Thoughts and ideas on how to build tools, automate workflows and speed-up the workplace.
Risk management is one of the key challenges for IT teams of all sizes. This comprises all kinds of operational, technical, financial, security, compliance, and other risk factors. Recording, assessing, and acting on these can be an enormous undertaking. These days, there’s a huge market for software tools to help IT teams stay on top of risks within their organizations. These range from relatively straightforward solutions for gathering and managing data to more complex platforms that offer advanced capabilities for specific types of risks - like regulatory change monitoring or network threat detection.
Ronan McQuillan
Jan 28, 2025
API headers are central to how your request is received by the target server - and the response it produces. These can be used to provide extra context for our request, prove our permission to access resources, or for other important metadata. As such, knowing how to use request headers properly is a vital part of accessing external data via APIs. Today, we’re going to cover everything you need to know - from what API headers are, what they do, and how they work - to concrete real-world examples of how you can leverage them to build integrated solutions.
Ronan McQuillan
Jul 14, 2024
Enterprise incident management is, without doubt, one of the most important responsibilities of IT teams in large organizations. This is because IT incidents can potentially have an enormous impact on the wider business. In fact, in extreme situations, it could easily be lights out. Even if it’s not this dramatic, we still risk data loss, service interruptions, and, ultimately, lost revenue. Today, we’re going deep into managing IT incidents in an enterprise context.
Ronan McQuillan
Jun 20, 2024
Enterprise inventory management is the foundation of a huge range of processes across finance, logistics, operations, ITSM, planning, and many more. The core challenge here is achieving a centralized, accessible view of assets, products, raw materials, tooling, and other inventory across our entire organization. Today, we’re covering everything you need to know. We’ll start by checking out the basics of enterprise inventory management and what it achieves. Then, we’ll move on to some of the specific technical challenges that enterprises face when tracking and handling inventories.
Ronan McQuillan
Jun 17, 2024
Hardware asset management is one of the central pillars of a successful ITSM strategy. Put simply, we can’t deliver effective services to users without first furnishing them with the right devices, environments, and infrastructure to do their jobs. However, with the exception of very small organizations, this can present enormous challenges. This has an outsize impact on operational efficiency, security, risk, and, ultimately, the cost of delivering IT services to users.
Ronan McQuillan
Jun 13, 2024
Gathering information from customers and colleagues is a daily challenge within large organizations. Having a secure, efficient way to collect structured data is vital to countless processes across ops, HR, customer success, product, and other verticals. Today, we’re diving deep into enterprise survey software. Specifically, we’re going to check out the key purchasing decisions for survey tools, as well as the top priorities for enterprise use cases. Then, we’ll move on to our top picks for enterprise survey solutions.
Ronan McQuillan
Jun 12, 2024
IT teams handle huge volumes of service requests every day. This is a key part of how we deliver internal services to colleagues and customers. How we handle interaction between IT and the wider organization has a huge impact, across security, service up-time, operational efficiency, resource utilization, and more. Today, we’re covering everything you need to know about service request management within ITIL. Specifically, we’ll start by checking out some basic definitions of service requests, and how these differ from other common ITSM workflows before moving on to the specific framework laid out for managing these in ITIL.
Ronan McQuillan
Jun 4, 2024
The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a popular framework for delivering effective IT services to customers and internal users. Application management is a core part of this, dealing with how we furnish users with the tools they need to carry out defined tasks within internal processes. Like any other aspect of ITSM, the goal is ultimately to deliver the best quality services to users while minimizing the burden placed on our internal IT resources.
Ronan McQuillan
May 30, 2024