White Papers

This white paper focuses on building a business intelligence (BI) strategy that aligns with the enterprise goals, improves knowledge management, advances business by making the best use of information, enables BI penetration into the business processes, and helps enterprise with strategic, tactical, and operational decision making. It presents the essential components of BI strategy to enable the vision of driving better business performance by empowering all in the enterprise to be able to do their job effectively as a natural part of their daily work.

By providing a multitude of web forms that address every likely request and by responding, on average, within one business day, GreyStone Power demonstrated to its customers the value of web-based requests. And, by providing service representatives with an easy to use tool for organizing, managing, and responding to requests, GreyStone created a true win-win situation. GreyStone saves money by staffing its correspondence team—those representatives who handle electronic requests—based on average rather than peak loads. Customers are provided with a more flexible and satisfying process for making requests, and customer service representatives have a system that requires less labor, causes less stress, and provides more accuracy.

Have you ever been part of an IT project that started with high hopes and fanfare, but ended up behind schedule, over budget, and ultimately in trouble? This scenario might sound like a professional nightmare, but for many IT project managers it has at some point been an unwelcome and dreaded reality.

Many outsourcing agreements provide clients with the right to benchmark price and service levels. Some clients struggle to successfully gain the benefit of benchmarking. Contrary to popular belief, the primary obstacle to a successful benchmark is not the service provider, but the benchmarking method itself. Service providers often support benchmarking as a way to “prove” to their clients they are competitive. Successful benchmarking requires clients to understand the different types of benchmarks available, how they work, and how benchmark results can best be applied.

Convincing the CFO of the value your ITIL initiative brings to the business may be the biggest challenge you face. It may also be the most important role you play as an IT leader. We need to rethink the way we describe our vision and high-level business objectives for our ITIL initiative. The benefits are real. We just need to quantify them in terms of return to the business.

The traditional "command and control’ service desk and IT asset management models that served corporate IT so well are now straining to keep up with the pace of twenty-first-century business. The old models made sense in the past, when it was important to protect expensive IT resources and people with rare technology skills from having to deal with end users, but the old models have become obsolete. This white paper looks at the challenges and trends that are driving the need for change, and presents some of the actions that can be taken today to enable IT to move at the speed of the business in a complex, rapidly changing world.

High-performing IT organizations recognize the need to control and account for the IT assets that provide support for their IT infrastructure and service level agreements. A solid configuration management process, supported by an easy to‐use and information-rich configuration management database (CMDB) provides the basis for accurate recording and tracking of an IT asset throughout its lifecycle. Beyond just the asset accounting and tracking benefits of a CMDB, the information and relationships contained therein can be leveraged to provide significant benefit in support of other IT processes.

Remote control software enables you to work on a remote computer in real time as if you were using its own keyboard and mouse. The other computer can be physically located across the hall or around the world. Remote control software has been around for over twenty years and was originally used over telephone lines via modems. Today, these powerful software programs are most often run over high-speed local area networks, over private wide area networks, or over the Internet.