Did you know that an average worker spends approximately 3 hours per 8 hour workday in personal or unproductive work? A significant amount of time is lost in repetitive or administrative tasks, which do not aid in increasing project productivity. Instead, they adversely impact employee satisfaction and efficiency by robbing substantial project time. As such, improving workflow productivity and efficiency has become a key challenge for organizations today.

Studies consistently show that a positive UX (user experience) drives revenue growth, repeat business and brand loyalty. Here’s a good example: in Robert Pressman’s book Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, he writes “For every dollar spent to resolve a problem during product design, $10 would be spent on the same problem during development, and multiply to $100 or more if the problem had to be solved after the product’s release.”

The insurance sector is incredibly competitive and tightly regulated, so being able to provide great customer service is vital to success. And having the right technology is imperative to delivering quality service. At Covéa Insurance, the UK arm of France’s top mutual insurance group, we provide commercial, motor, high-net worth, property, pet, and protection insurance to more than 2 million customers.

Some of the many ways that malware, including ransomware, is commonly spread is through malicious attachments to business email, unsanctioned apps downloaded from third-party app stores, drive-by downloads via phishing and pharming attacks, employing brute-force tactics using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), and network propagation via SMB and CIFS sharing.

We all like to enjoy untethered freedom, as is shown by the incredible growth of mobile devices we use every day for business and personal activities. We use mobile devices for buying products and services, and banking and investing. We download apps that allow us to connect with our favorite businesses and socially interact with friends and relatives.

The success of a modern business starts with recognizing the value of the customer and committing to provide a great experience. The best companies do this by putting respect and empathy at the core of every interaction. In today’s new era of work, delivering an enhanced customer experience has become increasingly connected with the employee experience. This creates new opportunities for organizations to drive stronger satisfaction for both parties simultaneously.

ServiceNow has been named a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Agile Planning Tools for the first time. This is a big move for us after being positioned a Niche Player in 2019 and a Challenger in 2020. We believe this position is a result of our extended integration with third-party tools, our project and portfolio management (PPM) use cases, and our portfolio management capabilities.

Recently, we had the opportunity to hear from Charlie Betz of Forrester Research about the future of technology operations. He covered the shift from project-based work to product team orientation, the integration between DevOps and IT services and the ways in which the entire enterprise is getting value from investments in artificial intelligence. Check out some of the interesting questions and answers from the discussion and be sure to catch the full conversation in the video below.

A configuration management database (CMBD) is a centralized repository that stores information about all the significant entities in your IT environment. These can include your hardware, installed software applications, documents, business services, and even the people who are part of your IT system. The CMDB is designed to help you maintain and support the interrelationships between the configuration items (CIs) within a vast IT structure.

Here at Ivanti, we are excited about iOS and iPadOS 14.5. I’m pleased to share that we offer zero-day compatibility and key feature support across the Ivanti product portfolio for the new features built into Apple’s updated OS.

Just as our physical world has suffered from a devastating health pandemic, over the last 3 years the digital world has been suffering a ransomware pandemic that grew 7 times in 2020 compared to the same time in 2019. While we have vaccines for our health crisis what are our options to help protect us against this digital threat?

I’m a big believer in leaving things better than I found them. I apply that mentality to work, home, and all the places in between. This planet is pretty remarkable, as are the approximately 7.6 billion people who share it. So, it’s no surprise that I want to play a part and create lasting change that leaves our world more sustainable, more equitable, and more ethical for everyone.

A client onboarding checklist will help to make client onboarding easy for both parties. There is no reason why client and customer onboarding has to be a laborious process. Utilizing the power of workflow automation tools like StartingPoint, you can transform your onboarding process into a streamlined workflow designed to enhance customer experiences. Have you considered enhancing customer experiences with an improved onboarding process?

QR codes, those touch-free codes that look like square puzzles or mazes, seem to be everywhere these days. Gaining in popularity over the past few years, their proliferation has exploded with the onset of COVID-19 precautions. These wonder-codes make it easy for our mobile devices to quickly scan a menu, pay a bill, and find information about a product or service. QR codes blend the physical world with the virtual.

As distributed work models become the norm, businesses need to respond quickly and effectively to the demands of their employees, especially when it comes to service issues. Historically, using multiple agents across departments has made it difficult for service and operations teams to access the information they need to resolve employee incidents and requests seamlessly.

As we enter spring 2021, transformational changes continue to impact ITSM. While IT service management embraces these new technologies, most organisations don’t currently have the high-level capabilities to match their ambitions. Freshworks has collaborated with the Service Desk Institute (SDI) to produce a report that determines how IT professionals feel about these new advances.

People are an organisation’s greatest asset. They are also the key to an organisation’s productivity, profitability and reputation. If the well-being of employees is neglected, the whole business is adversely affected. Fortunately, business owners and leaders are beginning to take employee well-being very seriously, particularly in the high-pressure world of ITSM.

Before I start my ramble here, let me tell you something... the day I learned how to construct a manual Effective License Position (ELP) in Excel my life gained a new purpose, and it became the biggest hobby, sport and passion ever! Those who have done manual ELPs in Excel will know that magic feeling! First, it’s hard as you scramble for the data and licensing knowledge, but if you’re lucky enough and at least get some vendor report or purchase summary, it's a good starting point...

Hyperconverged Infrastructure is a unified system that combines computer network and storage in one easy way to manage virtualized systems. To give you a brief understanding, these systems have two major components hypervisors and storage controllers. To elaborate further, typically the hyper converged systems are available as fully integrated hardware appliances and a standalone software. The question now arises how does it work?

Coca-Cola is one of the most recognizable brands on the planet. That’s because wherever it’s produced, the quality, product, and design are the same. When three Coca-Cola companies merged in 2016 to create Coca-Cola European Partners, operational differences became apparent. The company needed a way to standardize platforms and processes across 13 Western European countries and 50 bottling plants. We had three systems in place, three ways of working, and multiple languages.

The retail, banking, telecom, and tech sectors have been trying to prove their love of customer experience (CX) for years. But the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the need to elevate those vital customer relationships. German shoemaker Adidas is a case in point. In November 2020, it reported strong quarter-over-quarter performance.

Workflow efficiency has never been more important. As the COVID-19 pandemic tightens purse strings across the globe, organizations of all sizes are looking to get more done with less. Workflows are a vital asset to any organization. It has been found that approximately three hours of every eight-hour workday is wasted on irrelevant or personal tasks.

It is no secret that the failure rate of IT projects is the biggest worry for project managers. Add to this the impact of the current pandemic. A cursory Google search will present you with reports from Gartner, Statista and many others detailing how the spending in Global IT is projected to go down in 2020 (We still don’t have complete figures for all the financial quarters in 2020) compared to 2019. This is despite the availability of vaccines and the growing number of vaccinated population.

Is your company losing out to your competition because your workforce is unable to be productive? Do your employees lack the right tools and IT support that they need to do their jobs?Is your IT team struggling to meet the pouring demands of your employee IT issues? Are your employees feeling frustrated waiting for their IT issues to be resolved?

The term ‘patch’ triggers many familiar images – affixing a rubber patch to a blown bike tire, the ubiquitous duct tape repairs of myriad objects, and so on. While these temporary fixes won’t heal the underlying cause, they are a quick and easy solution. Our applications and software frequently need patches as well, to fix bugs, security flaws and add feature enhancements. However, in this case, patching is not a temporary band-aid, but rather a proactive planned strategy.

Over the past year, companies have flocked to digital transformation more than ever to protect revenue, maintain business continuity, and pursue productivity in today’s distributed work environment. Having an effective cloud strategy is a key component to any company’s digital transformation journey. To build the best cloud strategy, IT departments need one data model and cross-enterprise integration system.

Businesses need maximum agility to survive these trying times. The Agility Issue of Workflow Quarterly is packed with insights to help your company power through the pandemic and emerge stronger on the other side. The issue presents new research by ESI ThoughtLab and ServiceNow on how the pandemic has affected business agility in enterprises around the world.

Managing hardware assets, manually, from the time they are purchased to the time they are disposed of is a tedious, cumbersome task that is susceptible to many errors. These manual and scattered processes are often inaccurate and difficult to manage. Manual data keeping means that asset information is stored in silos, which raises the overhead expenses, increases the likelihood of asset theft and losses, and makes it hard to comply with the organization’s standards and regulations.

Protect your brand, people and data with an end-to-end, zero trust approach At Ivanti, we make the Everywhere Workplace possible. Our solutions enable fundamental security controls based on zero trust principles and best practices from cloud to the edge. Translation: we secure all endpoints and help organizations move toward an end-to-end, passwordless access authentication experience. Plus, we make it simple.

Recently we have received a lot of requests for Enterprise Alert to not only alert on critical situations but to also take a proactive approach to initiate, record and track those situations through ITSM tools such as ServiceNow and BMC Remedy. This post will center around what happens when critical systems fail and tickets are not being created in ServiceNow due to a break in the workflow.

Customer service is by no means easy. Managing this part of your operation can be immensely challenging. Your team must strike a balance between solid technical knowledge and perfect communication skills to deliver the very best customer experience. At StartingPoint, we believe customer experience is something that should be continuously refined. Exceptional customer experiences are the fuel driving the growth of your business.

Drive outcomes with insights What if you could give employees reliably great experiences while improving outcomes across your organization? You’ve got it with Enterprise Service Management from Ivanti. It arms you with insights and actions that let you dramatically reduce resolution times and give you more time for the cool stuff you love to do.

Being mobile is in large part about communication. Our app for mobile access to Alloy Navigator™ ITSM platform gives IT people the freedom to communicate with customers and teammates, notify stakeholders, submit approval requests, assign work, and escalate incidents from anywhere, anytime. All those communication tasks typically involve choosing the right person from a list.

Planning for a safe return to school in the midst of a health crisis is a daunting task. From gauging student preparedness and determining special accommodations to meeting government health requirements and communicating protocols with parents quickly and easily, there are many factors for IT services to consider.

Anyone involved in any kind of datacenter or physical IT operations faces multiple challenges every day: What if there were an easier way? End-to-end automated workflow At ServiceNow, we reached a major milestone: end-to-end automated workflow of the cloud hardware supply chain, from order through disposal. The features in the Paris release of ServiceNow® Hardware Asset Management (HAM) took us over the finish line, reducing asset management time for engineers and asset managers by 76%.

We are happy to announce the immediate availability of Spring 2021 update to the Alloy Software ITSM/ITAM platform, including Navigator, Navigator Express, and Discovery. This maintenance release (8.7.4) offers stability and usability improvements, resolves issues with external tool integrations in Discovery and Network Inventory, and addresses several issues reported in earlier versions. For detailed information about all changes in this update, please see Release Notes for your product.

Are you curious about how Ivanti is tackling Zero Trust? Check out this video clip below and hear from Scott Erickson, Lead Technical Marketing Engineer at Ivanti, to learn more and then visit the Zero Trust Access page for even more resources.

In today's complex IT world, employees expect to be productive from everywhere they work (think kitchen tables, sofas, coffee shop Wi-Fi or mobile hotspots) any time using various devices from desktop and laptops to PCs tablets and smartphones. And while work is happening everywhere, IT teams are rushing to secure their IT environment as the growth of devices, increased cybersecurity threats, and more data processed at the edge make their jobs even harder.

Hi! We’re Ivanti. We may have met before, but we’d like to reintroduce ourselves because a lot of things have changed for us. Between seriously expanded capabilities and a bold, fresh look, we’re a whole new brand. Of course, things haven’t just changed for us; the whole world has changed. For one thing, there’s a good chance you’re reading this from somewhere other than the traditional office space where you camped out prior to spring 2020.

For over four decades, large US businesses have relied upon the shared services business model for cost reduction and operational efficiency. Even now, the trend continues with over 80% of the Fortune 500 companies in the USembracing it for obvious reasons. Presently, Human Resources (HR) and Legal shared services teams have become increasingly popular due to their sensitive nature and the supportive role they play in the overall functioning of a business.

So, what does CX mean? As you can expect with any “what is” query you pop into Google, Wikipedia does a great job providing customer experience definition. It says that: “The product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship”. Now, by all means – that 100 % true. But, being in the customer experience game ourselves, we’re not entirely satiated. At least not just yet.

Efficient Data Center monitoring and management supports our digital economy. As a result, operation and protection of the Data Center are critical. For reliable and safe monitoring, transparency is of utmost importance. But it is surprising to witness that one of the least explored area in data center network establishment is monitoring. This is ironic because at its core, a network has two goals: 1) Get packets from A to B 2) Make sure packets are received from A to B.

Being a student can be exciting—and tough — all at the same time. There are many new things to get used to: a new place to live with new people, finding your way around a jumble of buildings, and new freedoms, often for the first time. Then there’s the challenge of your studies, with lots of new things to learn, deadlines to meet, and exams to pass. For many, life can feel quite stressful.

Today’s employees and customers expect modern, frictionless IT service management (ITSM) experiences that incorporate digital workflows. But how do enterprise IT leaders deliver on this expectation? The answer is simple: human-centered IT service management. Human-centered ITSM means incorporating human-centered design to simplify IT technology and make it easy for people to use. It’s not a completely new concept, but it’s more critical today than ever. Here’s why.

Password 1.0 was your cat’s name and your birth year and you used it across every endpoint for a decade. We see you, Sprinkles1979. Password 2.0 was SSO and MFA and WTF because literally everyone used Facebook for authentication. We all saw how well that went. It’s time for Password 3.0 We’ve always operated at the leading edge of innovation, and this is no exception. While the industry gets bogged down in sending texts to confirm authorization, we’re moving forward.