White Papers

The term “DevOps” typically refers to the emerging professional movement that advocates a collaborative working relationship between Development and IT Operations, resulting in the fast flow of planned work (i.e., high deploy rates), while simultaneously increasing the reliability, stability, resilience and security of the production environment. Why Development and IT Operations? Because that is typically the value stream that is between the business (where requirements are defined) and the customer (where value is delivered).

Responsible service provisioning requires an appropriate balance between quality and cost. But this balance cannot be achieved without a clear understanding of service costs and the relationship between cost and service levels. With this knowledge comes the power to make decisions on where and how to spend to reach the desired balance.

There are many benefits to remote support. For best results, follow these good practices.

This guide outlines the path to an aligned service strategy and structure that supports and governs the people, integrated processes, and tools supported by a balanced performance scorecard.

A well-designed, highly automated reporting framework that utilizes a balanced approach, effective graphics, clear targets, and real-time and periodic reporting, along with analysis and recommendations, is absolutely essential for IT service management to be effective in delivering quality services, as well as reporting the value of such services to the organization.

In February 2011, HDI published a white paper on “The Mobility Revolution and Its Consequences for Support.” Since then—and especially at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012—this revolution has gained momentum. It is no longer necessary to predict mobile, always-on, always-connected styles of work. They are here, and likely here to stay. The purpose of this paper is to look back over the past year, extract meaningful information, and take a look at what is and is not being done in the world of mobile support.

The old 5×8 support model (five days a week, eight hours a day) simply doesn’t get the job done anymore, with companies and organizations branching out into separate locations and virtual offices, not to mention overseas. Meanwhile, staffs in many support centers, depending on industry, are being thinned, or at least not growing. One of the solutions has been to move to multichannel support, placing less emphasis on the phone and email as the primary and secondary ways of communicating with customers. This white paper is intended to help support centers understand why and how they might move into a broader multichannel environment, and how they can be successful.

Higher education institutions are struggling to keep pace as their students, faculty, and business partners demand more diverse services, more creative uses of technology in the classroom, and more open support for the devices they are accustomed to using in their personal lives. In a series of live and virtual meetings from February to July 2011, the HDI Higher Education Forum (HEF) defined five key trends, identified the challenges and impacts associated with these trends, outlined considerations for future success, and shared some practices that have already proven effective for a number of universities and colleges. This report shares these findings and ideas, which can be adapted across industries, and guides others on how to meet the future with confidence.