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Stephen Mann

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Stephen Mann is an independent IT and IT service management content creator, and a frequent blogger, writer, and presenter on the challenges and opportunities for IT service management professionals. In his career, he’s held positions in IT research and analysis (at IT industry analyst firms Ovum and Forrester), IT service management consultancy, enterprise IT service desk and IT service management, IT asset management, innovation and creativity facilitation, project management, finance consultancy, internal audit, and most recently product marketing for a SaaS IT service management technology vendor.

1070 Views

November 13th, 2018

Creating the Business Case for Enterprise Service Management

There are many reasons for adopting an enterprise service management (ESM) strategy – i.e. the widespread use of IT service management (ITSM) principles, best practices, and technology in other business functions. It could be a need to achieve all three of “better, faster, cheaper,” or perhaps the delivery of automation and other back-office-performance enhancing capabilities...

875 Views

May 22nd, 2018

Customer Experience: How Well Do You Really Meet End-User IT Support Needs?

How often are we so engrossed in what we’re doing to consider the impact (of what we do or don’t do) on the people we are serving? Or, put another way, how often is task execution seen as more important than task outcome? IT support is an excellent example of how it can be too...

1069 Views

January 23rd, 2018

6 ITSM Service Management Tool Questions Answered

With organizations continuing to regularly switch ITSM solutions, every 3-6 years (according to industry analysts), it’s become an unfortunate, unwanted, and expensive technology-investment cycle that needs to be broken. That’s why I was invited by the fine people at SysAid to present my recent webinar Your 7-Point Checklist for Selecting the Right ITSM Tool. I...

1015 Views

December 5th, 2017

In 2018, Great IT Service Delivery Will Require ITSM Alchemy

ITIL, the popular IT service management (ITSM) best practice framework, is no longer the de facto approach for ITSM. Not only are there valid alternative approaches, so much has changed in the world since the last version – ITIL 2011 – was released, with more and more organizations now potentially requiring guidance and help from...

1143 Views

October 24th, 2017

VeriSM: There’s a New ITSM Good Practice Approach in Town

ITIL has been the IT service management (ITSM) best, or good, practice “frontrunner” since the 1990s despite the birth, or evolution, of other approaches. And there’s no doubting that it has helped tens of thousands of organizations. However, the latest version of ITIL was released over six years ago and, despite the release of ITIL...

1136 Views

February 21st, 2017

The Downside of Using Email to Manage IT Support

There are a number of reasons why email and other personal productivity tools are used for IT support, for example: Most IT staff usually have access to email IT staff know how to use email The email technology has already been “paid for” in providing a set of tools for personal productivity reasons So it’s...

1007 Views

March 30th, 2016

ITSM Tool Selection Basics: 10 Tips to Make RFP Stand for “Right Fit Procurement”

As Joe the IT Guy said in his recent HDI blog on selecting a new IT service management (ITSM) tool – “Selecting any new technology is a serious matter.” In particular, there’s little fun to be had with the request for proposal (RFP) process, for all the involved parties. And, having been involved with RFPs...

2399 Views

January 19th, 2016

ITSM and Business Intelligence: Why Do We Continue To Ignore Our Wealth of ITSM Data?

I’ve written about IT service management (ITSM) and the opportunities of business intelligence (BI) before, but that was four years ago, as an industry analyst. Since then, I’ve seen very few vendors shouting about the fact that they have upped their reporting, and potentially BI, game. It’s really odd, especially when you consider how the...

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2399 Views

January 19th, 2016

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