Paul Bittorf Posts

We all (or at least most of us) want to be the best at what we do. This holds true even for those who perform IT services and manage IT services organizations.  I remember the sense of pride we had in my service department, which went far beyond a paycheck. Overtime was the norm for our group, and customer dissatisfaction personally upset the people I worked with. That pride was an intangible asset that the companies I outsourced to usually understood within the first month or two of our engagem ...

Remember Green IT? Though the recent economic plunge has certainly had an impact on the growth of eco-friendly technology, the more recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and rising energy prices (again) have once again proven that the environment and our limited resources are never too far away from the front page (no, I don’t actually read actual newspapers but it is still a good metaphor). Though it would be nice to think that people care about Green IT just because they care about our world ...

In many ways I’m a very logical and practical guy. I try to plan my day in a logical and practical order.  It doesn’t always work out that way of course, but that’s OK - life is chaotic. I still try. I like to do things that make sense and that, for the most part, have some intrinsic value. When I was providing IT services to customers, it made a lot of sense (to me at least) to first sit down with my potential customers (sometimes for days) and figure out what they needed before I ever tried to ...

I’ve been working with IT services and support executives as part of CompTIA for the past eight years.  In that time I have learned that what most of you want usually comes down to some very basic items. Indeed, some of the best things in life are actually quite simple. Industry collaboration is seldom rocket science (incidentally my brother works at Raytheon with actual rocket scientists and yes, they are geeks…but I digress). Industry collaboration, however, is quite useful because no one want ...

As I see it, one of the most essential ingredients of a successful managed services operation is the services level agreement (SLA).  In fact, it’s so crucial that it’s part of our standard definition for managed services that I mentioned in my last blog post. CompTIA Managed Services Definition:The ongoing management, monitoring, and maintenance of networks, software, hardware, and related IT services by an external organization. Managed services are often marked by detailed service level agree ...

It seems to me that a good starting point of any managed services conversation is to agree just what managed services are.  Though there are a lot of definitions that have been floated in the technology field, I like the definition that we at CompTIA vetted in managed services research last Fall, based on its simplicity and directness. We have since taken this definition to several groups, including CompTIA’s new Managed Services Community, and it seems to be generally accepted.  I like it so mu ...