When discussing organizational management, a critical aspect is the balance between Strategic, Tactical, and Operational roles and duties. Have you ever seen companies where the employees complained that: The directors and upper level managers keep sticking their nose in the day-to-day operations and making a mess of things. Major processes keep getting re-defined and no …
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A friend of mine manages a hosted ecommerce solution and was complaining to me the other day that people in his organization were putting unauthorized code onto production servers without going through the typical deployment process. His team would discover this when upgrading the customers’ ecommerce sites. During the upgrade, they would stumble across some …
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How good are your Disaster Recover plans (DR plans)? Of 10 companies that don’t have DR plans, only 1 will be in business for more than 10 years. Is it because the other 9 companies experience a major event for which they are unprepared? No, most likely it is because those 9 other companies have …
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Want to start a heated discussion with an ITIL Expert? Ask them to define the term “Change”. ITIL v3 defines a Change as: The addition, modification or removal of anything that could have an effect on IT services. The scope should include changes to all architectures, processes, tools, metrics and documentation, as well as changes …
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Many years ago, I worked for a company that specialized in producing slides from PowerPoint (remember slides, those little translucent pieces of plastic you would shine light through?). We were a Microsoft partner and what the industry called “in the box” with PowerPoint (remember when software came in boxes?). When you installed PowerPoint, the installation software …
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IT prides itself on ensuring that our services are highly available. We measure availability to ridiculously high levels of precision. Indeed, we have a magical number that represents availability nirvana. We call it “Five Nines”. The term Five Nines indicates that our systems are available for 99.999% of the agreed time. Notice that I said …
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The true test of an IT organization’s maturity is how it reacts when a significant issue occurs. By significant issue, I mean that a large portion (or even the entire) organization’s ability to function is severely impaired due to an IT-related failure. What happens isn’t a test of any single group or process – it …
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