Whether an organization provides support internally or outsources it, service level agreements are an important base measure of the effectiveness of support. If employees’ technology problems are not being solved—if their laptops aren’t being repaired when they need them or their questions aren’t being adequately answered, for example—they won’t be able to perform their jobs. But SLAs generally are too limited to transactions between the support staff and users. They don’t encourage support staff to see past the immediate technology problem and look for ways that IT can help users do their jobs better. Furthermore, SLAs are often out of date a few months after they’re established. For instance, in a company that successfully institutes a customer relationship management system, sales and customer service professionals will see their dependence on technology increase rapidly. Salespeople who become dependent on the system to prepare for each day’s sales calls won’t tolerate the 24-hour ...

While most organizations continue to rely on SLAs, some companies are setting a new course for measuring the value of IT support. The winners could be named as “support leaders”—companies that were providing highly effective IT support. On the other hand, If you compare their answers to those of organizations that we can call as “support laggards”—those struggling to address the support challenge. Well, the observation is that leaders escaped the SLA trap and adopted more business-oriented metrics to gauge their effectiveness. Such metrics are far different from the typical “the technology is working” measurements. For instance, a business unit with a printer problem that required a technician to be dispatched to make a repair. The technician replaced a part on the printer but inadvertently erased all the settings and failed to test the printer to see if it worked after completing the repair. The technician saw the issue as resolved: He replaced the part. Yet after he left, no one coul...

Many companies’ IT support functions are missing a golden opportunity to provide greater value to the larger enterprise. While a few leading companies have recognized that IT support should be tied explicitly to its impact on user productivity and business-unit performance, many organizations remain caught in the IT support trap perpetuated by misguided SLAs. To improve the value they provide, IT support functions must go far beyond measuring only a narrow part of the service experience. We believe the time is right for CIOs to shift from measuring IT service performance for its own sake to measuring its effectiveness through real business results, such as end user productivity and its impact on company revenue and profitability. If they can do it, they will be able to begin to achieve the goal of measuring and representing the true value that the IT organization and its support services deliver to the business.

Virtualization is not new. IBM first introduced virtual machine technology for mainframe computers in the early 1960s. Microsoft Windows NT included a virtual DOS machine. Virtual PC was introduced by Connectix in 1997 (Microsoft acquired Connectix in 2003). EMC’s VMware introduced its first product, VMware Workstation, in 1999. Softricity introduced SoftGrid, the first application virtualization product, in 2001 (Microsoft acquired Softricity in 2006). Server virtualization is the masking of server resources, including the number and identity of individual physical servers, processors, and operating systems, from server users. The server administrator uses a software application to divide one physical server into multiple isolated virtual environments. The virtual environments are sometimes called virtual private servers, but they are also known as partitions, guests, instances, containers or emulations. There are different types of virtualization. Machine virtualization uses softwar...

The megatrend that powers SaaS is the same one driving Web 2.0, SOA and every other expression of today’s increasingly Web-connected world. Fundamentally, the infrastructure of the Web allows us to cut out much of the location-dependent friction that gets in the way of communicating, collaborating and trading. Software used to be delivered in boxes and had to be installed in the same building as the people that used it. The Web removes those constraints, enabling SaaS — and SaaS in turn becomes the foundation for innovative new ways of interacting and doing business. Software as a Service (SaaS)—meaning delivering software over the Internet—is increasingly popular for its ability to simplify deployment and reduce customer acquisition costs; it also allows developers to support many customers with a single version of a product. SaaS is also often associated with a "pay as you go" subscription licensing model. Under a "pay-as-you-go" model, your customers gain access ...

Donald J Carty, who became Dell Inc's chief financial officer less than 18 months ago when the computer maker's accounting was under scrutiny, is stepping down and will be replaced by a longtime General Electric Co executive. Brian T Gladden, chief executive of SABIC Innovative Plastics, formerly called GE Plastics, will join Dell on Tuesday and succeed Carty as CFO on June 13. The transition has come at a critical juncture for Dell. Company officials believe they have accounting issues under control, but Dell still trails Hewlett-Packard Co in worldwide shipments of personal computers and is cutting jobs and spending to meet financial targets. Dell is expanding beyond phone and Internet sales to sell machines through retailers, and it is expanding its reach in emerging markets such as India and China to recapture the robust growth rates of its earlier years. Gladden, 43, said he was "excited to be joining Dell at a time of transformation." He held a series of financi...

It's MySapce spamer. Is $234 Million judgement not enough? Well, MySpace has made it very clear that one can't get into his or her defined space. Unless, you are willing to pay the price for it. I don't think it's worth it. Better don't go there.. The name “Spam” comes from a Monty Python sketch where a group of Vikings wish to eat in a restaurant where the menu contains so much Spam (the food) that it is difficult to determine what else is available. Spam filtering is a difficult classification task for a variety of reasons. Spam is constantly changing as spam on new topics emerges. Also, spammers attempt to make their messages as indistinguishable from legitimate email as possible and change the patterns of spam to foil the filters. Another serious issue is the problem of false positives, i.e. a legitimate email classified as spam. For many email users, false positives are simply unacceptable; thus the requirements on the spam filter are very exacting. As new t...