Tape vs Disk
Debate

 

Metrics for the Internet, Information Technology,
and Service Management

Over 540 Objective
Metrics Defined
83 Graphical Metric Reports
show over 240 metrics

Compliant with ITIL
ISO 20000
IT Service Management

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Version 4.0

1. Added section on Outsourcing Metrics
2. Updated style sheet
3. Correct minor errata

Version 3.1

1. Sample reports reviewed and modified to comply with ITIL and IT Service Management
2. Service Management and Help Desk Section Updated to comply with ITIL and IT Service Management
3. Graphics Updated
4. Glossary Updated

 

Version 3.0

1. Sample reports reviewed and modified to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley
2. Sample reports presented in landscape format

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Metric and IT Measurement News

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Service-Oriented Architecture and IT Service Management Are Keys To Success in the Recovery

SOA and ITSM drive success and productivity

One bad customer experience can cost you that customer for life. Hospitality, travel, retail, healthcare, and financial services are especially prone to losing customers who have a negative experience. It does not take much for a customer to decide that you and your company are not worth his time, effort, or money.

  

Customers like to feel loved, and they are turned off very quickly when they sense that you do not care about the pain they are feeling. Even if you cannot help them because the situation is beyond your control, acknowledge that you understand both the situation and their frustration.

 No customer wants the person serving her to be distracted or preoccupied. Ever go to the local mall and try to get help from a teenager focused more on texting her friends than helping you find what you’re looking for? On the other hand, being too focused can be a bad thing. Have you ever asked an innocent question out of curiosity and then found yourself stuck for an eternity while a customer support person hunts endlessly for an answer? This person is likely so focused on getting the answer that he does not realize that you really do not care that much about it and would rather not wait for an answer to an inessential question. Be sure your people understand the degree of focus required for the job.

Even if the employee has the right skill set and experience, his odds of being successful and remaining on the job are low if his core behaviors and tendencies do not line up with those needed for success in that particular role. This is especially true for customer-facing roles in which your frontline employees act as extensions of your brand and heavily influence the customer experience.  

- more info

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IT Service Management drives customer satisfaction

Industry estimates peg the costs of acquiring new customers as being about five times more than the costs incurred to satisfy existing customers. IT Service Management and change control are keys to this process.

Customer retention and satisfaction also drive profits. According to some experts*, a 2 percent increase in customer retention can have the same effect on profits as cutting costs by 10 percent. And a 5 percent reduction in customer defection rate can increase profits by up to 25 to 125 percent, depending on the industry.

Additionally, existing customers are the ones who are most likely to be future purchasers. They’ve already shown they want and like your products or services and are willing to pay for them. And in many cases, customer profitability tends to increase over the life of a retained customer.

So what’s the key to retaining customers? Keeping customers happy has always been a cornerstone of good business practice. But with today's economic conditions, delivering good service to ensure satisfaction has become critical to any company’s success.

- more info

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Security of wireless networks compromised by Google

Security of wireless networks is a concern of Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal who is heading up a 30-state investigation into Google's Wi-Fi data gathering scandal.

Blumenthal's investigation adds to the legal headaches for Google caused by the revelation that its Street View cars were collecting wireless "payload" data in addition to geolocation data from unsecured wireless hot spots. Ever since Google revealed the extent of its data gathering a month ago in response to inquiries from German regulators, lawyers and politicians have been lining up to express their outrage.

"Consumers have a right and a need to know what personal information--which could include e-mails, Web browsing, and passwords--Google may have collected, how, and why," Blumenthal said in a statement posted on his Web site. "Google must come clean, explaining how and why it intercepted and saved private information broadcast over personal and business wireless networks."

- more info

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Record mangement key to information goverance

Effective record management and information governance provides a foundation for addressing the various challenges faced with electronic information, including:

• Management of information growth. Proactively monitoring and managing what content is being stored based on business value and record keeping obligations;
• Mitigation of risk. Reducing risk and ensuring conformance with different regulatory, legal and business policies; and
• Management of access to content. Driving competitive advantage and improving business operations through both access control and better re-use of information. Policy is at the heart of each of these challenges and key to an information governance strategy.
• Information governance is most effective when policies can be carried forward consistently with enabling technologies. Foundational technologies at the core of a good information governance strategy include classification, security and access control, retention policy management, search, archiving and content management.

- more info

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Recovery Point and Recovery Time Metrics

- more info

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Most Common Security Weaknesses - Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance

Security Manual Template has a solution for each of these weaknesses.
    1. Improper account provisioning with segregation of duties
    2. Insufficient controls for change management
    3. A general lack of understanding around key system configurations
    4. Audit logs not being reviewed (or that review itself not being logged)
    5. Abnormal transactions not identified in a timely manner be considered abnormal or a violation of a security policy within the network.

go to http://www.itproductivity.org/Security.htm

- more info

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Risk management starts with risk assessment

There have been lessons learned  from the current financial crisis in wasy to address perceived weaknesses in risk identification, assessment and management. The direction that CEOs and CIOs need to taker are:

• Risk management must be given greater authority
• Senior executives must lead risk management from the top
• Management needs to review the level of risk expertise in their organisation, particularly at the
  highest levels
• Managers should pay more attention to the data that populate risk models, and must combine
  this output with human judgment
• Stress testing and scenario planning can arm executives with an appropriate response to events
  Incentive systems must be constructed so that they reward long-term stability, not short-term
  profit
• Risk factors should be consolidated across all the business operations
• Managers should ensure that they do not rely too heavily on data from external providers
• A careful balance must be struck between the centralisation and decentralisation of risk
• Risk management systems should be adaptive rather than static

- more info

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Common threads for security issues

A comprehensive  survey compares  findings of several security studies and finds that:

• Big jumps in incidence of password sniffing, financial fraud, and malware infection.
• Organizations often are fraudulently represented as the sender of a phishing message.
• Average losses due to security incidents are down again this year (from $289,000 per company to $234,244 per company), though they are still above 2006 figures.
• Twenty-five percent of companies felt that over 60 percent of their financial losses were due to non-malicious actions by insiders.
• Most companies are satisfied, though not overjoyed, with all security technologies.
• Most companies t their investment in end-user security awareness training was inadequate, but most felt their investments in other components of their security program were adequate.
• When asked what actions were taken following a security incident, 22 percent stated that they notified individuals whose personal information was breached and 17 percent stated that they provided new security services to users or customers.
• When asked what security solutions ranked highest on their wishlists, many named tools that would improve their visibility - better log management, security information and event management, security data visualization, security dashboards and the like.
• Companies generally said that regulatory compliance efforts have had a positive effect on their organization's security programs.
  

- more info

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Improving knowledge worker productivity a CIO challenge

Many analysts support the notion of an integrated productivity environment for information workers. Many vendor frameworks combine these capabilities to create the next-generation workplace for information workers. The introduction of Microsoft Office 2007, Open Office and Google Documents are solutions with tight design integration, deliver the functionality that would have previously required 6 - 10 products for a full business productivity platform. The next releases of these products will take this integration to the next level by providing more flexibility in delivery and new capabilities to help improve productivity by saving the business time and money. - more info

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Chnage control and Quality Assurance Fail at McAfee

Change control and quality control fail at McAfee, as a result they released a product that caused thousands of customer PC to fail.  McAfee has responded with the following statements:

How did this DAT file get through McAfee’s Quality Assurance process?

• Process – Some specific steps of the existing Quality Assurance processes were not followed:  Standard Peer Review of the driver was not done, and the Risk Assessment of the driver in question was inadequate. Had it been adequate it would have triggered additional Quality Assurance steps.
• Product Testing – there was inadequate coverage of Product and Operating System combinations in the test systems used. Specifically, XP SP3 with VSE 8.7 was not included in the test configuration at the time of release.

What is McAfee going to do to ensure this does not repeat?

• Strict enforcement of rules and processes regarding DAT creation and Quality Assurance.
• Addition of the missing Operating Systems and Product configurations.
• Leveraging of cloud based technologies for false remediation.
• A revision of Risk Assessment criteria is underway.

What is McAfee going to do to prevent this from happening again?

• Nearly all of McAfee's 7,000 employees have been working around the clock to help customers get back to business as usual and to make sure this never happens again.
• McAfee is implementing additional QA protocols for any releases that directly impact critical system files. McAfee is rolling out additional capabilities in Artemis that will provide another level of protection against false positives by leveraging an expansive whitelist of critical system files and their associated cryptographic hashes.

- more info