White Papers

Rather than the integration of technologies, it's the integration of the IT department with the business organization that challenges so many companies. Despite the efforts of IT and business leaders alike, it remains hard for many IT departments to work in partnership with the business in the same way that other departments, like accounting and marketing, do.

In many large organizations, the role of the IT function is poorly communicated and hence misunderstood. IT groups often view business users as overly demanding and under appreciative, while users perceive IT as reactive and defensive. In recent years, frameworks such as ITIL have emerged, promising to show IT how to run “like a business.” The proper implementation of service catalogs can go further, helping IT run as a business—through improved communication, easier access to IT services, and measurement-driven continuous process improvement.

There are many compelling reasons to launch a webinar program, but there are expenses and time investments that are not immediately obvious. To minimize surprises and achieve expected results, carefully evaluate your internal capabilities and outsource where necessary.

Today’s business world, in its pursuit for enhanced efficiency, is opening up more and more to all devices that can improve workforce mobility and productivity. Technology has supported our need for mobility and has also provided additional means of communication. Laptops, smart phones, memory sticks, iPods, they are all part of day to day life and work. The downside of this trend is that while largely adopting their usage, few realize how serious the inherent threats are within them, as mobility and portability make data protection a far more complicated problem than ever before.

Organizations that are focused on applying best practices from ITIL have numerous questions about the newest release, ITIL v3. Will it live up to the expectations of IT executives who must continually face the challenge of supporting innovative projects to help their companies grow? Can this version of ITIL really provide better guidance so IT departments can work more efficiently, even in a cost-constrained environment? Will the new release of ITIL help IT reduce the time it takes to complete IT implementations and make deployments run more smoothly? Will current ITIL processes, such as incident and problem management, go away, be modified, or evolve into more useful forms? What are the major differences between ITIL v2 and ITIL v3?

While large enterprises have a well-defined security mechanism in place with dedicated personnel to look after it, in most SMBs the scenario is less organized, short-staffed, and under-equipped. They have a small number of IT staff who manages to give only a portion of their time towards the security aspect. A comprehensive solution plan that offers the best-of-breed protection in every aspect of security is the need of the hour.

All software, from simple command line utilities to large-scale corporate systems, needs documentation. It may be done either in the form of several text strings shown in a console window or in the form of thousands of webpages stored on the company portal in a distributed database. No matter how documentation is done, it must be done.

This paper is intended to provide guidance for those who are in the midst of, or are considering, IT process improvement project implementations based upon ITIL, and are asking questions about how implementing ITIL might impact their current and future implementation plans.