Operations & Service Delivery

The changes that are currently being driven through the business are having an interesting affect on how Information Technology is being viewed. As it becomes more and more apparent that the changes required rely in the main on IT to deliver the appropriate infrastructure, it becomes equally apparent that there are insufficient IT resources to do so efficiently within the time frame expected. Furt...

Many who have outsourced their Service Desk complain that in doing so they lost touch with the pulse of their organisation. Bringing the Service Desk back in-house allows customer and IT intimacy to be re-established. In my experience, once IT shows that it understands, and can effectively deal with user’s service issues, only then will it gain the permission it requires to ass...

For a long time now the organisational structure of the group of construction companies to which we belong has more or less flown in the face of what would normally be considered best practice. The holding company’s philosophy has always been that as three of the operating divisions compete against each other in the highly competitive Australian market place, they should, within reason, be free ...

From time to time our company looks at opportunities to grow the business through the acquisition of other organisations. When this occurs we are asked to review the information technology infrastructure of the target organisation. Our brief is to assess their IT health and identify areas where there may be significant expenditure required to ensure it achieves a level which complies with our stan...

Delivering real business improvement in Workforce Automation & Management practices has proven elusive for many organisations. Two principal factors seem to have been at play. Firstly, a piecemeal approach seems to have been taken with a focus on rostering rather than on the entire process chain (see diagram). Secondly, the organisational change management effort seems to have been under...

We have recently been successful in winning two significant projects in Western Australia associated with the construction of the South Western rail link between Bunbury and Perth. These projects, which have a combined value of around $400m, are for the provision of infrastructure for the railway line which, as well as including several bridges (Package E), also involves tunneling under the Perth ...

Service-level agreements (SLAs) serve as a powerful tool for enabling an IS organisation to understand the business'' definition of adequate service (based on business requirements) and for business communities to understand the support function''s responsibilities. If the services are sourced externally, then they are also one of the most critical factors in the success of the outsourcing relatio...

To date we have been concentrating our efforts on improving the performance of our Help Desk, through better incident and problem management, and through imposing some much needed disciplines on our infrastructure support team by introducing more rigorous and collaborative change management processes. It is true to say that, prior to ITIL, we firmly believed that it was important to resolve as man...

One of the most difficult dilemmas an IS project manager or CIO is likely to face is what steps should be taken when the client will not accept a proven technical solution, e.g. because she claims acceptance will compromise her ability to meet her performance criteria set by the CEO.

Small and midsize companies have, so far, mostly postponed investment in CRM solutions because of their complexity, their cost and dubious return on investment. Now, with Microsoft in the fray alongside Salesforce.com and others like them with their online deployment models, SME''s have a better range from which to choose and should be planning how they can take advantage of more affordable soluti...