Outsourcing
Gartner, 11/19/03: Business Process Expertise Will Define IT Services Leaders
The underlying transition of business process outsourcing as a market for technical skills to a market for business process skills will define market competitiveness during the next two to three years.
Despite the buyers' market for IT services, business process skills remain scarce.
IT services providers face an influx of new resources from all over the globe. Primary attention tends to go to the price arbitrage that appears to be playing out on a global stage. However, the underlying transition from a market for technical skills to a market for business process skills continues to be the key dynamic that will define market competitiveness during the next two to three years.
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Meta, 11/14/03: Top 10 Risks of Offshore Outsourcing
Outsourcing & Service Provider Strategies, Service Management Strategies
Dean Davison
Offshore outsourcing is growing 20%-25% per annum, with little evidence of slowing. Indeed, while most enterprises experience initial resistance, most technical issues are readily resolved and geopolitical risk is deemed insignificant after careful evaluation. Even the current political fervor about jobs being moved offshore via outsourcing is not impacting the demand or strategy of IT organizations. Offshore outsourcing will continue to grow as a “labor arbitrage” model until 2008/09.
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Giga, 11/18/03: IT Trends 2004: Active Directory Management
Thomas Mendel
What are the key market drivers and trends regarding Active Directory management technologies for 2004?
Active Directory management technologies include all products that help to migrate from a legacy network operating system (NOS) to Active Directory, assist in Active Directory change management, ease Active Directory administration tasks, and monitor, detect and identify any abnormal behavior of the Active Directory implementations. Giga anticipates a healthy growth rate for the market through 2004.
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Gartner, 11/24/03: Predicts 2004: IT Management and IT Services & Outsourcing
The focus on cost will not disappear during the next 36 months, but an unavoidable need for innovation and value add will lead to new opportunities and challenges in the IT services arena.
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Help Desk
Giga, 11/18/03: Key Metrics for Service Centers and Help Desks: Operational Metrics
John Ragsdale
What core operational metrics should be tracked by customer service centers and help desks?
Operational metrics for help desks and customer service centers have evolved from phone-centric to multichannel and now expand beyond productivity-centric to include more CRM friendly metrics such as customer satisfaction ratings for agents. Support management must ensure the products in place are capturing adequate metrics to not only rate agents objectively on quality and quantity of work performed, but also to pinpoint areas needing fine tuning or additional training in orsder to improve the overall customer experience.
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Giga, 11/18/03: Key Metrics for Service Centers and Help Desks: Cost Metrics
John Ragsdale
What core metrics related to costs should be tracked by customer service centers and help desks?
While, historically, support management has focused on metrics relating to agent quality, productivity and interaction volumes, increased use of embedded analytics by vendors is making robust cost reporting readily available. Having a base set of cost metrics in place will ease budget processes and speed up building a business case for automation software such as remote control or knowledge bases. Support management should routinely track cost metrics to determine where resources are being spent and identify products and departments with high support costs that may be targeted for further analysis.
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Giga, 11/24/03: IT Trends 2004: Service-Level Management and Business
Services Management Technologies
Thomas Mendel
What are the key market drivers and trends regarding service-level management and business services management technologies for 2004?
In 2004, the market for service-level management and business services management technologies (SLM/BSM) is expected to experience healthy growth. Giga defines SLM as the process of measuring the service quality, reporting results and taking action to ensure the quality stays within agreed parameters. BSM takes this approach one step further by mapping the actual business processes to the underlying IT infrastructure.
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IT Management
Giga, 11/13/03: A Cautious Outlook for 2004 IT Budgets
“While IT budgets for 2004 for North American enterprises are up only 2%, IT execs have yet to factor positive economic news into their plans, so Forrester expects actual IT spending to grow by 4%.”
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Security
Gartner, 11/18/03: New Technologies Will Drive Managed Security Services
New approaches to security technology at the network perimeter and new reporting requirements by auditors will cause fundamental changes in how enterprises monitor security devices and manage outsourcing in 2004.
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Collaborative Technologies
eWeek, 11/25/03: Triple Point Relies on Rss
By Anne Chen
Feeds enable workers to share critical data.
Best known as a method for personal web loggers to syndicate content, RSS feeds have evolved into an integral way to disseminate mission-critical information at Triple Point Technology Inc. Using a combination of Web-based technologies and Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook e-mail client, Triple Point, of Westport, Conn., was able to leverage Resource Description Framework Site Summary feeds that enable users to access real-time reports from closed enterprise applications. Triple Point develops and manages commodity trading platforms for energy, power and financial services companies.
Allie Rogers, the company's chief technology officer, said collaboration among product development teams has increased dramatically, enabling the company to efficiently meet product cycle dates. An estimated 75 percent of Triple Point's work force subscribes to at least one internal RSS feed, Rogers said.
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eWeek, 11/24/03: John Patrick on Weblogs
Contagious Media
By Marcia Stepanek,
Weblogs, or blogs, are, at their very least, Web pages for self-proclaimed pundits. But increasingly, blogs are showing up on the corporate intranet, and, when left alone by corporate censors, can energize collaboration and give new life to the concept of knowledge management.
John Patrick is president of Attitude LLC and former vice president of Internet technology at IBM, where he worked for 34 years. During his IBM career, Patrick helped start IBM's leasing business at IBM Credit Corporation, and was senior marketing executive during the launch of the IBM ThinkPad. Starting in the early 1990s, Patrick dedicated his time to fostering Internet technologies. One of the leading Internet visionaries, Patrick is quoted frequently in the global media and speaks at dozens of conferences around the world.
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News From Canada
The Globe and Mail, 11/25/03: Canadians discover instant messages
Services gaining broad acceptance, with huge potential for future growth
CUB L8R - if you understood this, you are one of the many Canadians who contribute to the millions of monthly text messages back and forth between mobile phones.
Translated, it means 'call you back later,' and it's just one of hundreds of short forms in the informal text message library of commonly used words and phrases.
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