It was the first in a series of complimentary executive briefings aimed at informing managers and business owners in the insurance sector about technology from a business perspective. The event was organised by SureSkills, an Irish-owned company that provides technology, knowledge and learning solutions to complex and challenging requirements, to help businesses achieve their potential.

By definition if we are surrounded by technology – pervading every aspect of our working and social lives. Then we should make every effort to maximise the value the organisation extracts from it. Effective service management is at the core of great organisations – delivering effective, efficient and economical use of “resources” in terms of People, Process and Technology.

Cloud has been a hot topic for many years now and everyone has heard about the benefits, but what are the benefits to you and your organisation? What are the challenges you face and what kind of service would help you run your business better? 

SureSkills, as the only accredited Education & Consulting Partner in Ireland for AWS, Microsoft, VMware and Google will take an independent look at how these global cloud giants can be tailored to help your business, because one size doesn’t fit all.

We know this because we surveyed our customers about what services would benefit from being migrated to a cloud platform, and what were the biggest business benefits of doing so. At 26.5% and 25.3% respectively, email and websites were the top candidates for cloud migration. Some 22% of our customers said moving IT infrastructure to the cloud would deliver business benefits. In our experience, as customers understand the general value of cloud, they then begin looking at how they manage and mine information. CRM is a classic example of this, and was next in our survey (16%).

#1: ITIL is a standard to adhere to 

ITIL is sometimes treated as a standard, which it was never meant to be. The guidance was never intended to be applied rigidly. The service management improvement initiative was not designed to be treated as a big bang project, where the capabilities described in ITIL are considered as a block of processes, roles, and procedures to be ‘implemented’ as close to the ‘letter of ITIL’ as possible.

This approach inevitably leads to huge waste, and is unlikely to succeed in improving the value of the services delivered to the customer due to the unnecessary cost and additional work it generates. There is rarely a meaningful explanation of why the organization has taken this approach, beyond “because ITIL says so”, which is hardly a business value-focused justification, and is certainly not a persuasive argument that might bring others on board. The end result, most likely, is an amalgam of highly complicated process models that nobody follows and a painful muddle of procedures that mask the absence of customer focus.