Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Change management is an essential part of IT service management (ITSM), and it's a tightrope walk between implementing the change as fast as possible and mitigating the risks. The risks go up when it's an emergency update. According to Harvard Business Review, 70% of change initiatives fail. But emergency changes are important, they’re essential to keep the business flowing and to mitigate losses. Let's explore the emergency change control process and five best practices for it.

Have we often heard phrases like ‘The Customer is King’ and ‘The Customer is Always Right? These phrases have undoubtedly been around for a while but are they still pertinent in this dynamic sales and marketing environment? When you refer to your customers as kings, you inherently place them on a pedestal, a place of high regard. And more often than not, this can cause issues. As yourself, would you be able to relate to a king or a friend?

The hotel industry is huge, and they are inventory intensive as well. For example, hotels have lots of facilities where customers can spend their time such as restaurants, cafes, showrooms, etc. These all facilities have an abundance of inventory and hotels themselves have rooms that are the biggest inventory for hotels as they help in generating revenue. Therefore, it is important to have an inventory management strategy so that inventory is not wasted.

Project management principles can help your organization strive toward operational excellence. If you are embarking on complex and challenging projects, you need a clear set of principles to ensure you are moving in the right direction. While there are many different project management frameworks, we are going to break down some basic project management fundamentals.

We’ve been talking about it for more than a year now, but the last few months have only affirmed the fact: hybrid work is here to stay. The myriad research that’s been conducted so far proves that not only do employees want the flexibility of hybrid work, but also that hybrid work has a huge potential to drive better business results.

Peanut butter and jelly are two great condiments on their own but pairing them together elevates the sandwich game to a whole other level. That’s pretty much the case with employee experience and customer experience. When organizations pair EX and CX together and channel their efforts to keep both ends of the spectrum happy and delighted, the end result is the sweet and salty aftertaste of PB&J in the form of lower employee turnover and higher customer satisfaction.

As businesses grow, the support teams often struggle to keep up with increasing workloads. There is often more than one issue, service request, or customer query that needs resolving, and the staff can be under-equipped to attend to them in real-time. Hence, it is vital to ensure that your IT support staff should be able to maintain high levels of productivity, swiftly address customer demands, and efficiently manage all incoming support requests.

SolarWinds recently release Hybrid Cloud Observability, a solution we’ve been building towards for a long time, and something I see as the evolution of monitoring. If you missed Thomas LaRock’s recent article on observability and how we got here, then you missed a fun walk down memory lane. Importantly, it covers the history of our evolution from a simple toolset to the comprehensive set of monitoring known as the Orion® Platform and beyond.

We’ve entered a new era of cyber risk where cybersecurity is no longer just an IT issue, according to findings from a May 2022 ThoughtLab global survey co-sponsored by ServiceNow. Although cyberattacks and breaches are increasing, many organizations are unprepared to respond. The problems come down to three main areas.

A robust IT asset management solution is key to the efficient delivery of IT services to an organization. It’s important to keep track of the organization’s assets, both hardware and software, to ensure continued service delivery. Without this, these assets may fail or stop functioning as intended and can cause inconvenient service disruption.