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Showing posts with the label Protection and Optimization

Creating and Supporting Services – Plan, Protect and Optimize!

Would you buy a product or service that did not include some type of warranty?  If the manufacturer or reseller does not explicitly set the expectations, then you will form them for yourself.  It is the same with the customers of your IT services.  Either IT clearly sets the expectations, or end-users will develop them on their own. Best practice tells us that during the negotiation and acceptance of Service Level Agreements, IT commits that services not only meet business and customer outcomes but also that they will meet requirements for availability, capacity, continuity and security.  Ok… that is good.  Best practice tells us to include these so called “non-functional” requirements early in the lifecycle of a service.  In reality these warranty requirements are often considered somewhat in the Strategy/Design stage but more often than we would like to admit the majority of the work and effort for security and availability are performed reactively in the Service Operation lifec

The Importance of Demand Management

I was recently asked to comment on the importance of Demand Management for IT Services as it relates to the IT Business organization. Demand Management Demand Management is tied to the “Customer” or consumer demand. It is more about the market and what is the demand from that level. Strategic Example Strategic Demand Management might be a business strategy for how to influence user behavior. The telecom industry a few years back offered “Free nights and weekends”. This was a “Strategy” to manage the “Demand” until the provider could get all of the infrastructure laid down to support the demand for service. Tactical Example Within the activities of “Demand Management “ are those that are defined to monitor, manage, and report upon the patterns of business activities (PBA) and the activities of the varied user profiles (UP’s) . Demand Management would provide the UP’s and PBA’s and work very closely with Capacity management (managing workload at the component level to meet