Workforce Productivity - Best Practices
Steps to improve IT workforce productivity include:
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Develop a strong team orientation - Effective teams and the effective planning and execution provide the structure necessary to get the best from all team members. Well written job descriptions are a first step in that process.
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Align roles and performance objectives - Change causes by today's business environment causes misalignments of roles and focus of a significant number of the workforce. Job descriptions that are results and metric driven are an essential tool in the management process.
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Set performance goals and manage workforce with that as the focus - A majority of the workforce performs better if they have specific goals they must achieve. Good job description include measurable goals.
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Evaluate workforce based on defined objectives and goals - Review job performance based on job content and metrics to see how they can be modified to improved organizational productivity and minimize organizational dysfunction.
IT Best Practices News and Information
Service-Oriented Architecture and IT Service Management Are Keys To Success in the Recovery
SOA and ITSM drive success and productivity
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 youre 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 infoIT 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. Theyve 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 whats 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 companys success.
- more infoSecurity 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 infoRecord mangement key to information goverance
Effective record management and information governance provides a
foundation for addressing the various challenges faced with electronic
information, including:
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Management of information growth. Proactively monitoring and managing what content is being stored based on business value and record keeping obligations;
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Mitigation of risk. Reducing risk and ensuring conformance with different regulatory, legal and business policies; and
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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.
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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.
Recovery Point and Recovery Time Metrics
Recovery point objective (RPO) refers to the amount of data loss a customer can tolerate, specifically the point in time to which your enterprise must be able to recover the data. Some enterprises require an RPO of ZERO. That means the enterprise cannot lose a single committed transaction in the event of a site failure; they must be able to recover the data back to the zero minute of the time of the disaster. There are implications to setting up an RPO of zero. The replication solution will require synchronous replication (explained in detail later in this section) and may impact performance of the application being replicated.
An
RPO of greater than zero, for example 30 minutes, can be handled differently. An
RPO of 30 minutes means the customer can tolerate losing the last 30 minutes of
transactions in the event of a site failure. If the disaster occurrs at 12:00,
the customer must be able to recover the data to at least 11:30 (30 minutes
prior to the disaster). This can most likely be accomplished with asynchronous
replication with minimal performance impact to the application. In this
situation, careful planning and monitoring of the write-history log is essential
to support the expected RPO.
A RPO can only be
determined by their business rules and other governances of their environment.
The customer must weigh the risk of data loss in a higher RPO against the cost
and performance impact of a zero RPO.
Recovery time objective (RTO) refers to the amount of time it takes a customer to get their backup site up and running after a complete failure at the primary site. Most customers have an RTO of anywhere from 15 minutes to 8 hours, though the average is about 2 hours. This includes the time to failover the replicated LUNs (logical Unit Number) to the backup EVA (Enterprise Virtural Array) , recover the backup database and bring it online, and redirect any applications to the backup database server. A faster RTO can usually be accomplished by prestaging the backup site to the greatest extent possible.