Tag Archives: TCS

October 14, 2012 · 11:09 am

Remember Internet time? You’re now living on mobile time.

Transformation in the Enterprise: The Post-PC Era
Grant Shirk, Senior Enterprise Product Marketing Manager, Box

“Mobile has become a major catalyst for innovation in the enterprise. With more than 60% of employees sharing and creating corporate content away from their desks, we are witnessing the rapid transformation of the enterprise, and employees’ perceptions of “the office.”  This shift is changing the way people work together and creating new opportunities for workplace collaboration. In this session, see how leading companies are using collaboration and learn how you can harness the cloud to make mobile devices tools for productivity, not just consumption.  Welcome to the Post-PC Era”.

Always On. Always Connected.

“Given that mobility—like the Internet before it—is equally confusing and compelling, it only remains for IT to craft a strategy for conquering it. Creating such a strategy means first acknowledging the shift from applications containing data, logic, and presentation tiers to one in which services exchange information.

In essence, CIOs must embark on a three-step process to hone their strategy.

Step one: Discovery. Identify current projects as well as future goals; keep in mind that business units may be tackling applications on their own.

Step two: Acceleration. Having identified the projects you want to pursue and the underlying technologies, promote acceleration by standardizing your efforts as much as possible. Use common code – aka an “application factory” – for basic elements spanning people, process, and tools. These help reduce overlap and increase developer efficiency. Establishing common interface elements for employees will also help reduce training time and increase productivity.

Step three: Innovation. Once you’ve created a strong foundation for internal progress, you can start looking at other capabilities to help make your mobile applications even more of a competitive advantage. How can you target those key areas and create even better tools for helping to reduce sales cycles or gathering customer insights at the moment they’re making purchase decisions? Those kinds of insights are closer to reality than ever before, but only if you understand your strategic goals.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that you’re still aiming at a moving target. Remember Internet time? You’re now living on mobile time. Devices continue to evolve, as do application development tools. Just as you had to do in Internet time, you must focus on what aspects of mobility serve your business requirements most, and recalibrate them periodically. While you can easily refresh some strategies every year or two, for the time being, you must reconsider your mobile strategy as often as every six to 12 months to verify that you’re still placing your bets on the right trends”.

The New Digital Mobile Consumer:

How Large Companies are Responding

“The Digital Mobile Consumer: Key Findings

  1. Many businesses are making fundamental changes to their products/services and processes to win over the digital mobile consumer.
  2. The average company in the four regions of the world will spend between $13 million and $22 million this year on technologies, business process changes, and other expenses to respond to digital mobile consumers.
  3. Marketing, sales and service functions are taking the lead in shaping their organization’s overall strategy for serving the digital mobile consumer – but the IT function is integrally involved.
  4. Companies with some of the best opportunities are in sectors that haven’t changed as much as others in responding to the digital mobile consumer.
  5. Designing mobile applications and websites just for tablet devices is becoming a new battleground.
  6. Consumers in Asia-Pacific and Latin America conduct more business through mobile devices than consumers in Europe and North America”.

IBM’s Mobile Enterprise Services

Working securely anywhere, anytime from any device

“IBM Mobile Enterprise Services provides an integrated suite of capabilities for smartphones, tablets and rugged wireless devices—including Apple iPhone and iPad, Google Android, RIM BlackBerry and PlayBook, and Windows Mobile devices.

With a robust set of standard and customized services that help align your business strategies with your mobile requirements, our mobile portfolio includes strategy assessment and infrastructure design services, lifecycle management, mobile messaging and mobile enterprise application management. We help you optimize cost and efficiency with flexible services (including managed and subscription-based offerings), and enhance mobile-user productivity with best-practices processes and advanced technologies”.

So Grant Shark talked about the Post PC Era at the Consumerization in IT tn the Enterprise Forum in New York on Wednesday.

As Accenture say we are now living on mobile time with a tremendous boost to personal productivity.

Managing Mobility is a high priority for Enterprise IT.

Managed Mobility Services must provide a safe secure offering for information workers on the go.

One Device Control Service is offered by Apperian with the launch of a Remote Control solution for IOS [iDevices] – LINK

Apperian pitch “Mobile devices go anywhere and everywhere – so there’s no need to be on the same local network or use a VPN to use Remote Control. An administrator can remotely control a device that is behind a home router, firewall or captive network with no additional configuration. It even works over cellular network, so you can provide support to a user no matter where they are”.

Now that you effectively have a personal network device with access to more information than a small mainframe in the 80’s, be careful that you do not mis-place your mobile device or download any malware.

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February 5, 2012 · 2:49 pm

How “cyber-ready” is your service?

Last week the World Economic Forum launched an initiative to help protect the digital environment by improving global resilience to major cyber risks.

The “Partnership for Cyber Resilience” is a set of shared principles, signed and endorsed by Chief Executives of companies which recognize the interdependence of all organizations in combating cyber risks in a hyperconnected world.

Cyber resilience, it says, “is defined as the ability of systems and organizations to withstand cyber events, measured by the combination of mean time to failure and mean time to recovery.”

The PCR Initiative’s steering board are:

  • Ian Livingston, CEO, BT Group;
  • Bill McCracken, CEO, CA Technologies;
  • Michael Chertoff, former secretary of Homeland Security and now Managing Principal, Chertoff Group – a risk management and security consulting company;
  • Robert Wainwright, Director, Europol (European Police);
  • Natarajan Chandrasekaran, CEO & MD, Tata Consultancy Services

Here is a link to the press launch of this new initiative –  http://www.weforum.org/videos/partnership-cyber-resilience-annual-meeting-2012

I recommend that you watch the first 5 minutes where Alan Marcus outlines this critical protection issue and commitment required from CEOs to cyber security.

“This initiative is essentially an attempt to immunize the Internet. The more stakeholders endorse and implement the principles the higher the chances to safeguard the digital environment.”

I recommend that you read the short 15 page PCR Principles and Guidelines document which includes a C-Suite Checklist on page 11.

In today’s Observer there is an article in which the Cabinet Office warns that the London Olympics could crash the internet.  Fears of an internet meltdown during the London Games may lead to web access being rationed for British businesses

Additionally, BBC News Technology reported this week that Israel, Finland and Sweden are seen as leading the way in “cyber-readiness“, according to a major new security report.  The McAfee-backed cyberdefence survey deemed China, Brazil and Mexico as being among the least able to defend themselves against emerging attacks.

ITIL 2011 Edition Service Design define resilience as – “The ability of an IT service or other configuration item to resist failure or to recover in a timely manner following a failure. For example, an armoured cable will resist failure when put under stress.”

Page 167 – The requirements for resilience in the IT infrastructure should always be considered at the time of service design.  However, for many services, the resilience of the service is only considered after it is in live operational use.  Incorporating resilience into service design is much more effective and efficient than trying to add it at a later date, once a service has become operational.

Business Continuity Resilience Services

[youtube http://youtu.be/8-irBeUg804]
The evolution of business resiliency management – A proactive guide to helping you strengthen your business resiliency management program

So you should now be aware of the new “Partnership for Cyber Resilience” initiative which will engender support among industry leaders to a common set of guidelines and principles.  It is of interest that 3 of the 5 members of the Steering Board are CEOs of global Technology firms – BT, CA and TCS.  The requirements that they have helped shape will need to be addressed by Global and National Service Providers.  

In essence, the key question an internal / external service provider should ask is how “cyber-ready” are we to “protect and serve” the Business?

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January 22, 2012 · 12:46 pm

Is it possible to predict the future of the Service Desk?


On Wednesday 18th January the good folk at BrighTalk arranged a Service Desk Summit.

I have selected two presentations from the day which resonated with me.

Future of the Service Desk – Get Social, Stay Relevant

Crystal Miceli (first 13 mins) & Bill Riley

Social Service Desk – Adding social media channels to self service

Today, it’s about serving your customers across different channels, whether it’s web-based, online chat, mobile, social media like twitter or email because they are unlikely to pick up the phone.

New Service Desk Model attributes –

multi channel support

RSS feed subscription, forums, chatter

open lines of communication

collaborative knowledge capture and dissemination

and voice of the social customer drives new service development.

Service Desk 2.0

Brightalk webcast

Presentation Slides

James Finister (TCS)

A workforce that works seamlessly across platforms and that blurs the divide between private and corporate IT.

  • wants IT delivered on its own terms
  • will informally leverage social media and web based services to reduce their own workload

The goal of support is to provide value by helping customers to use services to do their jobs.

Self service and peer support become the default support mechanisms.

Tools will have to facilitate greater communication with other products.

Things we need to unlearn:

• SD activity targets

• The language of ITIl

• The importance of process

• Service Desk as SPOC

• The SD has all the answers

To what extent did the Brighttalk – Service Desk Summit provide a look into the future?

For me, these two presentations soared to the mountain peak whilst others remained in the safe environment of base camp.

Crystal Miceli and James Finister know what good looks like.  They are prepared to raise their heads above the parapet and provide a distinctive point of view.

So what other viewpoints are out there?

The Future Of The Service Desk Requires A “Customer-Savvy” Approach

John Rakowski – Forrester

Service desk professionals now operate in a business environment in which their end users or customers are “tech savvy.” This leads to a potential conflict spark point where IT customers believe that they have more IT know-how than the service desk.

The service desk and IT as a whole has to focus on becoming “customer savvy” to embrace these pressures.  Customer savvy starts firmly with the soft skills of I&O professionals. Simply, it is the ability to listen to your users/customers and to take on board their IT service suggestions.  Secondly, it is then the ability to apply your IT knowledge and experience to these suggestions from a risk, cost, and potential competitive perspective.

Jeff Weinstein (RightAnswers) adds – At the heart of a customer savvy service desk is the challenge for the team to really be on the pulse of its users and know how to address issues in proactive as well as reactive ways.

What Will the IT Help Desk of the Future Look Like?

John Paul Titlow

We’re already seeing clues about the future of the IT help desk today. The workforce is beginning to become more distributed and mobile, while the nature and number of devices people use day-to-day changes rapidly.

The trend toward socially infused customer support probably has only a limited relevance to company IT departments, whose “customers” are really internal staff.

Not only is the nature of the workforce itself becoming more mobile, but so too are the tools used by IT staff to fix problems. We’re already seeing really solid mobile and tablet apps for things like help desk software, remote desktop support, accessing servers via SSH or FTP and managing networks, to name a few. As smartphones and especially tablets become more ubiquitous and powerful, we can realistically expect to see even more robust administrative tools built for them

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/21028044]

In the future, it may not just be tablets and smartphones, but other connected devices as well. As the Web continues to grow outside of its original desktop boundaries, the list of devices IT departments need to support could grow as well. Anything that connects to the Internet and has a potential professional use is something that IT staff will at least need to be familiar with, even if they’re not fully supporting it

  

Next Generation of BMC Remedyforce Goes Social with Chatter

“Since it was introduced at Dreamforce, Remedyforce has helped IT departments of all sizes achieve greater success using social, mobile and open, cloud technologies,” said George Hu, executive vice president, salesforce.com. “BMC and salesforce.com are helping to automate the social enterprise by providing the leading IT help desk app in the industry built on Force.com.”

  

Goodbye service desk, hello to the collaborative IT support

Matt Rigby

Social IT support – what is it and how does it work? –

While traditional IT support is built on a closed “one-to-one” communication between you and your service desk, social IT support is built on an open “one-to-many” communication between you and your community

It’s relatively easy to introduce social IT into your business.  Since most, if not all of your employees or colleagues will already understand the concepts of social media through their use of platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, all you need to do is enable these ways of working within the workplace.  There are a growing number of social IT service management platforms emerging, either built entirely on the concepts of social media, or integrating some of these concepts to enable organisations to embrace this new way of working.

“Service Desk 2017”

“Lots of interest in @sdi_institute up and coming paper on Service Desk 2017.

If you’ve a view of the future get in touch if I forgot to ask!” @howardkendall

 

“Anatomy of the Service Desk”

LANDesk & the SDI are compiling a new whitepaper for 2012 –

The paper will look at how ITSM professionals spend their time, biggest time drains, and levels of pressure, while suggesting ways to improve service desk time-management and productivity.

Can you hear me now?  The future of the Service Desk.

ITSM Weekly The Podcast (Episode 63) -Service Desk of the Future 1 Of 5

Chris Dancy, Matthew Hooper and Matt Beran (twitter #ITSMWP) if you have the stamina to sit through 5 episodes!

MyPredictions for the “Service Desk” of the future

Will there be a Service Desk in the future?

The current view of the service desk as a single point of contact for users will not endure.  There will be virtualised operations from multiple locations with no concept of a centralised function.  This formation will become the default model in the short term to achieve cost savings through less facilities overheads – Telephony, Buildings etc. 

Where required to do so, service personnel will be spread across geographies to provide Follow the Sun coverage.

The Service Desk will need to transform into a Customer Interaction Capability that maintains the channel of the customer’s choice with little requirement for human voice interaction.

Non-voice technology – multi-channels – will enable users / customers to communicate just as easily in any format as they do by voice. 

In the future more and more customer interactions will occur on the go to help keep track of information from cradle to grave.

“Phablets” Smartphones / tablets will be aware when utility (fit for use) is sub-optimal and will communicate directly with the SaaS product in the Cloud     

The future is about the Customer Experience. So can the Customer Interaction Capability keep up with their demanding expectations for instant gratification?

What will the new Customer Interaction Capability be called?  

Mult-Channel Service Centre, Service Interaction Centre, Service Storefront… 

Have your say – @WDGLL or whatdoesgoodlooklike@gmail.com


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