Posts Tagged ‘best practice’
by Amanda Dahl, Director at AWIC
Quite often, business continuity planning is thought to be the domain of very large enterprises, like large financial institutions, who need to continue trading even in the event of major global disaster. But as we mentioned in our article on the impact of snow-related transport issues on businesses, “Small companies, especially ones without dedicated IT staff are the most vulnerable to loss of productivity due to weather-related staff shortages. According to the Federation of Small Businesses, this could translate to an estimated 1.2 billion pounds lost in a day because of the disruption, with one-fifth of the UK workforce unable to make it into work.”
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Tags: best practice, business continuity, colocation, disaster recovery, service improvement, strategy
Posted in AWIC Desktop, Charity and education, Film/TV, Media, Financial Services, Hospitality, IT Strategy, Oil and gas, Pharmaceutical and biotech, ProStream, Resourcing and recruiting, SMB | No Comments »
Do you run a startup or small business? We’d love to hear about how you use IT and what works for you.
If you can spare 2 minutes, please share your views by taking our short survey.
Tags: best practice, service improvement, website
Posted in AWIC Desktop, News, SMB, Uncategorized | No Comments »
A quality recruiting database
For resourcing companies, a quality database can be the key to helping business really grow, even in these tough economic times. It can mean the edge over the competition, and just one day without that data could mean significant losses for many companies.
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Tags: best practice, business continuity, cloud, disaster recovery, hosted desktop, recruiting, strategy
Posted in IT Strategy, Resourcing and recruiting, SMB | No Comments »
by Amanda Dahl, Director at AWIC
Good capacity planning is worth the effort
The benefits of an effective capacity management programme are well known to most IT departments. Proper capacity management allows you to:
- Reduce infrastructure costs by sweating your assets
- Meet agreed service levels by avoiding capacity-related outages
- Accurately budget for infrastructure growth by projecting future requirements
- Avoid project delays by having appropriate resources on-hand
And, by now, most IT departments have some form of capacity planning tool implemented which can give them fairly accurate reports on current and past usage.
But what are you doing with those reports? Who attends your capacity planning meetings? And do you have a dedicated capacity planning manager?
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Tags: best practice, budgeting, business alignment, capacity planning, ITIL
Posted in Financial Services, IT Strategy, LevelBase, Oil and gas, Pharmaceutical and biotech | No Comments »
by Ivan Zidek, Director at AWIC
In the second of a series of articles, we look at ways to make a remote support teams work for you. See the first in our series here.
Ongoing actions, to ensure your new team continues to perform
Several factors will ensure the remote team you have in place can continue to perform well, even after the honeymoon period is over, and the staff they replace have left the organisation.
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Tags: best practice, offshoring, remote teams, strategy
Posted in AWIC Services, ProStream, SafeShore | No Comments »
by Amanda Dahl, Director at AWIC
Many enterprise infrastructure groups consider follow-the-sun support to be the holy grail of the IT operations service. The aim is to provide customers with a seamless, and truly global, support service. Simply dial a single number or create a single support ticket, and the request will be handled in a timely manner, no matter where in the world the user is located.
But how is this implemented when you currently have silo’d regional support teams?
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Tags: best practice, global teams, managed service, offshoring, service improvement, strategy, support
Posted in Financial Services, LevelBase, Pharmaceutical and biotech, ProStream, SafeShore, Uncategorized | No Comments »
by Amanda Dahl, Director at AWIC
Many companies already have some form of change management in place, but how stringent is yours?
Organisations often put change management to one side, citing the need for flexibility and rapid releases. While it’s true that change management can slow down the rate of change, this is often of benefit to the business in the long run. Think about the business impact of pushing through an unstructured change which causes an interruption to your service. Have you stopped to calculate the loss to the business of your last change-related outage? Even if it was only the loss of business opportunity, it can add up significantly.
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Tags: best practice, change control, service improvement
Posted in AWIC Services, Financial Services, KeyControl, LevelBase, Oil and gas, Pharmaceutical and biotech | No Comments »
by Ivan Zidek, Director at AWIC
In the first of a series on remote teams, we take a look at some best practices for recruiting remotely and what to consider when building a remote technology team.
The scenario
Take one London-based investment banking technology organisation, the need for more system administrators to support three thousand high-end servers, budgets being slashed faster than tuna in a sushi shop and what do you get? The move to a new breed of remote system administrator.
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Tags: best practice, offshoring, remote teams, strategy
Posted in AWIC Services, Financial Services, IT Strategy, Oil and gas, Pharmaceutical and biotech, SafeShore | No Comments »
As more and more companies journey down the path to virtualisation, AWI takes a look at some of the best practices that could make the difference between a successful implementation and a more chaotic rollout.
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Tags: best practice, strategy, virtualisation
Posted in AWIC Services, Film/TV, Media, Financial Services, Hospitality, IT Strategy, InfraSwitch, Oil and gas, Pharmaceutical and biotech | No Comments »
