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Achieving Change Management from a Business Perspective  August 14, 2008 11:00 am PT

This SupportIndustry.com webinar, conducted by Pete McGarahan and FrontRange Solutions, examines IT and ITIL best practices for managing change across the entire IT infrastructure. In this webinar, you will learn:

• Why the first question during a system outage should be "What Changed?"
• Why formal and controlled IT Change Management is a high priority for the business
• The metrics that matter most for IT and the business
• Positioning IT Change Management on your ITSM Roadmap
• Changing the IT Culture to adopt and adapt to this formalized process for implementing change
• The business speaks -- real life stories regarding change gone badly!

Register today!

MyWay Interactive to Deliver Micro Social Networks for Enterprises
MyWay Interactive has designed the MyWay Network, a peer-based network that delivers instant on-demand collaboration within global enterprise sales teams and support structures. Integrated with the new Cisco WebEx Connect client, the MyWay Network offers multiple peer to peer and collaborative support features, automatically builds confidential, individualized client portfolios, and provides communication and alert infrastructure to global sales teams. The combined products bring new synergies for effective peer collaboration across geographic boundaries.

FutureResume.com Offers Free Video Resume and Conferencing for Job Seekers and Employers
Greg and Theo Rokos, executive search and sales leadership professionals, have announced the launch of FutureResume.com, a new concept in the online job board that allows job seekers to show their personality and professionalism through one- to two-minute video resume introductions that let them stand out from the crowd and find the perfect job. The new employment web site lets hiring managers experience some of the same qualities a job seeker might reveal in an interview, but before the investment in a live interview, shortening and solidifying the hiring process.

VISANOW Solution Simplifies the Green Card Application Process for Employers
VISANOW, an immigration solution provider, has announced the introduction of enhanced technology designed to simplify the Process Electronic Review Management (PERM) labor certification process required for employment-based permanent residency applications, commonly referred to as green cards. PERM is an electronic filing process designed by the U.S. Department of Labor and is the first step towards obtaining employment-based permanent residence.

Targeted Back-Office Cuts Instead of HR and GA Can Ease Impending Recession
As the recession looms, many companies are reacting by mandating across the board cuts in key General & Administrative (G&A) areas such as IT, finance, HR, and procurement. But new research from The Hackett Group, Inc. suggests more may be gained by taking an alternative approach  -- targeted, strategic reductions that can offset up to almost half the impact of a potential recession while minimally affecting service delivery and the ability to provide strategic value.

According to Hackett, typical Global 1000 companies (with $23.4 billion in annual revenue) can generate $200-$400 million per year in savings through targeted G&A cuts, an amount that represents up to 45% of the potential decline in pre-tax profit due to a recession. The cost reduction opportunities are focused in two primary areas. More than 40% of the potential savings, or up to $171 million per year, comes from IT alone. More than a third, or up to $145 million per year, comes from finance.

Hackett's research details the strategies and tactics companies can use to accomplish cost reductions, including reducing labor costs, cutting technology spending, and selective globalization of business processes. By utilizing empirically-proven best practices, companies can cut costs while minimizing impact on business delivery. Companies can also simplify or eliminate processes, an approach that often involves the use of outsourcing for activities that can be done faster and cheaper by a specialized provider. Process standardization is also a powerful approach, although it may require companies to make technology investments and can demand strong commitment from senior management.

In IT, for example, companies can cut infrastructure management costs in half by achieving world-class efficiency levels through strategic transformation. Another area to target is application maintenance, where cost reductions of over 40% are possible, largely by reducing the complexity of the application portfolio, taking a more disciplined approach to application disposition planning, and improving demand management.
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Significant Changes for U.S. Workers Since 1998
The latest edition of a study of U.S. workplaces finds that employers with more women and more minorities in top positions, and nonprofits organizations, are more likely to offer flexible workplaces. These are just two of the significant findings to emerge from the landmark 2008 National Study of Employers (NSE), released by the Families and Work Institute.

First conducted in 1998, the 2008 NSE addresses the changing needs of today’s workforce. Designed by Families and Work Institute and conducted by Harris Interactive, Inc., the NSE interviewed 1,100 employers with 50 or more employees located throughout the United States and provides trend data on changes that have occurred over the past 10 years. The study addresses questions such as:

A sampling of changes in the workplace over the past 10 years includes:

On the rise:

• Flexibility: 79% of employers now allow at least some employees to periodically change their arrival and departure time, up from 68% in 1998.

The 2008 study shows that 53% of organizations with 50 or more employees allow some employees to phase into retirement by working reduced hours over a period of time prior to full retirement and 38% allow some employees to take sabbaticals (paid or unpaid leaves of six months or more) and return to a comparable job.

• Elder care: Thirty-nine percent of employers today provide access to information about services for elderly family members compared with 23% in 1998.

• Employee Assistance Programs : 65% of employers provide EAPs today, up from 56% in 1998.

• Wellness: Sixty percent of employers provide Wellness Programs today compared to 56% in 1998.

• Maternal Benefits : More employers are providing private space for breastfeeding women in 2008 (53%) than in 1998 (37%).

• Domestic Partners: Employers are more likely to provide health insurance for unmarried partners of employees—31% in 2008, compared with 14% ten years ago.

On the decline:

• Flexibility: 47% of employers today allow at least some employees to move from full-time to part-time work and back again while remaining in the same position or level, down from 57% in 1998.

• Maternal Benefits: Far fewer employers provide full pay during the period of maternity-related disability, today at 16%, down from 27% in 1998.

• Health care Premiums: Only 4% of employers pay all of the premiums for family members today, compared with 13% in 1998. Overall, 35% of employers report increasing employees’ premium co-pays for individual and family health care coverage in the past 12 months.

• Pension & Retirement Plans: 29% offer defined pension plans in 2008 compared with 48% in 1998. Employers are also less likely to contribute to employees’ retirement plans. Twenty-nine percent of employers in 2008 provide defined-benefit pension plans, down from 48% in 1998. Employers in 2008 are less likely (81%) than employers in 1998 (91%) to make contributions to employees’ retirement plans.

More...

Confidence Among IT Decision Makers Impacts Staffing
Confidence among IT professionals appears to be stabilizing, and in some areas is showing a slight uptick, according to the latest version of the CDW IT Monitor, a bimonthly indicator of the direction and momentum of the IT marketplace.

The CDW IT Monitor is based on an online survey of at least 1000 IT decision makers from businesses of all sizes and all sectors of government. It is composed of two sub-indices, the IT Value Monitor, which measures the value of IT in achieving organizational objectives and satisfying decision makers' expectations, and the IT Growth Monitor, which measures future IT expectations within organizations.

Fifty-one percent of businesses predict IT budget increases over the next six months, up slightly from 49 percent in the previous IT Monitor. The leading driver of this change is in the medium-sized business sector, where the number of companies expecting increased budgets jumped 10 percentage points from April to 64 percent.

However, confidence has not started to improve with the same intensity across all sectors. Small businesses remain the least confident with only 27 percent anticipating a budget increase in the next six months. In terms of staffing, only nine percent of small businesses expect to bring on additional IT staff during that time, compared to 25 percent of medium-sized businesses and 41 percent of large businesses.

CDW Monitor highlights :

• The number of decision makers who feel that IT investment contributes to the organization’s bottom line increased four percentage points to 72 percent.

• The IT Growth Monitor score in the government sector increased two points to 69 from April. This increase was driven by the state government sector score, which rose six points to 72.

More...

U.S. Organizations Lose 7 Percent of Revenues to Fraud
U.S. organizations lose an estimated seven percent of their annual revenues to fraud, according to a survey of Certified Fraud Examiners who investigated cases between January 2006 and February 2008. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) published the results of the survey in a 2008 “Report to the Nation on Occupational Fraud & Abuse.”

The benchmarking data is compiled from 959 cases of occupational fraud that were investigated between January 2006 and February 2008. When applied to the projected 2008 United States Gross National Product, the seven percent figure translates to approximately $994 billion in fraud losses.

The report also found that:

• Fraud schemes tend to be extremely costly. The median loss caused by the occupational frauds in this study was $175,000. More than one-quarter of frauds involved losses of at least $1 million.

• Schemes frequently continue for years before they are detected. The typical fraud in the study lasted two years from the time it began until the time it was caught by the victim organization.

• Frauds were most often committed by the accounting department or upper management, and most fraudsters were first-time offenders. Only seven percent of fraud perpetrators in the study had prior convictions and only 12 percent had been previously terminated by an employer for fraud-related conduct.

• Occupational frauds are much more likely to be detected by a tip than by audits, controls or other means.

• Small businesses are especially vulnerable to occupational fraud.

• Seventy-eight percent of victim organizations modified their anti-fraud controls after discovering that they had been defrauded.

More...

HR Professionals Expect Very Weak Hiring for August 2008
Human resource professionals from around the country report that hiring in the manufacturing and service sectors will fall sharply in August 2008, compared with one year ago. The report also shows that the rate of new-hire compensation growth for both sectors grew at a substantially slower pace compared with July 2007. Those two sectors make up more than 90 percent of America’s private sector employment.

Manufacturing employment expectations plunged 24.8 points compared with August 2007. This index declined from 47.3 in August 2007 to 22.5 in August 2008. During the same time period, the manufacturing sector lost 40,000 jobs on a seasonally-adjusted basis and 8,000 jobs on a not-seasonally-adjusted basis.

Compensation growth declined significantly for new hires in the manufacturing sector. The manufacturing new-hire compensation index for July 2007 was 12.1, compared with 0.4 in July 2008.

In the service sector, employment expectations dropped 27.4 points from August 2007 to August 2008 (47.1 compared with 19.7). In August 2007, private service-sector employment rose by 98,000 jobs on a seasonally-adjusted basis and by 21,000 jobs on a not-seasonally-adjusted basis. The new-hire compensation index also decreased from a year ago — 14.1 in July 2007 to 6.6 in July 2008.
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3 Steps to Creating Personalized Support Experiences

"A 'one-size-fits-all' approach to service doesn't recognize what is unique about each customer."

Mindfully approaching each unique support incident can dramatically increase customer satisfaction. What's more, business intelligence collected from personalization also provides valuable insight for up-selling, cross-selling or renewal opportunities.

Pregnant Pause Can Hurt Career
Samantha Jenner was a true corporate high-flyer; by the age of 36 she was a senior manager at a blue-chip organization with international clients, a 300-strong team working under her and glittering career prospects. When she announced she was pregnant with her first child four years ago there were celebrations all round and she went off for six months’ maternity leave believing she would be fully supported on her return to her high-powered role. She was wrong.
Full Article...

Narcissists at Work: How to Deal with Arrogant, Controlling, Manipulative Bullies
Narcissism, defined as a personality disorder by the National Institutes of Health, is a pattern of behaviors that show a pervasive need for attention and admiration, as well as a lack of concern or empathy for others. In the workplace, narcissists tend to be successful and goal-oriented, with no concern for others who get in their way. They feel a need to control co-workers, projects and situations around them, and they can be manipulative, spinning situations and facts to make it appear that others around them are the problem, not them.
Full Article...

Everybody at Chorus Works at Home
Chorus, a provider of software for health care providers, closed its Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., headquarters in early June its office  in Texas in early July; that means all of the company's 35 employees and full-time consultants work at home. CIO Rick Boyd says the company decided to close its offices to save money (an estimated US$400,000 a year) and spare employees the hassle and rising cost of commuting. Chorus was able to make this move because it had much of the infrastructure already in place that would allow employees to collaborate and communicate with clients. But the company also had to establish work policies designed to maintain employee productivity, figure out how the IT department would provide desktop support and identify software tools to make employee workloads more transparent for managers.
Full Article...

When Gossip Goes Bad
"Pssst! Did you hear about the director of marketing? I hear she's having an affair with the vice-president of sales. Be honest. You've had conversations just like that around the water cooler, haven't you? After all, it's human nature to want to share information with colleagues. But when does an exchange of information cross the line from idle chit-chat to malicious gossip, the kind that can create a corrosive atmosphere in a work environment?
Full Article...

St. Louis Gets Serious About Tech Talent
There's been much acrimony  on the subject of attracting and retaining IT talent. Employers are regularly criticized  both for overstating the problem and doing little to rectify it. But give some credit where it's due. The St. Louis business community, having identified tech talent as a shared concern, last July launched a program called Greater St. Louis Works. The goal: Define the scope of the region's IT talent challenges and figure out ways to address them. The guiding principle: Regional economic development isn't just about dangling tax incentives and other subsidies in front of companies. It's increasingly about assuring local companies, and those considering moving in, that they'll have access to enough talented tech professionals, so critical to driving every business.
Full Article...

The Essential Guide to Employee Engagement: Better Business Performance through Staff Satisfaction
by Sarah Cook

Engaged employees are more productive, engender greater customer satisfaction and loyalty, and help promote a company's brand. This book explores the concept and practice behind creating an engaged workforce and how this can contribute to organizational success.  Cook draws on case studies and examples from globally recognized companies to demonstrate how actively engaged employees assist the progress of their organization. She shows managers how to measure the level of their employees' engagement and provides them with strategies to help increase staff participation.

For more information, or to order your copy...

More books can be found in the RecognizeServiceExcellence.com Required Reading section: http://www.recognizeserviceexcellence.com/

2008 Service & Support Metrics Survey Results

Supportindustry.com has announced the release of a free white paper outlining the results of the 2008 Service & Support Metrics Survey. This annual survey explores the state of enterprise service and support -- current industry trends, future plans, technology adoption, workforce issues, benchmarking strategies, metrics and other areas.

Get your free copy of the survey results today! http://www.supportindustry.com/2008supportmetrics.htm

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