., weather, construction work, or natural disaster). Outages occurring during business hours result in revenue loss, as orders are dropped, customers move on, and employees cannot access critical applications. IDC research found that revenue losses per hour averaged $75,000. However, the adoption of best practices has allowed midsize companies to reduce downtime significantly in recent years. Solutions that improve system management, protect data assets from loss and unauthorized access, strengthen network security, and ensure availability directly reduce these losses at customer sites.
All organizations need a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan, but many are unsure what is appropriate or how to scope the organization’s needs. Operating with an insufficient DR plan leaves organizations vulnerable to negative business impacts in the event of a disaster. Organizations can save time and money by properly scoping their DR plan.
The process of examining your DR plan can be broken down into a series of steps:
* Determine the current DR capability which IT can provide
* Know what DR capabilities the business wants
* Align the business’ and IT’s DR priorities
Use this Storyboard to begin the process of building your organization’s ultimate DR plan.
Consumer technology is invading the enterprise and IT must embrace it in order to encourage employee productivity and satisfaction. Info-Tech recommends that organizations allow personal mobile devices on their corporate networks. This research addresses the following:
•Understand differences in security and management between the three major platforms – BlackBerry, Apple iOS, and Google Android.
•Evaluate the organization's position on the mobile device security scale and determine if third-party infrastructure is necessary.
•Development and enforcement of a personal mobile acceptable use policy to encourage end-user compliance and foster success.
Embrace consumer technology in the enterprise, and focus on end-user compliance to leverage productivity and maximize the potential for success.
Selection of a standard collaboration platform and toolset used to be easy: Microsoft or IBM Lotus. Now there are many competitors in this market, fueled by the rise of Web 2.0 collaboration paradigms, requiring organizations to know what the problem is they are trying to solve.
This storyboard will help you:
•Understand and identify collaboration opportunities that exist within your organization.
•Identify leading vendors and compare capabilities.
•Select the right solution to implement.
Organizations are embracing the need to support teams with enterprise collaboration solutions.
A strong communication capability between the business and IT ensures the alignment of business requirements with delivered IT functionality and value. Use this storyboard to understand common barriers to effective requirements management, tactical solutions to overcome these barriers, and how to achieve a high level of project success.
This storyboard will help you:
•Understand the common barriers to effective requirements management
•Learn how organizations have solved these challenges
•Implement your own tactical solutions to enable effective communication of business requirements for IT projects in your organization
•Achieve a high level of project success
Whether an organization develops its own applications or implements packaged solutions, the success of the project depends on the clear communication of business requirements in terms IT can understand and deliver.
Virtualization infrastructure in financial services rully feranataRully Feranata
Over many years, the IT function in financial institutions has evolved from a mere transactional tool into
a pervasive, integral element of virtually every aspect of doing business. This transformation has
constituted a fundamental, structural change in the financial services arena and has put IT performance
at the top of the CEO’s agenda at most banks and insurance companies.
Don't let the common issues catch you out. M&A IT projects are difficult however the issues tend to be common ones. In this whitepaper we help guide you through them so come Day One you have a smile on your face and not a frown.
A Business-Driven Approach to Mobile Enterprise SecurityJuniper Networks
For IT professionals, the mobile enterprise is the next step in a progression that started years ago with the introduction of laptop PCs, enterprise wireless access points (APs), and mobile storage devices. There are important distinctions however. The growing use of consumer technologies and cloud-based services makes mobile enterprise policy management and enforcement more granular and complex— few organizations are simply willing to ban the use of iPads or block all employees from Facebook. As soon as these technologies are accepted, decisions on who can use which technology at what time and for what purpose become more difficult to create and enforce.
Ultimately, large organizations need to think of the mobile enterprise as a new model and act accordingly. This is already happening in some industries. For example, hospitals use wireless technology and RFID tags to locate mobile equipment and roaming physicians while private health care practices are eschewing in-house servers and applications for cloud-based alternatives. At a high-level, mobile enterprise guidelines are fairly simple: create and enforce policies to enable productive behavior and minimize risk. At the same time, constantly monitor activities to measure success. Finally, use technology to automate fixes when possible.
While some vendors will take time to adjust to mobile enterprise requirements, Juniper Networks has already developed a comprehensive architecture that enables automated granular policy creation and enforcement spanning from mobile wired/wireless endpoints to the network core. As such, large organizations would be well served to evaluate Juniper Networks as they develop mobile enterprise strategies.
Business Capital Planning PowerPoint Presentation SlidesSlideTeam
Download our ready to use business capital planning PowerPoint presentation slides to represent the planning process utilized to determine the business long term investments. Our research analysts have researched the content of this presentation, and our group of PowerPoint designers have designed this presentation. This capital improvement plan PPT presentation covers a slide on numerous relevant subjects such as introduction, functional areas overview, ERP system architecture, task categories of ERP systems, ERP project progress by stage, overview of implementation process, planning and selection phase, implementation phase, enterprise resource planning funnel, tuning of concept, situational analysis-basic target concept, software selection process, and software selection criteria. It also includes a template on software selection criteria, realization and implement, v model for implementation of ERP system, tips for selecting ERP system, ERP criteria list-technical requirement, and ERP implementation-selection phase. We aim to provide the presentation slides that help customers win the heart of the audience and achieve end goals. Using this presentation PPT, you will be able to explain the concept of investment appraisal. Finetine the frequency with our Business Capital Planning PowerPoint Presentation Slides. Your views will be recieved loud and clear.
Your Challenge
Infrastructure managers and change managers need to re-evaluate their change management process due to slow change turnaround time, too many unauthorized changes, too many incidents and outages because of poorly managed changes, or difficulty evaluating and prioritizing changes.
IT system owners often resist change management because they see it as slow and bureaucratic.
Infrastructure changes are often seen as “different” from application changes, and two (or more) processes may exist.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
ITIL provides a usable framework for change management, but full process rigor is not appropriate for every change request.
You need to design a process that is flexible enough to meet the demand for change, and strict enough to protect the live environment from change-related incidents.
A mature change management process will minimize review and approval activity. Counterintuitively, with experience in implementing changes, risk levels decline to a point where most changes are “preapproved.”
Impact and Result
Create a unified change management process that reduces risk and takes a balanced approach toward deploying changes, while also maintaining throughput of innovation and enhancements.
Categorize changes based on an industry-standard risk model with objective measures of impact and likelihood.
Establish and empower a change manager and change advisory board with the authority to manage, approve, and prioritize changes.
Establish easy-to-follow intake, assessment, and approval processes, and ensure that there is visibility into changes across the organization.
Framework for Cloud Computing Adoption: A Roadmap for Smes to Cloud Migrationijccsa
Small and Medium size Enterprises (SME) are considered as a backbone of many developing and
developed economies of the world; they are the driving force to any major economy across the globe.
Through Cloud Computing firms outsource their entire information technology (IT) process while
concentrating more on their core business. It allows businesses to cut down heavy cost incurred over IT
infrastructure without losing focus on customer needs. However, Cloud industry to an extent has struggled
to grow among SMEs due to the reluctance and concerns expressed by them. Throughout the course of this
study several interviews were conducted and the literature was reviewed to understand how cloud
providers offer services and what challenges SMEs are facing. The study identified issues like cloud
knowledge, interoperability, security and contractual concerns to be hindering SMEs adoption of cloud
services. From the interviews common practices followed by cloud vendors and what concerns SMEs have
were identified as a basis for a cloud framework which will bridge gaps between cloud vendors and SMEs.
A stepwise framework for cloud adoption is formulated which identifies and provides recommendation to
four most predominant challenges which are hurting cloud industry and taking SMEs away from cloud
computing, as well as guide SMEs aiding in successful cloud adoption. Moreover, this framework
streamlines the cloud adoption process for SMEs by removing ambiguity in regards to fundamentals
associated with their organisation and cloud adoption process
In today’s globalized, competitive marketplace, being able to leverage technology to deliver faster turnaround times, meet lower pricing goals and provide customizable options can mean the difference between sustainability and irrelevancy. In this ebook, we’ll explore some of the leading solutions transforming the manufacturing industry:
- Automation for cost savings
- 3D printing for improved productivity
- Smart data for quality assurance
- Connectivity for safety and communication
- Security solutions to protect it all
Learn more: http://ms.spr.ly/6006Twegg
Transformation of legacy landscape in the insurance worldNIIT Technologies
Evolving business models decrease the distance between customers and providers. The need for direct and easy communication and the transparency between the two increases, and products silos are curtailed. The insurance industry is struggling with a multitude of applications that require extensive maintenance and have mediocre capabilities. This white paper aims at helping organizations understand the issues involved in effective management of the existing legacy systems.
A look at IT decision making, budgeting, priorities and technology adoption among UK and Germany-based SMEs based on 500 interviews (250 in the UK and 250 in Germany) with IT decision makers from private sector SME organisations.
A strong communication capability between the business and IT ensures the alignment of business requirements with delivered IT functionality and value. Use this storyboard to understand common barriers to effective requirements management, tactical solutions to overcome these barriers, and how to achieve a high level of project success.
This storyboard will help you:
•Understand the common barriers to effective requirements management
•Learn how organizations have solved these challenges
•Implement your own tactical solutions to enable effective communication of business requirements for IT projects in your organization
•Achieve a high level of project success
Whether an organization develops its own applications or implements packaged solutions, the success of the project depends on the clear communication of business requirements in terms IT can understand and deliver.
Virtualization infrastructure in financial services rully feranataRully Feranata
Over many years, the IT function in financial institutions has evolved from a mere transactional tool into
a pervasive, integral element of virtually every aspect of doing business. This transformation has
constituted a fundamental, structural change in the financial services arena and has put IT performance
at the top of the CEO’s agenda at most banks and insurance companies.
Don't let the common issues catch you out. M&A IT projects are difficult however the issues tend to be common ones. In this whitepaper we help guide you through them so come Day One you have a smile on your face and not a frown.
A Business-Driven Approach to Mobile Enterprise SecurityJuniper Networks
For IT professionals, the mobile enterprise is the next step in a progression that started years ago with the introduction of laptop PCs, enterprise wireless access points (APs), and mobile storage devices. There are important distinctions however. The growing use of consumer technologies and cloud-based services makes mobile enterprise policy management and enforcement more granular and complex— few organizations are simply willing to ban the use of iPads or block all employees from Facebook. As soon as these technologies are accepted, decisions on who can use which technology at what time and for what purpose become more difficult to create and enforce.
Ultimately, large organizations need to think of the mobile enterprise as a new model and act accordingly. This is already happening in some industries. For example, hospitals use wireless technology and RFID tags to locate mobile equipment and roaming physicians while private health care practices are eschewing in-house servers and applications for cloud-based alternatives. At a high-level, mobile enterprise guidelines are fairly simple: create and enforce policies to enable productive behavior and minimize risk. At the same time, constantly monitor activities to measure success. Finally, use technology to automate fixes when possible.
While some vendors will take time to adjust to mobile enterprise requirements, Juniper Networks has already developed a comprehensive architecture that enables automated granular policy creation and enforcement spanning from mobile wired/wireless endpoints to the network core. As such, large organizations would be well served to evaluate Juniper Networks as they develop mobile enterprise strategies.
Business Capital Planning PowerPoint Presentation SlidesSlideTeam
Download our ready to use business capital planning PowerPoint presentation slides to represent the planning process utilized to determine the business long term investments. Our research analysts have researched the content of this presentation, and our group of PowerPoint designers have designed this presentation. This capital improvement plan PPT presentation covers a slide on numerous relevant subjects such as introduction, functional areas overview, ERP system architecture, task categories of ERP systems, ERP project progress by stage, overview of implementation process, planning and selection phase, implementation phase, enterprise resource planning funnel, tuning of concept, situational analysis-basic target concept, software selection process, and software selection criteria. It also includes a template on software selection criteria, realization and implement, v model for implementation of ERP system, tips for selecting ERP system, ERP criteria list-technical requirement, and ERP implementation-selection phase. We aim to provide the presentation slides that help customers win the heart of the audience and achieve end goals. Using this presentation PPT, you will be able to explain the concept of investment appraisal. Finetine the frequency with our Business Capital Planning PowerPoint Presentation Slides. Your views will be recieved loud and clear.
Your Challenge
Infrastructure managers and change managers need to re-evaluate their change management process due to slow change turnaround time, too many unauthorized changes, too many incidents and outages because of poorly managed changes, or difficulty evaluating and prioritizing changes.
IT system owners often resist change management because they see it as slow and bureaucratic.
Infrastructure changes are often seen as “different” from application changes, and two (or more) processes may exist.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
ITIL provides a usable framework for change management, but full process rigor is not appropriate for every change request.
You need to design a process that is flexible enough to meet the demand for change, and strict enough to protect the live environment from change-related incidents.
A mature change management process will minimize review and approval activity. Counterintuitively, with experience in implementing changes, risk levels decline to a point where most changes are “preapproved.”
Impact and Result
Create a unified change management process that reduces risk and takes a balanced approach toward deploying changes, while also maintaining throughput of innovation and enhancements.
Categorize changes based on an industry-standard risk model with objective measures of impact and likelihood.
Establish and empower a change manager and change advisory board with the authority to manage, approve, and prioritize changes.
Establish easy-to-follow intake, assessment, and approval processes, and ensure that there is visibility into changes across the organization.
Framework for Cloud Computing Adoption: A Roadmap for Smes to Cloud Migrationijccsa
Small and Medium size Enterprises (SME) are considered as a backbone of many developing and
developed economies of the world; they are the driving force to any major economy across the globe.
Through Cloud Computing firms outsource their entire information technology (IT) process while
concentrating more on their core business. It allows businesses to cut down heavy cost incurred over IT
infrastructure without losing focus on customer needs. However, Cloud industry to an extent has struggled
to grow among SMEs due to the reluctance and concerns expressed by them. Throughout the course of this
study several interviews were conducted and the literature was reviewed to understand how cloud
providers offer services and what challenges SMEs are facing. The study identified issues like cloud
knowledge, interoperability, security and contractual concerns to be hindering SMEs adoption of cloud
services. From the interviews common practices followed by cloud vendors and what concerns SMEs have
were identified as a basis for a cloud framework which will bridge gaps between cloud vendors and SMEs.
A stepwise framework for cloud adoption is formulated which identifies and provides recommendation to
four most predominant challenges which are hurting cloud industry and taking SMEs away from cloud
computing, as well as guide SMEs aiding in successful cloud adoption. Moreover, this framework
streamlines the cloud adoption process for SMEs by removing ambiguity in regards to fundamentals
associated with their organisation and cloud adoption process
In today’s globalized, competitive marketplace, being able to leverage technology to deliver faster turnaround times, meet lower pricing goals and provide customizable options can mean the difference between sustainability and irrelevancy. In this ebook, we’ll explore some of the leading solutions transforming the manufacturing industry:
- Automation for cost savings
- 3D printing for improved productivity
- Smart data for quality assurance
- Connectivity for safety and communication
- Security solutions to protect it all
Learn more: http://ms.spr.ly/6006Twegg
Transformation of legacy landscape in the insurance worldNIIT Technologies
Evolving business models decrease the distance between customers and providers. The need for direct and easy communication and the transparency between the two increases, and products silos are curtailed. The insurance industry is struggling with a multitude of applications that require extensive maintenance and have mediocre capabilities. This white paper aims at helping organizations understand the issues involved in effective management of the existing legacy systems.
A look at IT decision making, budgeting, priorities and technology adoption among UK and Germany-based SMEs based on 500 interviews (250 in the UK and 250 in Germany) with IT decision makers from private sector SME organisations.
Develop a long-term IT plan while implementing customized IT solutions. Learn about the help desk evolution, top future IT issues, and how to move from a steady approach to stable applications.
Bending the IT Op-Ex Cost Curve Through IT SimplificationCognizant
CIOs can cut back operations expenditures (Op-Ex) and redirect the funds to strategic digital transformation by reducing IT complexity and rooting out inefficiencies while engaged in IT simplification.
NFRASTRUCTURE MODERNIZATION REVIEW
Analyze the issues
Hardware
Over-running volume of data is a problem that should be addressed by data management and storage management. Data is being constantly collected but poorly analyzed which leads to excessive amounts of data occupying storage and delay in operations which inevitably affect production, sales and profits. If this remains unresolved, current data may have to be moved to external storage and recovered if needed. There is also the risk of data not being encoded into computers and thus will remain in manual state. This can be a case of redundant or extraneous data that is not yet cleaned and normalized by operations managers with the guidance of IT. This situation is known as data overload where companies actually use only a fraction of the data they capture and store. Many companies simply hoard data to make sure that they are readily available when they are needed. This negatively impacts the Corporation when assessing data relevance, accuracies and timeliness (Marr, 2016).
Software
The Largo Corporation (LC) seems to running on an enterprise resource planning system that is probably as long as 20 years old. Initially, LC has had success with the old system because they were able to establish themselves in various industries such as healthcare, media, government, etc. But due to various concerns, the Corporation is currently running on an outdated system because it is unable to provide services that keeps the Corporation a float. The LC is losing revenue and customers. Complete data without analysis is invaluable because, no information and insights can be produced that will support decisions. Customer data should lead to the best marketing and sales campaigns. The Corporation needs to recognize its weaknesses and implement changes to their software by incorporating funding for a new system that is reliable, secure, and has the ability to run on integrated systems; all of which will streamline data organization and analysis for the enterprise. (Rouse, n.d).
Network/Telecommunications
The network that was built in the 1980’s has become slow and unreliable affecting business operations. The problems caused by the old network are; lack of integration and communication between departments affecting the work flow, supply vs. demand, and inability to analyze data to carry out these operations. The Corporation should have taken into consideration the growth of the company by expanding and upgrading their networks along with their services. They should also take into consideration the number of departments, the number of users and their skill level, storage and bandwidth, and budget (Rasmussen, 2011). The current network does not allow employees to connect on their mobile devices which restricts flexibility and places limitations on productivity and portability.
Management
The responses of both IT and the business group are both juxtaposed against e ...
The Four Essential Pillars of Digital TransformationIan Thomas
Based on years of practical experience this whitepaper distils four key pillars we have observed time and again in successful digital initiatives, providing a structured foundation for an orderly, end-to-end digital transformation of the enterprise.
5 Reasons Why IT Managed Services in Washington, DC, Are the Best.pdfBerryHughes
With managed IT assistance, many companies could survive. There are several traps for big to small organizations to avoid that IT may fix, like dedicating too many resources to time-consuming jobs and not providing adequate support services as a firm expands.
https://topnotchcomputers.com
Managing It Innovation: Recessionary and Post-Recessionary Service and Staffi...IJMIT JOURNAL
Information Technology (IT) service and staffing models were increasingly reduced in the wake of
recession, which often limits focus for long-term innovation, as the remaining services and staff are focused
on producing short-term requirements. Despite these cutbacks, organizations must continue to innovate and
provide contributions to the set of stakeholders. In addition as the post-recessionary timeframe begins,
organizations that continued to innovate throughout the recession, must retain human capital and take
advantage of their prior investments. Organizations that focus on innovation during recessionary
timeframes, are more likely to emerge in a superior competitive position during post-recessionary
timeframes. This paper explores identified industry best practices for IT service and staffing models that
can be utilized to ensure adequate resources are dedicated to achieving innovation, and management
implications for post-recessionary methods. In addition, a review of the capacities and capabilities which
fall under the new IT service and staffing models are developed in the form of an innovation matrix. This
approach reduces IT requirements to focus on key strategic service areas, with considerations for reduced
staffing needs during periods of economic downturn, and staffing retention during the following economic
upturn.
Resilience Engineering as an IT Cultural DisciplineCognizant
To enable always-on and always-available digital business, IT organizations must become more operationally resilient to enhance system and application stability, which fuels service reliability and boosts reputational integrity.
Read this Executive Brief to understand why your team should make the case to modernize your communications and collaboration infrastructure.
Understand why it's time to move forward with modernizing your communications infrastructure.
Discover the productivity and efficiency gains you can achieve.
Redefine how you think about communications.
Learn how to build a strategy that addresses both unified communications and collaboration.
Understand Info-Tech's methodology and approach to modernizing communications and collaboration infrastructure.
Forrester: How Organizations Are Improving Business Resiliency with Continuou...EMC
This analyst report describes reasons why adoption of continuous availability is rapidly increasing, citing research on benefits they believe they can realize in their IT environment.
Forrester: How Organizations Are Improving Business Resiliency with Continuou...
MTW03011USEN.PDF
1. IBM Global Technology Services
Thought Leadership White Paper
October 2014
Time is money and
downtime is expensive
Why it pays to have a robust technical support strategy
2. 2 Time is money and downtime is expensive
Contents
2 Executive summary
3 I. Introduction: The “ripple” effect of downtime
4 II. Step 1: Take a holistic view of IT technical support
strategy
5 III. Step 2: Conduct a thorough assessment of your
current IT support structure
6 IV. Step 3: Develop a roadmap to define and prioritize
transformative initiatives
7 V. The new math: Add up the benefits of a comprehen-
sive managed solution
9 VI. Conclusion
9 VII. Why IBM?
Executive summary
The old adage that “time is money” is the foundation of IT in
the enterprise. A primary goal of IT is to increase the productiv-
ity and capabilities of line-of-business (LOB) end users, thereby
decreasing cost and increasing profit. Productivity is increased
by integrating IT into business processes, which has yielded
significant business benefits for enterprises. At the same time,
companies are also looking for ways to reduce IT costs.
As the forces of cloud computing, big data and analytics, mobile
computing and social have converged, the focus on enabling
integrated, optimized IT solutions has expanded even further.
Ironically, though, higher levels of IT integration and optimiza-
tion have resulted in new challenges and risks. With business
processes increasingly dependent on IT, the consequences of
downtime ripple throughout an organization, affecting user
productivity in departments across the organization, potentially
impacting revenue streams and perhaps even damaging your
reputation in the marketplace. For example, the increase in
expectations of mobile employees using “companion devices”
frequently means there are no “normal” work hours–applica-
tions, data and the infrastructure that support them must be
available 7x24. New capabilities are a double-edged sword: they
increase end-user productivity when functioning properly, but
magnify the business impact when there are problems in the
IT environment.
71 percent of CEOs surveyed cited technology
as the number-one factor they see impacting
their companies.1
At the same time, a highly converged, optimized IT environ-
ment is typically more complex and requires specialized skills
to maintain. Given the interconnected and interdependent
landscape of multivendor networks, servers and storage devices,
it becomes ever-more difficult and time consuming to even
identify—much less quickly resolve—causes of outages, the
costs of which have dramatically increased since 2010.2
According to a Ponemon Institute and
Emerson Network Power 2013 study on
downtime, the overall, average per-incident
cost of an outage in 2010 was US$544,498,
and has increased over 20 percent to
US$680,0003 in 2013.
How can IT organizations help achieve business goals and
reduce costs while mitigating risks and the negative impacts of
outages? Balancing these seemingly mutually exclusive priorities
can be a struggle. This white paper outlines the benefits of hav-
ing a carefully planned, holistic technical support strategy and
describes how IBM’s focus on both short- and long-term
solutions can help organizations achieve optimal support,
at the lowest-possible cost.
3. 3IBM Global Technology Services
I. Introduction: The “ripple” effect of
downtime
High levels of IT integration and optimization are now the
backbone of business success for organizations operating in
every industry. New initiatives are designed to increase align-
ment of IT with business strategy, drive down costs and provide
new business capabilities that support growth and competitive
market position. Many organizations are undertaking
projects that:
●●
Use cloud computing to optimize resources through
virtualization and provisioning technologies
●●
Use data—the new natural resource—and analytics
to streamline processes, better understand current customers
and discover new customers, and support the creation of new,
innovative services
●●
Exploit social media tools to enable cross-enterprise
collaboration and better customer service
●●
Incorporate mobile devices that enable “anytime, anywhere”
access to data and applications, supporting higher productivity
and user efficiency
A reactive break/fix approach to IT is
increasingly costly and underscores the
criticality of having a comprehensive,
robust technical support strategy in place.
Although new technologies are enabling innovative applications
of IT to create new business capabilities, they also increase the
dependence of business processes on ubiquitous, always-available
IT resources. This amplifies the negative impact from device
failures, creating the “ripple” effect of downtime. (See figure 1.)
Examples of the ripple effect of downtime are numerous.
Downtime that affects:
●●
Customer-facing websites can prevent customer orders
from being entered.
●●
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) can cause orders not
to be processed, shipments to be delayed and replacement
materials not to get ordered, which disrupts the entire
business flow.
●●
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems can
cause sellers to be unable to take advantage of opportunities
and close sales, which impacts revenue.
●●
Analytics solutions can delay information required for
strategic and tactical decisions, causing missed opportunities
and under-served customers.
●●
Social and collaboration capabilities can inhibit teamwork,
slow down projects, shut down communication with custom-
ers and cause your company to disappear from the social
landscape.
●●
Mobile solutions can prevent mobile workers from being
productive, such as an inability to scope or price proposals, or
result in cancelled customer orders.
●●
Cloud computing can cause degraded performance and
response time across the enterprise if an unexpected outage
exceeds the architected headroom.
Figure 1. The “ripple” effect of downtime in integrated and optimized IT
environments magnifies the negative impact of a device failure.
4. 4 Time is money and downtime is expensive
Figure 2. The Technical Support Strategy Framework from IBM.
People
Process
Technology
Centralized remote support
Onsite support
Center(s) of Excellence
Continuous education on new models,
features and capabilities
Reactive and proactive processes and
tools; diagnose and resolve issues
Collaboration
Continuous improvement
Incident management
Compliance management
Multiple vendors and platforms
Software
“Call home” technologies
Incident tracking
Problem analysis and diagnosis
Resolution repository
Metrics tracking and reporting
Metrics reporting and analysis
Change management
Support contract management
Proactive management
Parts management: logistics and
depot centers
Roles
Skills
Supported environment scope
Technical support tools
With business goals so highly dependent on IT, optimal perfor-
mance is dependent on every device—network, server and stor-
age. Even a single device failure can have an enterprise-wide
impact, because every minute of downtime (or even degraded
response time) is multiplied by the number of business users
whose productivity is decreased. And a multivendor environment
complicates and extends the time it takes to determine which
vendor is responsible for a given device, delaying problem
diagnosis and resolution.
A Pomenon Institute and Emerson Network 2013 study on
downtime showed that the business impact of outages has
increased significantly. While the frequency and duration of
outages has declined slightly, the cost per minute of downtime
has increased 41 percent since 2010, taking it from
US$337,020 per hour to US$474,480 per hour.2 Today’s highly
integrated and optimized IT environment makes a reactive,
break/fix approach to IT support increasingly costly. The results
of the study underscore the criticality of having a robust techni-
cal support strategy in place. But what, exactly, does that
mean—and what does it require?
II. Step 1: Take a holistic view of IT
technical support strategy
IBM has created an integrated support services capability frame-
work to enable a more comprehensive approach to IT support
in a converged environment. It encompasses three categories:
people, process and technology.
The “people” category includes the roles that people play in a
highly optimized technical support world, which may be central-
ized, or may include remote locations that require an onsite
presence. The “process” category encompasses how all activities
and tasks are performed in a cross-platform, multivendor envi-
ronment. The “technology” category includes the environment
being supported and the tools that are being used to support
that environment and prevent problems.
5. 5IBM Global Technology Services
A well-thought-out strategic approach to
reviewing, prioritizing and improving IT
support can help you transform from a reac-
tive mode to a foundation that’s based on
analysis, anticipation and prevention.
These three categories form a framework that serves as the basis
for an IT support strategy that can optimally meet business pri-
orities, nimbly respond to new opportunities and consistently
improve and innovate. It can take you from a reactive break/fix
response to an IT support foundation that’s based on analysis,
anticipation and prevention. And while it may seem like there’s
a daunting array of elements to consider and incorporate into
your strategy, it can be simpler than you think to begin your
transformative journey to a more prepared and proactive IT
support environment.
III. Step 2: Conduct a thorough assessment
of your current IT support structure
Using the three categories from IBM’s Technical Support
Strategy Framework—people, processes and technology—we
have developed a model designed to assess the maturity of tech-
nical support environments. (See Figure 2.) The more complex
the IT environment, the greater the need to reevaluate IT
support to mitigate the risks and costs of downtime through
a higher maturity level. Our model includes three stages:
●●
Ad hoc: lacks standardized tools and processes for opening,
tracking, diagnosing, resolving and reporting on incidents;
doesn’t have a reliable hardware and software inventory;
issues are dealt with in a manner that results in unpredictable
responses/resolutions, and an inability to respond quickly and
effectively to device failures which can cause subsequent
outages
●●
Reactive: provides a single point of contact for end users;
includes well-defined, repeatable processes including service
level agreements (SLAs) and escalation; provides a standard-
ized, dedicated toolset for tracking, resolving and reporting
on issues; enables accurate hardware/software inventory; takes
a multi-vendor approach when appropriate; helps manage
compliance with all applicable corporate and government
guidelines
●●
Proactive and preventative: is solution oriented rather than
box oriented; inventory is based on electronic discovery of
all components attached to the network; includes automation
and analytics; uses a project-based approach to firmware and
operating system updates; provides Centers of Excellence for
maturing and evolving best-practice processes and technolo-
gies, and results in a strong alignment with business needs
To help evaluate where you are in your IT maturity journey,
here are some important questions to ask:
●●
How many vendors are involved in supporting your environ-
ment? Was vendor selection a component of your overall
strategy and based on appropriate criteria?
●●
What impact does downtime have on your users and lines of
business, and when was the last time you updated these
calculations?
●●
What do you consider to be your mission-critical systems—
that is, what causes your business the most difficulty if it goes
down? Is your technical support strategy aligned with business
outcomes?
●●
What’s the risk for each application? What server, storage and
network devices are critical to provide to end users? Does that
risk rise during peak hours?
The more you have integrated IT into your
business processes, the greater the need to
reevaluate IT support to mitigate the risks
and costs of downtime through a higher
maturity level.
6. 6 Time is money and downtime is expensive
Lifecycle management is a key—but often neglected—
component of a technical support strategy. It can not only help
you optimize availability, but also support a higher return on
investment (ROI) and a reduced total cost of ownership (TCO).
Knowing when your products become eligible for third-party
savings, as well as identifying the most cost-effective time to
migrate, can save you thousands of dollars per year.
Also consider the possibility that IT availability can be impeded
by organizing support primarily around platforms, which can
become silos. Many of our customers tell us they struggle across
lines of business and platforms—network, mainframe, x86,
Microsoft, Linux, and so on—to coordinate both prevention
and reactive maintenance support. This is often a natural conse-
quence of IT specialization, but it can impede efficient, effective
problem resolution. This makes it critical to have a shared
strategy that speeds cross-platform support.
After you’ve evaluated your current IT support environment,
you’re ready for the next step: developing a detailed, thorough
plan that can take you from where you are to where you want to
be along your IT support maturity.
IV. Step 3: Develop a roadmap to define
and prioritize transformative initiatives
After you’ve assessed your current level of IT technical support
maturity, you may find that there are gaps, overlaps or opportu-
nities for improvement that will impact business outcomes. The
next step is to develop a roadmap that is based on your priorities,
the issues affecting availability and the levels of support that
you require. The focus should be on high ROI areas that can
increase IT staff and LOB productivity, enhance revenue
streams and relationships with customers, and reduce your
vulnerability to the risk and costs of downtime.
A detailed technical support services roadmap
can provide a clear path to improvements,
leading you to a more efficient, optimized IT
support model that supports better business
outcomes.
At the most basic, organizations with an “ad-hoc” level of matu-
rity have only device-oriented, basic support for their IT hard-
ware and software. At the “reactive” level, an organization is
solution oriented, has an accurate IT inventory with associated
support levels, a single point of accountability, rapid access to
deep skills for problem diagnosis and resolution, accelerated
response times, and efficient support contract management.
And at the proactive and preventative level, an organization has
enabled a cross-enterprise, business-outcome-oriented approach,
lifecycle management, integrated infrastructure availability man-
agement, systems monitoring and automated services.
As an example, here is a roadmap that IBM helped one of our
clients create. A workshop was held to review each area of the
Technical Support Strategy Framework, compare to best prac-
tices and identify areas for potential improvement. When the
“as is” was compared to the “desired” state, it resulted in a clear
path to improvements that led to a more efficient, optimized IT
support model. (See Figure 3.)
7. 7IBM Global Technology Services
Figure 3. An example roadmap: Assess current position, determine appropriate levels and establish priorities.
Current state
People
Process
Technology
Ad-hoc Reactive
Proactive
and preventative
Future state
Overall or by workload, platform, datacenter,
geography or other definition of scope
Overall
Optimized support model
Incident management
Inventory and lifecycle management
Microcode and OS currency
Support contract management
Metrics analysis
Support toolset
Operational maturity and
continuous improvement
V. The new math: Add up the benefits of a
comprehensive managed solution
In a converged multivendor IT environment, the merely chal-
lenging becomes deeply complex and a strain on internal staff,
taking significant time to respond to even basic support issues
required to keep users productive and meet service level and cost
objectives. Establishing and achieving consistent service levels
depends on:
●●
Having an accurate IT inventory with pre-defined service
levels
●●
Running a responsive, effective help desk
●●
Managing multiple service contracts from different vendors
●●
Determining the cause of problems—whether hardware,
software or both—and who to call
●●
Performing root-cause analysis and applying the findings to
your entire environment
●●
Managing IT growth and change
A “do-it-all-yourself” approach can be cost and time prohibitive,
since it requires that you:
●●
Retain internal resources that have the deep expertise required
to address the needs of every product deployed in your
environment
●●
Ensure the availability of specialized skills for extremely
complex combinations of technology
●●
Endure delays when IT staff must be diverted from mission-
critical functions in order to quickly respond to outages
●●
Maintain a repository of problems fixed previously to
accelerate future problem resolution
8. 8 Time is money and downtime is expensive
Figure 4. The enterprise-wide benefits of having a comprehensive technical support strategy.
streamline
productivity
availability
strategy
income
value
speed
competitive
advantage
revenue
increase
resilience
technology
server
velocity
metrics
mobile
social
analytics
efficiency
network
storage
reliability
orders
best practices
priorities
persistence
framework
satisfaction energy
money
revenue
tools
applications
business functions
cloud
solution
marketing
sales
human resources
distribution
payroll
finance
parts
global
management
change
platform
product
service
logistics
regional
national
quality
components
flexibility
capabilities
effectiveness
market
share
continuity
performance
reputation
client relationships
A managed support solution can help you
more effectively and cost efficiently link,
integrate and optimize all aspects of IT
support across your business environment.
Often, transferring the burden of IT support and management
to a third-party solution provider can deliver value-added
services and save you far more dollars than it costs. The right
service partner can provide a single point of contact that can
support multivendor products and peripherals for faster problem
resolution, a single contract with simplified invoicing and more
consistent service levels, and a solution that’s tailored to your
business objectives and availability requirements. (See Figure 4.)
This can help you:
●●
Reduce downtime and improve availability through proactive
reporting and analysis
●●
Reduce the cost of maintenance, service and support
●●
Keep IT staff focused on business-critical initiatives
9. 9IBM Global Technology Services
VI. Conclusion
To summarize, there are concrete steps you can take to help
proactively reduce the cost and impact of outages, and facilitate
more robust, responsive and cost-effective IT support
capabilities:
●●
Make sure that your support priorities and decisions are based
on the current cost of downtime, which is significantly higher
than just a few years ago and continues to increase
●●
Conduct a thorough assessment of your current IT support
that includes all aspects of people, processes and technology
●●
Align your technical support needs with business goals,
including infrastructure support and strategy, using your
technical support improvement roadmap
When evaluating support vendors, it’s important to:
●●
Have a well-defined technical support strategy that addresses
the entire spectrum of people, process and technology
●●
Make decisions not based on who offers the lowest price
point, but rather on who will help you avoid the cost of
downtime—which will help you reduce overall business and
operational costs; avoiding a single outage can more than pay
for higher levels of services and competence
●●
Approach vendor selection as a “partner-of-choice” decision:
look closely at their methodologies, tools, parts and logistics
resources, and experience and intellectual capital—which,
depending on their capabilities, can significantly reduce your
support costs
●●
Make sure that your service provider can provide critical
metrics on demand for a data-driven approach to improving
service levels such as:
– How many times did you call for support? What proactive
measures could be taken to reduce the number of calls?
– What percentage of issues was resolved by the first-contact
focal point?
– How long did problem resolution take? For hardware
issues, what percentage of the time did your service provider
have the correct replacement part? What percentage of
problems was fixed right the first time?
– Did someone come to your site, and if so, how long did it
take for them to arrive? Would it have been possible to
resolve the problem remotely?
VII. Why IBM?
IBM Technical Support Services (TSS) has a well-deserved
reputation for employing industry-leading processes, tools and
people to help prevent and rapidly resolve issues. TSS is product
agnostic. We are focused on quality and speed to help enhance
clients’ results. We measure ourselves on customer satisfaction,
response times, resolution times, root-cause analysis and data
analytics to help you prevent future problems. We relentlessly
pursue process improvement, service level improvement and
increased client satisfaction. We also use unique propriety tools
to help better support your IT environment, such as:
●●
IBM® Watson™ Knowledge Engine, which provides
cognitive analytics to help improve availability, plus a clear
action plan to help decrease problem resolution times,
increase remote and first-time fix resolution rates, and
enhance IT and end-user productivity
●●
IBM ProWeb queries servers and storage devices to aid
in proactive service planning
●●
“Phone home” technologies such as IBM Electronic Service
Agent recognize and report potential issues, which can include
automated opening of a service request ticket so the resolution
is underway without requiring human action
●●
Our Technical Support Appliance, which can better manage
assets—including IBM and non-IBM servers, storage and
network appliances, and inventory—plus support better
strategic planning and help you avoid entitlement delays
10. 10 Time is money and downtime is expensive
Plus, our IT support resources—both local and global—are
virtually unmatched. We have:
●●
57 call centers worldwide, with regional and localized
language support
●●
23,000 IT support specialists worldwide
●●
585 parts centers, stocked with 1.3 million IBM and
non-IBM parts
●●
114 hardware and software development laboratories and
11 global research laboratories, whose insights and resources
we use on your behalf
Additionally, our technical support capabilities are reflected in
our performance:
●●
We completed more than 160,000 preventative maintenance
actions in 20134
●●
We can help you reduce operating costs by up to 20 percent
through outage mitigation and problem resolution5
●●
We can provide up to a 94 percent first-call hardware success
rate6
●●
We handled 6.8 million hardware and software service
requests in 20137
●●
Parts are delivered within four hours for 99 percent of
US customers8
●●
Seventy-five percent of software calls are resolved by the first
point of contact9
Finally, IBM is committed to providing valuable thought leader-
ship. According to Rob Brothers, IDC, Director Software and
Hardware Support and Deploy Services:
“IBM is providing valuable thought
leadership by presenting a framework and
maturity model to assist organizations in
evaluating and improving their technical
support posture.”10
“IBM’s tools can help organizations identify,
prioritize and remediate gaps while
providing a roadmap to improvement.
Organizations who are serious about
improving business outcomes need to seriously
consider IBM Technical Support Services.”11
Experience the confidence of having IBM on your team as a
trusted support provider. We’re ready to provide you with high-
value services to help you become more proactive in your IT
support strategy, increase your IT resiliency, reduce your vulner-
ability to downtime, and simplify and drive down support costs.