The ABCs of ITIL: Boundaries

March 17, 2015 Michael Scarborough Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

ITIL provides numerous best practices that help organizations establish, manage and maintain accountability, boundaries and consistency (the ABCs) in an organization, resulting in increased quality and cost-effectiveness. This blog post will describe the concept of boundaries.

The ABCs of ITIL: Accountability

March 10, 2015 Michael Scarborough Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

Service management, as defined by ITIL® (formerly the Information Technology Infrastructure Library), is a complex topic that takes individuals years to master. While individuals may have difficulty mastering all aspects of the ITIL framework, organizations often have significant difficulty understanding how the ITIL best practices fit into their environment. ITIL consists of five core books, with each book focusing on a specific stage of the lifecycle approach to service management.

Is Your Help Desk Being Replaced with Social Media?

January 27, 2015 Hank Marquis Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

As social media systems and services like Yammer, IBM Connections, Facebook and Twitter are now replacing IT service desks, it’s wise to consider which approaches are best for social media technical support.

New IT Requires New Skills for 2015 and Beyond

January 22, 2015 Mike Lewis Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

As IT evolves from craft to process to service integration — new jobs, new roles and new functions emerge. The current move toward mobile, cloud, apps or app-like data interfaces provided by XaaS vendors will create the need for IT people who understand essentially every part of the information technology ecosystem. To fill the new roles, IT people will have to know the technology, understand the services, create relationships with service providers, know the contract support language, and grasp the underlying architectures that connect a multitude of vendors into one shared interface.

ITIL as a Service Provider

December 18, 2014 Brady Orand Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

Consider any service industry such as teaching, banking or restaurants. Each of these industries has its unique set of challenges – not only in its industry but also as an organization’s maturity grows. For example, as a restaurant grows from a neighborhood eatery to a national chain, the ways of working must become more formalized. This formalization enables the restaurant to be more consistent in its delivery of services and, hopefully, to be more profitable.