INCIDENT MANAGEMENT

In a previous entry I was fascinated by the idea of running IT as a business. A key concept stemming from this is the ITSM, which is IT Service Management. This is the main topic discussed in ITIL V3, and many companies are trying to adopt the ITIL infrastructure in their own environment to fulfill IT services and manage it at a enterprise level.

One of my upcoming projects is to review the Incident Management process currently in place in our company. There are a lot of dicussion in ITIL, as well as in all kinds of white papers, about event management, incident management and problem management. There are certainly overlapping areas among those 3, but the differences are quite clear and should definitely be treated separately.

So I've been doing some homework for Incident Management and I thought I might just put some notes here.

VOSS

I was talking about the VOSS water with folks and guess what? Just found a case study and a SWOT analysis of the brand. Pretty interesting, and I particular agree on the "fashion savvy" part :)

So here's the analysis, a very interesting marketing lesson, in case anyone's interested.

Run IT As a Business

We had one of our IT directors from the enterprise technology services group today talking about how our IT infrastruture evolves throughout the years and what kind of issues and opportunities that we are facing in terms of aligning business and IT to achieve our business goals. It was really an informative presentation and was enlightening for us to hear how our business profit doubles in value every 5 years with information technology as one of the biggest drivers.

Then I read this article in McKinsey Quarterly about an interview with the CIO of Shell on how Shell as an international giant in the oil/gas industry has conducted huge IT transformation to better assist to achieve their business targets. A lot of the information seems to correspond to what I just heard in the presentation and I was really excited that our IT organization is heading towards the right path based on the success of the Shell story.

TOYOTA vs RISK

Trent sent me this article talking about how much risk the Toyota accelerator issue increases, written by a CMU professor.


As a driver and a non-stat-expert person, I really didn't get it. To me, comparing the risk of driving a recalled Toyota with that of driving while talking on the phone, is totally not practical. I mean, they are totally different risk factors in nature - I can discipline myself with rules not to talk on the phone while driving, but I can't tell or control my accelerator if it's defective and doing crazy things. This is fatal/life-threatening matter, and it really doesn't make any sense to me by calculating the "general riskiness of driving a recalled Toyota" from a holistic view.

Is E&Y in trouble?

So basically, I read this article about the bankruptcy exam for Lehman Brothers, and some interesting items pop up so I thought it would be nice to put something up here.

I was going to put more thoughts on the report that the examiner produced, but I realized that I didn't quite understand A LOT OF the stuff in it.....-_-

This BusinessWeek article says:

How much is iPad?

So, today is the big day for all the APPLE maniacs: iPad is open for pre-order today, and it'll be delievered on April 3rd. I saw on the web that a lot of people were getting everything ready and waiting in front of their screens for the channel to open, which is, well, quite commonly seen actually.

According to techspot.com, it's estimated that ~ 51000 orders were placed during the first 2 hours after the line is opened.

Why MBAs are Going East -- great article from BWeek

LINK

James Tsai is the sort of MBA corporate recruiters covet. He went to a good
prep school, earned a degree with honors from Middlebury College, and made
vice-president in Bank of America's (BAC) international wealth management
group at the age of 26. Today, Tsai is about to graduate, straight A's in
hand, from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, a top-rated program
in America. And he's hustling to land his first post-MBA job—in China.

Executive Class strivers like Tsai used to have just one post-grad career
destination, the U.S. Not anymore. "I am doing everything I think I can to
get over there," he says.