Information technology systems have been historically viewed by their managers as closed architectures that provide services to a fixed set of users in a controlled environment that limits devices to approved, authorized and corporate owned assets. Though this may have been achievable in mainframe, midrange and early microcomputer networks, the increasing demands of users and the expansion of the user base outside of the enterprise firewall makes the concept of “bring your own device” not only plausible, but also inevitable.

As business struggle with the need to do much more …

Many technical professionals struggle with properly understanding the role of the service desk when they are first introduced to ITIL. The misconception arises when they initially equate the service desk function to the technical support desks they frequently contact at software and hardware manufacturers. Though the standard tier 1, tier 2 and tier 3 (and perhaps beyond) conventions are used to describe the stages of technical support and there are other similarities, the roles of the service desk and technical support are quite different.

The Service Desk is the customer …

One of the earliest considerations during the adoption of ITIL by a corporation is establishing a starting point or roadmap from a list of greater than two dozen processes.  Several textbook examples of implementation strategies recommend customer-facing processes, such as change management, incident management or service level management.  While choosing an approach where end-user satisfaction with services is base-lined, measured and evaluated against improvement metrics and targets, there can be an often overlooked opportunity to deploy IT Asset Management and Configuration as a starting point.

IT Asset Management and Configuration can …

ITIL defines Service Catalogs as the portion of the Service Portfolio that contains services that are either active or approved and published for delivery to customers or prospects.  The approval process would include a review of numerous things, including the project management and financial aspects as well as the “price” to be charged and the acceptable profit margin, if applicable.

Many companies struggle with the creation of their service catalogs due to the confusion over the difference between technologies versus services; …

Consumer technologies, specifically the sleek user-friendly devices conjured by Apple and Google, have done what those of us weaned on green screens thought impossible – they have made technology desirable, but more importantly they have raised the profile of service management and in particular the need for robust asset and configuration management and the CMDB has moved even higher up the agenda.

With sales of smartphones up 72 percent in 2010 and mobile devices ringing cash registers to the tune of $1.6 billion last year according to analyst Gartner, consumer …