Warren Lee

Business intelligence (BI), it seems, has been wrested from the hands of elite business analysts and executive decision makers and pressed into service in call centres, sales forces and other customer-facing service organizations. The early results indicate that this is a winning strategy.

It makes perfect sense. If you have already adopted outsourcing as part of your IT strategy, why not use outside expertise to manage the outsourced elements?

As the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) continues to gain acceptance around the globe, its implications for each area of IT service delivery are being examined carefully. Most of the focus has been on the internal operations, but the ITIL approach can be just as effective when services are outsourced, even when there are multiple vendors involved.

Jim Burke knows from experience that multi-vendor collaboration

Managing multiple IT vendors on a major project, like taking more than one date to the dance, can be an exhilarating success or your worst nightmare come true. Yet such arrangements are becoming a routine part of IT management.

Hurricane Katrina made every IT organization question the viability of its disaster recovery (DR) plan. A natural disaster, a major accident or a terrorist act in the headlines forces us to think about survival. Could your facility, or your business, take a hit like that and survive?

Ontario

SunGard Availability Services' track record in the area of business continuity looks pretty impressive. The company's Web site says SunGard does 350,000 hours of business continuity consulting each year, has written 10,000 disaster recovery (DR) plans, and can be credited with more than 1,500 successful recoveries! Dave Palermo, SunGard's vice-president, marketing, shares some of these strategies in this exclusive interview with Warren Lee.