Gartner are predicting that, after a few years of experimentation and early adopter successes, 2013 will be the year of larger scale adoption of Big Data technologies. According to a recent worldwide Gartner survey of IT leaders, 42% of respondents stated they had either invested in Big Data technology, or were planning to do so within a year.

There I was the other week talking to Mike Culshaw, then of the North West of England NHS but now with Serco. Mike has always been a passionate, level headed, very capable service manager but that day I could sense something different. He seemed to need to get something off his chest. I mentioned our Global Knowledge blog page and asked if he might like to be a guest contributor. That was all the invitation he needed as we started talking about his idea for “Personal Service Level Agreements” (PSLA). He wasn’t sure if it was the ramblings of a madman or the start of a revolution! This is a little like how our conversation went…

Those of us who have been around IT for a number of years have all probably had the misfortune and felt the frustration of working in an organisation where silos have been an all too prominent part of daily life. Networks, Tech Support, Service Desk, Desk Top, etc. where reciprocal operation was just blaming each other and a related management system, a post-it not stuck on your screen. Common goals? Never!

I believe the one key quality you need to succeed in a service management role is passion; Passion for life, for the role, for service and developing your or other organisations’ cultures. Here’s a very personal view of how passion drives me to reach my service management Nirvana and how I measure I’m there.

Here we are going to take a look at 10 customer service mantras that we should all be wary of if we want to stay in the service provision business and how so much of the common sense that ITIL® espouses can help to deliver them.

There are many reasons why a blended learning approach finds favour with organisations.  For the manager, the primary reason is the amount of time it saves “out of the office” allowing education programmes to fit in with ever increasing demands of the modern workplace.  However from the Learning and Development point of view it is […]

In an IT world where the ability to plug two pieces of infrastructure together is being superseded by skill in plugging services from multiple vendors together I find it frightening that the font of knowledge that is Wikipedia gets only to its second sentence before it mentions “damages” and “compensation”.

ROI in a fault tree…Fault Tree Analysis can be used to assess the availability improvement and hence ROI that can be achieved by individual technology component design options

Is support ‘fashion’ changing merely to line the pockets of the vendors? Are we creating change for changes sake when what our customers want is so much simpler?

Sales, management and relationships guru Tony Allessandra said “Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. Service wins the game.” How true. I’m writing this blog from 38,134ft (11624m for the metrically minded) above the Atlantic Ocean having made my choice of airline based on my previous experience […]