Shared Service Model is collaborative approach to pool in all the resources into one. This approach allows the economies of scale, pooled experience, associative responsiveness, partnerships with in the organization for low cost and high quality. An internal business unit works as a service provider to the business clients that fulfills the non-core businesses and fragments the core business with higher epxertise within the pool of intelligent resources, with other business units of the same organization. Business organizations request products and services within the organization from the one of the business unit so called 'Shared Service Provider'. The various business units are billed interally and their costs are recovered through revenue generation. Since, these clusters of internal business units have to show profitability for their own existence. They normally buffers up some margins in the cost offered to the 'Shared Service Provider', which is a wrong practice....

In a recent survey from Forbes, a big question poped up. Is the demand for IT services down or up? Well, the experts have said it right that "demand is still very strong". It's the companies who are cutting down budgets on new assets, hires, software, and hardware. They are trying to meet customer's needs with existing resources. Infact, they are curtailing consultants rather than consultancy. Most of the data is digitized and the volume of transactions are growing like anything. A robust data management infrastructure through data consolidation (green data center) and virtualization have some answers to cut down on cost and might bring a smile on the CIOs face to add some value to the customer's growing needs of humangous transactions. The transation-volume-revenue, equation has broken down. But, the amount of work involved is growing at it's own pace. In the early years of 2000 the focus was on outsourcing when we were trapped in similar recession then. Now,...

Some known problems while using Citrix's XenConvert Software. This section describes known problems for the XenConvert software. Wherever possible, a workaround for the problem has been tried. Converting a Workload with Files in Use XenConvert cannot copy a file in use by another application or service. To ensure that the file is included in the conversion, stop the respective service before starting the conversion. It is not recommended to convert a workload executing a critical service that keeps critical files open that cannot be stopped (such as a Domain Controller with Active Directory service).Mapped Network Drive Can Interfere with Conversion If a network drive was mapped to the next available drive letter (e.g. F: when last local drive was E), then XenConvert is unable to get the drive letter for the new VHD that it just created, mounted, and formatted because Windows assigned it to the same drive letter as the network drive. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297694/ for ...

Do you feel like you need to escape the typical hardware and operating system lifecycle “treadmill?” Like a dog trying to catch it's tail.. For Application Virtualization what are the application your organization use and how the users are accessing the Applications? How these users are spread and the related challenges in the WAN environment? Securing the IT infrastructure in today’s computing environment may well be the biggest challenge faced by organizations. Not only must organizations ensure the integrity of their systems and data, but often they must also prove that their security processes and policies measure up against standards and regulations established and enforced by national standards-developing entities. In addition, the recent popularization of virtualized environments adds a new layer of complexity to the security picture. Businesses are just beginning to comprehend the security implications of these environments. To tackle these security issues, many organizatio...

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.