Being at the helm of a project is both exciting and scary! If you jump straight into it without a good plan you run the risk of your voyage ending in a shipwreck. You don’t want that, nobody wants that to happen. The best solution for this is what is called a project plan. Yes, as a project manager, it sounds tempting to just go with the flow and wing it, but the dangers of not sticking to a project plan are many.

You’ve heard it before: knowledge is power. For organizations, the collective knowledge of employees and stakeholders about a products, customers, and internal business processes is one of their most essential assets. But where is that knowledge stored, and how can it be accessed? Depending on the organization, that knowledge might be documented in a number of places and formats. As a business, it’s crucial that this knowledge is readily available for whoever needs it.

A robust IT asset management solution is key to the efficient delivery of IT services to an organization. It’s important to keep track of the organization’s assets, both hardware and software, to ensure continued service delivery. Without this, these assets may fail or stop functioning as intended and can cause inconvenient service disruption.

In what almost seems like a bygone era, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) used to carry considerably more weight with both customers and service providers. Over the years, the use of SLAs as accurate barometers of service has fallen dramatically, as they don’t necessarily reflect the lived experience of customers. This represents a shift in the perception of what used to be one of the key metrics by how service, and thus the user experience, used to be measured.

In what almost seems like a bygone era, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) used to carry considerably more weight with both customers and service providers. Over the years, the use of SLAs as accurate barometers of service has fallen dramatically, as they don’t necessarily reflect the lived experience of customers. This represents a shift in the perception of what used to be one of the key metrics by how service, and thus the user experience, used to be measured.

How long has the IT industry espoused IT self-service capabilities’ IT support benefits yet failed to realize them fully? They make so much sense, offering “better, faster, cheaper” service and support capabilities. Still, for many organizations, IT self-service capabilities need so much more than the implementation of the required technology.

UAC stands for “User Account Control”. This is a field of software management that isolates the operating system’s core components from potentially damaging changes. It refers to the level of access that in Unix-like systems is called “root” and in Windows systems is known as Administrator privileges. User Account Control was initially rolled out as part of Windows Vista to allow only admin accounts to give and take away these permissions.

During InvGate’s presentation at SupportWorld Live 2022, we are proud to introduce Support Assist, our AI engine that enhances the support capabilities of service desks for all types of businesses and departments. One of InvGate's guiding principles is to "simplify what is complex," and so for the last year we’ve been finding ways to leverage our solutions with machine learning, testing different tools inside our platforms that could make a real difference for our users.

It’s always something, isn’t it? It seems that just as you’ve gotten your organization up to speed with ITAM guidelines, some newfangled idea comes along to stir things up. But IT is (or should be) all about continuous improvement. Stationary things wither on the vine; things that move, evolve. ITAM 2.0 is precisely about keeping things moving along in the right direction. And, like it or not, managing your asset inventory is always going to be open to improvement.

Predicting consumer demand and ensuring you have the resources to support that is key to the success of any organization. The same is true for IT, and this is where ITIL demand management comes in. Demand management is an ITIL process that interfaces with multiple processes and manages expectations on both customer and service provider ends. Let’s explore the demand management process, what it entails, and what good demand management looks like.

Objectives and Key Results or OKRs are a popular goal management framework that helps organizations achieve goals by building specific and measurable actions as well as communicating and monitoring progress toward them. Used effectively, an OKR framework can support increased transparency, better decision making, and better engagement with strategy by organizing colleagues and the work they do around achieving a common set of objectives.

Over the last decade or so, we have seen organizations competing to rapidly launch products and new updates. This also often meant that information security lagged behind, as evinced by the fact that we have seen many companies facing major breaches and attacks over the last couple of years. The DevOps approach which focused on rapid development proved ineffective for robust security. This is where DevSecOps emerged. In this article, we explore the concept of DevSecOps and the top ten DevSecOps tools.

Over the past decade, global spending on digital transformation has steadily increased. With the global pandemic and the subsequent shift to remote work and focus on online business, organizations have realized the importance of going digital and presenting a digital interface for both employees and clients. In fact, the total global spending on digital transformation is projected to reach 1.8 trillion US dollars in 2022 and 2.8 trillion USD by 2025.

What makes for a good leader? In the world of IT, there are several characteristics that immediately come to mind. Typically, we perceive a good leader as someone effortlessly extroverted and who loves dealing with people. But, believe it or not, this is far from the ultimate truth of leadership; being an introvert doesn’t mean you can’t be an effective leader in an IT team. What really makes a great leader is the ability to understand the different personalities in the team.

In the world of IT, it’s common to see the terms CRM and ITSM being thrown around without much explanation of what they are and what they achieve in the grand scheme of things. The truth is that these tools are integral to any company’s success and learning to identify what they are —and most importantly how they work, should clear up any doubts when trying to implement them in day-to-day IT operations.

For many managers, there are two questions on permanent loop within their work: 1. Am I doing enough? 2. How do we make things quicker? When it comes to the first question, it is often a struggle to know when to let go. As a manager's role and responsibilities grow, and as their teams reach new levels of maturity, there is a need to shift focus towards the most important processes, while letting their team take responsibility of some others.

IT service management (ITSM) is big business. There are so many tools, vendors, and resellers out there, so how do you choose? If you work in a service desk or ITSM environment, the ITSM tool will be one of your most important spends. The right tool can help customer engagement, improve processes, and support effective incident resolution. As IT continues to recover and evolve in this new, post pandemic reality, “the best ITSM vendor” will mean different things to different people.

Network engineers are constantly looking for ways to improve the security and efficiency of their IT networks. High latency can affect the user experience and security measures can have costly impacts on the organization. And splitting the organization’s assets into different networks instead of one single large network achieves this. It reduces network collisions and computing demands from the devices and improves efficiency and improves the user experience.

Whatever your organization does, there’s always opportunity for improvement, and sometimes the best way to find them is by checking in on the end users themselves. It’s a tricky thing to accomplish, to be sure, since there are a lot of intangible factors that play into how an employee might be feeling about their experience at any given moment.

Even with advances in security practices and technologies, passwords continue to remain a weak point in an organization’s cyber security strategy. Strong passwords are still an essential part of security strategy for most organizations, and poor password hygiene can make their IT network vulnerable. According to the 2021 Verizon data breach investigation report, shared credentials and poor access management practices were among the top reasons for data breaches all over the globe.

The benefits of ITIL to a company or organization are widely discussed. This makes sense for the bigger picture, from the perspective of an organization. Smart organizations these days are adapting an ITIL framework to straighten out their IT service management and achieve business goals. However, it’s not so often you hear the question: what are the ITIL benefits to individuals?

Service management needs to change. The philosophies and understanding that gave way to the original concept of ITSM have been overtaken by time and perspective, rendering them outdated and leaving IT managers grasping with how to move forward. Because the various factors of work are constantly shifting (shown most clearly over the course of the last two years, but broadly true of any given period of time in tech), we need to be limber in our ways of thinking of these concepts.