The role of the IT service desk manager is not an easy job. It takes a lot of knowledge and experience to manage an IT service desk efficiently. With rapidly evolving technology and accelerated product launches, service managers have to be constantly on their feet and with their eyes trained on the horizon to ensure seamless IT delivery to their clients. Modern service desk solutions and frameworks have helped considerably. Many tasks can be automated and delegated more efficiently.

It wasn’t too long ago that a security system would be nothing more than a few walls, some cameras, and an inattentive security guard. That’s no longer the case In today’s digital landscape. Now organizations must invest in securing their assets from a growing number of cyberthreats. To start, they must first draw up the boundaries of their IT security perimeter.

We’ve been pretty enthusiastic about teaching you how to create a solid knowledge base. Yet knowledge base mistakes are still very common despite our best attempts to crush them into oblivion. This article is here to help you avoid those pesky sandtraps. According to an IDC survey, Fortune 500 companies lose a staggering $31.5bn yearly from knowledge base mistakes alone. Or, in other words, companies lose money from their inability to effectively share knowledge.

The change advisory board (CAB) can be one of the most important and useful meetings a service-oriented IT organization holds. It sets out a view of what’s happening to key services over the next week (or longer depending on its frequency and timeframe), confirms the impact to the business, reviews previous change activity, and looks at continual service improvement (CSI).

It's been a crazy couple of years, and things are still changing rapidly all around us. But you don't need me to tell you that; you're probably living it in your organization already. In the IT sector, we've gone through a global chip shortage, the postponement of major tech events, the delay of product launches, and perhaps most importantly, almost all companies shifted almost completely to remote work.

Books! Who doesn’t love books? Whether you’re one for the latest thriller to top the charts, or you go-Instagram-crazy for the latest self-help book, the majority of us love to read. In fact it was reported that the global book market was expected to grow from $87.92 billion in 2020 to $92.68 billion in 2021, with that figure reaching $124.2 billion by 2025.

It’s that time of year again when we get to make our New Year resolutions – with these things that hopefully get to last longer than the month of January. We might make a list of our New Year resolutions in our personal lives, but what about in our professional lives? Especially since any workplace-related resolutions might make our work lives easier or more rewarding (and ideally both). So what resolutions could you consider for 2022?

Tl;dr: Log4j is a mess, if you’re chasing down the applications, services and servers that use Java; consider the suggestions below to make zero day patching easier.

As I write this blog on IT service management (ITSM) predictions for 2022, I’m not entirely sure where 2021 disappeared to. 2021 went very much the way of 2020 for many IT organizations. However, it did see the replacement of 2020’s need to rapidly move employees to homeworking (and changing IT services and support capabilities to reflect new ways of working) with the need to return some employees to office-based working.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled It’s Time to Get Rid of the IT Department. It’s paywalled, so those without a subscription might not be able to read it, but the gist of it is this: IT departments are the lumbering remnants of a bygone era, and as such should be put out to pasture.