When I was growing up, gym was my least favorite class of the bunch. Yeah, I used to ride my bike like a possessed daredevil, but as for the rest of it? Meh, at best. You name it – if it could be played, I was poor at it. To this day, I still can’t do a lay-up, or a somersault vault, or even pass a football correctly. Ask me about episodes of Star Trek (the ones with Shatner/Nimoy, the only ones that will ever matter, IMHO), and I could recite chapter and verse. On to the story…
One week in the late 1970’s, we were told in our weekly gym session that we would have to undergo some form of physical fitness test for the President himself. Why Jimmy Carter cared about me touching my toes, I still wonder to this day. But there it was. I can’t recall all of the details, but there were four things you had to be able to do. One of them (situps), I could handle. Can’t remember the next two, but I sort of got through them, more or less. But the fourth item was a pull-up. The dreaded iron bar that you had to wrap your hands around and then hoist yourself up to, until your chin rested on the top. Besides the fact that I could not reach the bar at all, it was a futile attempt to fight gravity. They brought over a chair, I stood on it, grabbed the bar, they pulled the chair and I went down. Either I had no strength in my hands or I was way too pudgy for the strength I did have. Didn’t matter. I am sure that I must have dented the floor five or six times as the gym teacher tried to help me master the impossible. At least I didn’t break the gym floor when I proved a modified version of the “dead cat rule” right there in front of everybody.
But that’s not the interesting part of the story. What’s really odd is this: I received an achievement pin for my fine accomplishment! While I still have that pin someplace, an accompanying letter that was (presumably) signed by our fearless Commander in Chief is long gone. It spoke about how I was “giving my all” and I clearly was successful. He must have had a different understanding of the word success than I did – him being President and all…
Now look at your Service Desk. Yeah, you record tickets when calls come in with problems, but is that really everything you are expected to do? Are you really giving your staff your all when it comes to providing a world class service desk? Your end users are expecting so much more from you, but it is difficult to accomplish it all unless you’ve got the right tools available. Things like Ivanti’s Unified Endpoint Manager – a tightly integrated system that not only shows you what is present on the computer in question, but also allows you to install (or remove) software remotely, and the click of a mouse. No more excuses of “I’ll send a technician as soon as possible.” Or look at Ivanti Asset Manager as a key way to keep total track of your inventory from Purchase Order until final disposal. Linking Asset Management and Incident can lead to wonderful metrics, such as seeing when a certain class of devices start appearing more in trouble tickets (such as hard drives getting old) or validation that a particular brand of cell phone has a penchant for breaking screens.
Ivanti is serious when they talk about Unified IT. Let Dataseti show you how to get your chin up over the bar. Earn your pin for giving it your full 100%!
-Jeffrey Bromberger, Consultant – CISA, CRISC
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