ITSM Articles

How Important is ITIL, and Other Certifications, to IT Service Desk Staff?

How relevant is ITIL right now, especially for IT service desks and service desk agents? If you want some hot-off-the-press insight, new research data from HDI – in its 2018 Technical Support Practices & Salary Report – offers two perspectives on the value of ITIL certification to North American service desk agents.
This article summarizes the 12-step journey to Modern Service Management. It provides useful nuggets of information and takeaways you can apply immediately; with the journey map used to help to prevent and/or mitigate failures and to optimize successes.
In order to understand IT services better, and make the translation into business value, they can be broken down into three groups of properties: better IT services, faster delivery of IT services, and cheaper IT services. Here, industry authority Mark Smalley takes a closer look at these three dimensions.
Corporate IT service desks have long understood the opportunity, and benefits, of knowledge management, but far too many continue to struggle to make the most of what their service desk agents, and the wider IT organization, already know. The question is: why is this?
Here Doug Tedder discusses seven fundamental things that IT must do to run like a business, including: having a compelling portfolio of services and products and exhibiting financial and business acumen. After all, the business of the future demands a technology partner that acts and runs like a business.
Agile and DevOps practices are adopted to help resolve complex business issues at speed while still providing an increased certainty of intent, quality, and safety, but have you ever stopped to think about the the impact of Agile and DevOps on your business continuity practices?  
Should the person you’re asking to approve a change request actually be able to stop a change from occurring, even if everyone else agrees it should occur? This article aims to help you understand who in your organization is best positioned to approve changes.
This article aims to provide an overview of the different types of knowledge bases available. The question we want to answer here is: “Is it better for your company to use an internal knowledge base (that’s built into your ITSM tool) or an external knowledge base provided by a third party?”
Here we look at the current state of ITSM and ITIL adoption and also look ahead to advise on how we – globally – need to change to prepare for the future of ITSM. Plus we share tips on how to start your future ITSM career – either as a newbie or someone who is eager to change with the times.
AI and machine-learning, once obscure academic subjects, are now the talk of dinner tables and cocktail parties. But how can the new technologies and techniques of AIOps extend and integrate with established ITSM foundations to help prepare organizations for the future of IT? This article explores.
We must stop treating the processes in ITIL as discrete units, where “paint-by-numbers” is a viable approach, says Kaimar Karu. Remember: it’s not about processes, it’s about value and services, and the “how” of every process or concept matters only when the “why” is first successfully addressed.
IT is a critical business function, with any significant outage a disaster – exactly why the CIO should have a seat on the Board. So why does the question of whether IT is part of the business or a supplier persist? Is IT the victim of an injustice or maybe just super-bad at PR? Let’s take a look.
There’s one major area of IT that unlike the rest isn’t clearly defined — the people. And it’s why effective stakeholder management is so vital to your IT success. Here we dig into what stakeholder management is and provide a simple, five-step framework to help manage your stakeholders more effectively.
After attending a demonstration of live, real-time, security threat hunting, Daniel Card was left disappointed. So for this article he decided – in line with his research – to hunt out some real-life security threats on the internet on his own. Here you can get the lowdown and see the actual data he found.
The new, and higher, expectations of digital consumers – which includes employees – now means that IT organizations need to reassess their IT support services and capabilities across four key areas including service support strategies and service desk operating models; here Sarah Lahav discusses all four.