The LEAN movement is not quite two decades old, but has already rewritten rules across industries and impacted each department in an organization to some degree. Instead of dismissing the LEAN movement, your organization can use its guiding principles to rethink the way IT services are provided. This approach can help you innovate and keep pace with technology, even when IT resources are limited. Use LEAN to quickly identify the problems your customers want you to solve. Inst

Jerry may be the title character of the popular 90's sitcom Seinfeld, but we're betting Kramer was your favorite. Today, we've got 5 reasons why IT services are like Kramer from Seinfeld. 1. "You need movie phone, you got it." Remember when Kramer changed his phone number because "too many chicks" knew his number, and ended up with a number one digit off from Moviephone? Instead of getting irritated when people called him thinking they were dialing Moviephone, Kramer provided

Today's CIO is taxed with a work environment where there is too much to do, not enough time to do it, and not enough talent onboard to get everything done. You risk falling behind if your organization is not able to keep up with the pace of change. Let us share five signs your IT team is struggling. If these sound like symptoms of your team, it's time to perform an IT intervention to turn things around. 1.The number of meeting participants is growing. When more and more peopl

You can have the best IT services in the world, but if you aren't marketing them effectively your customers (the people you serve internally) will move their budget externally. Marketing is more than just random acts of promotion; it’s about the entire journey of your buyer. Your competition treats your internal customers like their consumers in attempt to sway them away from your budget. The only way you can maintain your customer base is by knowing them better. You have to

Is your company improving only through iteration or also innovation? It can be very tempting for companies to attempt to improve their growth and efficiency simply by repeating what has been done in the past, but there is a limit to how much a company can improve their productivity by streamlining existing services. For true IT growth and improvement, real and radical innovation is a necessity. Connecting Organizations and Customers through IT Services IT isn't just about imp

Today closes out our series around CIO Insight's "Why IT Must Respond More Rapidly To Tech Issues." We're wrapping it up with insights around impact. Yesterday we shared an infograph that stated: 91% said poor incident communication increases downtime. Downtime is a critical business issue. Ninety-one perfect of respondents said poor communications lead to more down time, but what's the impact? Just 15 minutes is all the downtime it takes for there to be an impact on business

"What we've got here is a failure to communicate." 1967. Cool Hand Luke. But that quote is just as relevant today as it was then. Part 3 in this week's series based upon CIO Insight's great piece "Why IT Must Respond More Rapidly To Tech Issues" is all about communication. Incident communication is a process. This word, 'process,' is key to incident support. The definition of process: "a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end." Incident communic

Part 2 of this week's series around CIO Insight's "Why IT Must Respond More Rapidly To Tech Issues." Today we tackle the blame game. It's easy to look at this statistic and feel a lot of frustration. Forty-one percent ignoring messages? While it's easy to blame the engineer, this statistic is a symptom of a larger problem. We ask engineers to innovate for our company, but at the same time we ask them to answer alerts at 2:00 a.m. We ask them to skip vacations because a major

We're doing something a bit different on the blog this week. A daily series around the real value of managed services. CIO Insight created several slides around the idea "Why IT Must Respond More Rapidly To Tech Issues." But the article could have also been titled "What Do You Want Your Engineers Focused On?" Can your engineers monitor your network? Yes. Can your engineers babysit tickets for service providers? Sure. Do you want them to? Absolutely not! Check out the below "m

Are your IT services as relevant as they need to be? In order to remain successful, you need to remain relevant– and in order to remain relevant, you need to provide the services your customers care about. Industries today move quickly; what customers desired yesterday isn't necessarily what they need today. To retain customers, you must be constantly building a better business canvas. Determining the Customer's Needs What is your value proposition? Building a business canvas