5 Tips: Designing Better Bots

3rd of June, 2018 / / No Comments

Around about now many of you will be in discussions internally or with your partners on chatbots and their applications.
The design process for any bot distils a business process and associated outcome into a dialog. This is a series of interactions between the user and the bot where information is exchanged. The bot must deliver that outcome expediently, seeking clarifications where necessary.
I’ve been involved in many workshops with customers to elicit and evaluate business processes that could be improved through the use of bots.… [Keep reading] “5 Tips: Designing Better Bots”

ITSM – Continual Service Improvement (CSI) – All you need to know

11th of May, 2018 / / No Comments

Why Continual Service Improvement (CSI) is Required?

  • The goal of Continual Service Improvement (CSI) is to align and realign IT Services to changing business needs by identifying and implementing improvements to the IT services that support Business Processes.
  • The perspective of CSI on improvement is the business perspective of service quality, even though CSI aims to improve process effectiveness, efficiency and cost effectiveness of the IT processes through the whole life-cycle.
  • To manage improvement, CSI should clearly define what should be controlled and measured.
… [Keep reading] “ITSM – Continual Service Improvement (CSI) – All you need to know”

Defining IT Strategy

9th of May, 2018 / / No Comments

Information Technology (IT) Strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines how technology should be used to meet IT and business goals.

The following approach can be used to define your organisation’s IT Strategy.

Inputs:

  1. Organisational Business Priorities
  2. Organisational Key Behaviours
  3. How Business will be Supported by IT
  4. Technology Influences
  5. IT Strategic Principles
  6. IT Service Management Operating Principles

First of all, in order to define an IT Strategy, we need to obtain the above inputs (as much as possible).… [Keep reading] “Defining IT Strategy”

EU GDPR – is it relevant to Australian companies?

26th of March, 2018 / / No Comments

The new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) from the European Union (EU) imposes new rules on organisations that offer goods and services to the people in the EU, or collects and analyses data tied to EU residents, no matter where the organisations or the data processing is located. GDPR comes into force in May 2018.
If your customers reside in the EU, whether you have a presence in the EU or not, then GDPR applies to you.… [Keep reading] “EU GDPR – is it relevant to Australian companies?”

Continual Service Improvement Roadmap – Operations – How it can be done

21st of March, 2018 / / No Comments

Step 1: Current State Assessment – People, Process and Technology
Step 2: Gather Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT)
Step 3: Gap Analysis – Comparing with Target State/Aspirations
Step 4: Recommendation and Next Steps
Step 5: Continual Service Improvement Roadmap
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Example: Step 1 – Current State SWOT Analysis
Analyse the current state – SWOT, include all the data in the category below. This will help to compare the target state outcomes.
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Example: Step 2 – Target State
Obtain the target state outcomes and aspirations from the organisation/department that you are analysing.… [Keep reading] “Continual Service Improvement Roadmap – Operations – How it can be done”

Set your eyes on the Target!

18th of August, 2017 / / No Comments

1015red_F1CoverStory.jpg
So in my previous posts I’ve discussed a couple of key points in what I define as the basic principles of Identity and Access Management;

Now that we have all the information needed, we can start to look at your target systems. Now in the simplest terms this could be your local Active Directory (Authentication Domain), but this could be anything, and with the adoption of cloud services, often these target systems are what drives the need for robust IAM services.… [Keep reading] “Set your eyes on the Target!”

What's a DEA?

14th of August, 2017 / / No Comments

In my last post I made a reference to a “Data Exchange Agreement” or DEA, and I’ve since been asked a couple of times about this. So I thought it would be worth while writing a post about what it is, why it’s of value to you and to your business.
So what’s a DEA? Well in simply terms it’s exactly what the name states, it’s an agreement that defines the parameters in which data is exchanged between Service A and Service B. … [Keep reading] “What's a DEA?”

The Vault!

4th of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Vault
The vault or more precisely the “Identity Vault” is a single pane view of all the collated data of your users, from the various data source repositories. This sounds like a lot of jargon but it’s quite simple really.
In the diagram below we look at a really simple attribute firstName (givenName within AD) DataFlow
As you will see at the centre is the attribute, and branching off this is all the Connected Systems, i.e. Active Directory.… [Keep reading] “The Vault!”

Where's the source!

26th of July, 2017 / / No Comments

SauceIn this post I will talk about data (aka the source)! In IAM there’s really one simple concept that is often misunderstood or ignored. The data going out of any IAM solution is only as good as the data going in. This may seem simple enough but if not enough attention is paid to the data source and data quality then the results are going to be unfavourable at best and catastrophic at worst.
With most IAM solutions data is going to come from multiple sources.… [Keep reading] “Where's the source!”

Selling Adoption Services

28th of June, 2017 / / 2 Comments

It’s no secret that Partners have challenges selling change & adoption services. I’m talking specifically about Partners who will provide offerings to complement other professional services they provide, like technical delivery. Proposals are subject to scrutiny and in the absence of a value proposition, change & adoption will be one of the first things to go in a re-scoping exercise.
“It’s OK. We do change & adoption ourselves”
Organisations like Kloud deliver a range of professional services centric to our mission to ‘move organisations to the cloud’.… [Keep reading] “Selling Adoption Services”