White Papers
Good to Great IT
A survey and analysis of what makes an IT department great.
Good to Great IT Whitepaper
ITIL: Theory into Practice
It is testimony to the complexity of today’s technology systems that even one of the most widely-used frameworks for simplifying and standardizing IT management is, in itself, a daunting piece of work.
Implementing the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) set of guidelines to aid the implementation of a lifecycle framework for IT service management (ITSM) is now a major priority for a growing number of organizations, but remains a task where external help is often of critical importance. In keeping with Touchpaper’s role as a leading provider of IT Business Management (ITBM) solutions, this white paper aims to assist today’s chief information or technology officer with a number of critical issues relating to ITIL
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The Touchpaper ITBM Maturity Model
Touchpaper has introduced a uniquely practical approach to best practice service management that enables CIOs to measure the value and contribution of IT to overall business success. The new methodology, known as the Touchpaper Maturity Model, is applicable to both internal IT and customer facing environments. This new white paper explains how, using the Touchpaper Maturity Model, organizations can gauge effectiveness and track Return on Investment (ROI).
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Using technology to improve customer service in your business
In today's highly competitive environment our customers are easily able to find several suppliers, who offer comparable, if not identical services, at similar prices. This provides some explanation as to why customer service is increasingly considered the key business differentiator in today's market. It plays a critical role in the success, or indeed demise, of an organization.
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ITIL Refresh - Will it improve your service?
IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is not a new concept, being originally developed by the UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC) in the 1980s. However, it is currently undergoing a major refresh that will lead to a new framework – ITIL V3, that is designed to update existing best practice in line with the changing global business climate, user feedback and modified organizational needs. These modifications mean that ITIL will become even more central to those managing IT service delivery and support infrastructures moving forward.
This white paper aims to provide an overview of the content in the forthcoming ITIL Refresh and Touchpaper’s views on how it will benefit organizations when adopted as part of an overall IT Service Management strategy.
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Knowledge powers the service desk
Knowledge management (KM) has enjoyed something of a chequered history in the corporate arena, with many early implementations failing to live up to full expectations. This is perhaps unsurprising given the high hopes for KM and the practical difficulties that many organizations experienced when trying to effectively create, capture, organize, access and use knowledge.The time has come to review knowledge management within service delivery.
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Forcing customer service up the business agenda
Customer service plays an increasingly important role in both the private and public sector today and research by Touchpaper reveals that organisations face a host of challenges in the area, inlcuding more demanding customers, diminishing loyalty and fiercly competitve markets.Faced with these pressures, Touchpaper's survey of 100 customer service directors reveals that 76 per cent feel more investment in technology could help deliver improvement in customer service.
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Measuring the Value of IT Survey
IT plays such a central role in supporting today's businesses that it would seem almost essential to develop goals and processes to evaluate how it is contributing to business success. Yet a recent survey of 100 IT directors by IT Business Management (ITBM) software leader, Touchpaper, reveals that many organisations are failing to do this.
According to the research only 40% of enterprises formally measure how IT is contributing to strategic business level goals or track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for IT in business related areas.
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Pragmatic ITIL: A Panel Debate
The purpose of the Pragmatic ITIL panel debate, held at the Institute of Directors and hosted by Touchpaper, a leading provider of IT Business Management solutions, was to draw together customer experiences, expert opinion and vendor knowledge regarding the ITIL framework and best practices for service management implementation and consider important issues that cut across the group’s specialisms. Pragmatic ITIL presented a fruitful area for such consideration, with the increasing pressures of compliance, fast changing technologies and the need for the IT function to place itself at the center of the business, key to driving uptake of the framework and raising the bar for overall service delivery.
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Change & Configuration Management Survey - June 2006
A recent survey of 100 IT Directors commissioned by Touchpaper provided an insight into the critical issues and priorities they face when trying to keep IT Systems available, secure and responsive to changing business needs.
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Change & Configuration Management Whitepaper
If there is a Holy Grail in IT Service Management (ITSM), it might well be a situation in which an administrator can obtain any piece of information about any corporate IT device, including its current location, owner, dependencies, usage and history at the touch of a button. This simple proposition, immensely complex in practice, is fast becoming a reality as a result of pressing management concerns surrounding risk, cost and regulation.
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The Integrated Service Desk for Novell Users
Organizations that utilise Novell solutions such as GroupWise®, ZENworks® and eDirectory® typically justify their investment with increases in user productivity and collaboration, better management of resources, and improved identity and security management. Although deploying these tools will increase productivity and reduce risk, they can also increase demand on the IT Service Desk to provide Incident, Problem and Change management support for users. Unlike many Service Desk solutions, Touchpaper’s IT Business Management software is tightly integrated with the Novell infrastructure and therefore allows users to benefit from all the features of a market leading service desk system, while simultaneously leveraging the unique features of their Novell applications.
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Getting better value from local government IT
Touchpaper has long promoted the deployment of state-of-the-art tools and techniques to improve the quality of IT infrastructure support. It also enthusiastically promotes the ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) standards, which ensure failsafe methods of managing complex IT environments. In instigating this study, Touchpaper has paid particular attention to the Audit Commission’s findings on current support practices in Local Government, and to its views on the capabilities of Councils to manage change in today’s dynamic environment. A specific objective of the study was to assess what kind of investments are needed in the coming years if Authorities are to succeed in meeting the Government’s target of 100% electronic service delivery by 2005.
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Improving IT service levels - by Touchpaper and LANDesk
IT managers face a difficult juggling act in trying to maintain or increase service levels to other departments in the face of increasing infrastructure complexity and mounting financial scrutiny. In this environment, many are implementing, or at least considering, automated systems that can undertake time-consuming tasks such as inventory taking, patch application or software licence monitoring. This white paper aims to undertake a review of the risks and benefits of implementing these systems compared to sticking with traditional manual processes. It also looks at the differences in return on investment (ROI) between so-called ‘point products’ which handle only a specific function such as applying patch updates, and integrated management suites that offer several automated functions within a single package.
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Counting on your help desk – How to find the right return on investment
A lot of money has been spent on IT support tools in recent years. Overall, millions of pounds and dollars have been invested in finding ways to simplify and improve the complex task of managing IT – with much of the investment devoted to help desk systems, network or systems management tools, asset management, problem resolution and knowledge databases. As it moves into a phase of technology maturity, the issue of return on investment (ROI) becomes more of a priority. This white paper examines why this issue is back on the table, looks at the problems inherent in making these calculations, and identifies payback elements at different stages in the evolution of an IT support function.
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Demystifying Sarbanes-Oxley for the Service Desk
SOX Compliance is a relative term, depending on your business, your business process, and your IT Intrastructure.
In plan English: How can you understand the key elements of SOX and COBIT, and IT's new responsibilities for internal controls? (i.e. the rules and procedures the organization must follow to keep financial reporting correct and reliable.)
Read more to learn about:
- The role that your Service Management/Service Desk organization can play in managing, tracking and auditing the business and IT processes that are required by sarbanes-Oxley.
- How Touchpaper can help you incrementally address your SOX compliance requirements, while at the same time adding value to your business operation.
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Building value across the organization
Research shows most managers ‘not confident’ of accuracy of asset records
Managing physical assets and their inter-relationships is becoming a critical priority for nine out of ten mid-sized UK organisations – but 84 per cent find it difficult to have an accurate, cross-departmental picture of their asset base, including computers, property and equipment, new research has revealed. This leads to difficulties assessing the impact of failures within an infrastructure.
The increasing priority of asset management is driven by worries about business risks including fraud, systems failures, unlicensed software proliferation, physical damage, the need for more effective utilisation of assets, insurance issues and the need to comply with a growing number of regulations.
If you are interested in finding out how you can introduce an effective asset and configuration management program while maintaining departmental independence and protecting investment in existing systems, please download our discussion paper.In the paper you can read about the key findings of the survey and review the changes that you can make to achieve the benefits of a consolidated, controlled approach to asset management.
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The role of ICT in meeting Local Government efficiency targets.
The Gershon Report "Releasing Resources for the Front Line" released in 2004, obliges every public body to look for efficiency savings in all areas of operation. In addition, in 2005, the UK Government paper on Transformational Government outlined their strategy for using "technology to transform government services", "doing IT differently" to support the next phase of public service reform. Furthermore, the Government also announced that it intends to conduct a second Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) to report in 2007. A decade on from the first CSR, the 2007 CSR will provide an opportunity for the Government to take stock of the progress it has made against its public sector goals, and to review the effectiveness of departmental spending.
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Flexible Working Survey
A recent survey of 100 IT Directors commissioned by IT Business Management software leader Touchpaper provided and insight into the critical issues and priorities they face supporting ever increasing numbers of home and mobile workers.
The findings from the survey, which polled 100 IT directors, suggest that the drive to encourage more flexible patterns of working by Government and employers is being held back by inadequate or inappropriate IT support.
The research found that while the UK's 2.2 million homeworkers*, the immeasurable number of people who work at home on an ad hoc basis in the evenings or at weekends and those who want access to e-mail and other organizational applications when travelling away from home, may expect a more balanced, family friendly or flexible working life, IT challenges cause them wasted hours and extra stress.
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When IT goes wrong, can IT services rise to the challenge?
IT was supposed to make work easier, but IT glitches cause us to swear, throw things and miss out on seeing family and friends according to a new survey carried out by Touchpaper. In a survey of 1,000 adults, a third of those who had experienced IT problems admitted to missing family and social commitments because a glitch had kept them at their desks late. Two thirds admitted to swearing, over half (52 per cent) to missing deadlines and 45 per cent to being in a bad mood all day. 15 per cent have even resorted to throwing things.
The Touchpaper study looked at the role of the modern IT service department and consisted of three separate surveys: an independent survey of 100 IT directors conducted by research company, Vanson Bourne; an independent online survey of 1,000 adults using IPSOS UK's i:Omnibus Service; and an online survey of 48 helpdesk support staff.
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How to Manage the ICT Dependency Culture - Local Government Whitepaper
In July 2004, Sir Peter Gershon published an independent review of public sector efficiency. In his report (known simply as The Gershon Report), Sir Peter proposed savings of over £20 billion by 2007/8 and anticipated a gross reduction of over 84,000 posts in the Civil Service. As a result, it was anticipated that there would be a far greater dependency on technology.
Touchpaper has joined forces with industry analyst, Rhion Jones, to produce a white paper entitled ‘How to Manage the ICT Dependency Culture’. The whitepaper is a call to action for Local Authorities in England and elsewhere in the United Kingdom to appreciate some of the challenges that lie ahead as a result of our unprecedented dependence upon information and communications technology (ICT).
It is intended for all those who find themselves involved in the immense process of change that affects all parts of the public sector, but which impacts Local Government in particular.
Whilst presenting us with significant challenges, our dependence on ICT is not bad news. It provides us with a huge range of benefits including more and better access to public services for citizens and businesses, more customer-centric public services, and new ways to personalise services and engage citizens more fully in service design and provision.
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Freedom of Information
The Freedom of Information Act 2000, the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act and the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 came into force on 1st January 2005. Public Authorities across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland are now required to log, manage and respond to requests for information (RFIs) from its citizens, regardless of citizen’s age, nationality or location.
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Is ITIL the Route to True Efficiency?
The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the best known approach to IT Service Management. ITIL, a set of best practice IT guidelines which can help an organization to achieve real IT operational efficiencies has received a significant amount of high-profile press in the last year. Organizations including IBM and Microsoft have all adopted ITIL best practices, in recognition of the need for IT efficiency to become a strategic business goal. Yet in spite of this endorsement, ITIL still remains something of an unknown quantity to many organizations both in terms of what it means, and how to implement it effectively.
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Treating Customers Fairly
This white paper provides an insight into the critical issues and priorities surrounding the management of the Financial Services Authority's Treating Customers Fairly (TCF) principles.
The results of a survey commissioned by Touchpaper showed that TCF was a high priority for the industry in general, particularly for retail organisations with high volume sales to high street customers. Results also showed that complaints handling was a significant area of activity. Many felt that it was a reactive way of measuring compliance with TCF and demonstrating results to the FSA.
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