BPO
Gartner, 6/10/03: BPO Services: Know What You Are and Are Not Buying
There are many flavors of service offerings that are being referred to as "business process outsourcing." Buyers must understand what services are included to determine the return on investment associated with a BPO relationship.
[more]
Help Desk
Giga, 6/11/03: Performing Root Cause Analysis Through Categorization of Help Desk Incidents
John Ragsdale
How do we best capture information about help desk incidents to allow root cause analysis reporting?
Performing root cause analysis is critical for understanding the genesis of customer problems, so common root problems can be fixed via training, technology or adjusting policies, cutting calls to the help desk. Granular root cause analysis is best enabled by linking each incident to a specific solution in a knowledge base, though an alternate method uses a field or fields on each incident to track attribution about the root cause for each customer problem.
[more]
Giga, 6/11/03: Escalating Help Desk Incidents Outside of IT May Guarantee Poor Service Levels
John Ragsdale
What common problems occur when the help desk relies on experts outside of IT to act as “level three” experts for certain customer problems?
In help desk audits performed by Giga, relying on subject matter experts (SMEs) outside of IT to resolve customer issues is a frequent root problem of missed service levels, due to incomplete position descriptions or objectives, interdepartmental conflicts and SMEs unwilling to relinquish control of systems/applications. Unless all barriers are removed, help desk agents should retain ownership of each issue and act as customer advocates to make certain the experts take action to resolve problems within the bounds of the service level.
[more]
Security
Computerworld, 6/12/03: Defending your DNS: Best practices for reliable DNS and DHCP
By Paul V. Mockapetris
Well-publicized attacks against Domain sName System (DNS) root servers and top-level domains highlight the vulnerability of the DNS infrastructure. Many CIOs are looking for ways to ensure secure, reliable network services.
[more]
ZDNet, 6/13/03: Antivirus flaw crashes Exchange servers
By Robert Lemos
In the digital equivalent of an autoimmune disease, Microsoft Exchange servers at a handful of companies have crashed because of a flaw in the Network Associates antivirus software that's designed to protect them.
Network Associates confirmed Thursday that in the past two days, four customers have been affected by a problem in its McAfee GroupShield 5.2 antivirus software for Exchange 2000 servers. A fifth company discovered the issue, but didn't suffer a crash, the security software maker said.
[more]
Mobile
Giga, 6/10/03: RIM BlackBerry Users Need a Contingency Plan
Ken Smiley
Given RIM’s recent legal setbacks, should we be abandoning BlackBerry as a wireless e-mail solution?
Research in Motion’s (RIM) BlackBerry wireless e-mail solution remains a strong competitor in the wireless e-mail market despite the recent announcements of judgments against the company. We see no reason to abandon the solution at the present time.
[more]
Computerworld, 6/12/03: IEEE approves 802.11g standard
Vendors have been shipping gear based on the draft standard
By Stephen Lawson
A long-awaited standard for wireless LANs that offers more carrying capacity than the current IEEE 802.11b specification while using the same frequencies won final approval this morning.
The new 802.11g standard lays out the ground rules for WLAN gear that's capable of at least 24Mbit/sec. and up to 54Mbit/sec., while remaining backward compatible with existing 802.11b gear that runs at a maximum of 11Mbit/sec. Both use radio spectrum in the 2.4 GHz band. Another standard, 802.11a, defines 54Mbit/sec. gear in the 5-GHz band.
[more]
Future
Gartner, 6/10/03: Grid Technology Is Influencing the Future of Large Servers
Grid technology is an alternative to symmetric multiprocessing, nonuniform memory access, massively parallel processors and cluster designs to achieve very high system performance.
[more]
8:32:44 AM 
|
