Despite being something of a romantic, I don't really go in much for the so-called "Hallmark Holidays." In fact, this xkcd comic sums up my feelings rather perfectly:

Still, I'm very aware that lots of other people enjoy Valentine's Day, and that it's a holiday that's just begging for CI pros to get more strategic about. Leveraging shared wish lists is one use case I really like, as is intelligent (read: permission-based) householding. Imagine, for example, a travel company that enables a couple to "gift" each other a special dinner or spa treatment during a shared vacation. 

But sometimes, CI goes horribly awry, as I recently experienced with Proflowers.com. I offer Exhibit A:

This email was sent to my email address, but addressed to my ex-husband. It's not hard to understand how this could happen: householding snafus might sometimes create a false connection between an email address and a first name, for example. In the grand scheme of things, if I was going to put CI Fails on a TSA-scale rating, I'd give this one a very bright yellow.

But embarrassingly (for all involved) it got worse. Just a few days later, another of Proflowers' brands, Shari's Berries, sent me this email:

In case it wasn't obvious? I'm not Kimberly.  

In approaching the research for my recently published TechRadar™ on strong authentication, at first I struggled a bit with overlapping concepts and terminology (as can be seen in the lively discussion that took place over in the Security & Risk community a few months back). The research ultimately revealed that form factor matters a lot -- smartcards in actual card form, for example, have some properties and use cases distinct from smart chips in other devices. So smartcards became one of the 14 categories we included.

The category that quickly became my favorite was "bring-your-own-token." BYOT is Forrester's term for the various methods (sometimes called "tokenless") that leverage the devices, applications, and communications channels users already have. The classic example is a one-time password that gets sent in an SMS message to a pre-registered phone, but we see emerging vendors doing a lot of innovation in this space. You can get a surprising amount of risk mitigation value from this lightweight approach, in which you can treat provisioning not as an expensive snail-mail package, but as a mere self-registration exercise. In a world where hard tokens and smartcards prove themselves to be, shall we say, imperfectly invulnerable, lightweightness can have a value all its own. In fact, BYOT showed up just behind these two venerable methods in the "significant success" trajectory on the TechRadar.

Data centers, like any other aspect of real estate, follow the age-old adage of “location, location, location,” and if you want to build one that is really efficient in terms of energy consumption as well as possessing all the basics of reliability, you have to be really picky about ambient temperatures, power availability and, if your business is hosting for others rather than just needing one for yourself, potential expansion. If you want to achieve a seeming impossibility – a zero carbon footprint to satisfy increasingly draconian regulatory pressures – you need to be even pickier. In the end, what you need is:

• Low ambient temperature to reduce your power requirements for cooling.
• Someplace where you can get cheap “green” energy, and lots of it.
• A location with adequate network connectivity, both in terms of latency as well as bandwidth, for global business.
• A cooperative regulatory environment in a politically stable venue.

The world of buyers and sellers has changed — vendor CEOs enter 2012 with growth strategies that favor deeper relationships with customers and that push sales to do more cross-selling at higher levels. In this new world, however, buyers are telling us there is a gap. Of the executive buyers Forrester surveyed, a mere 13% believe that a typical salesperson can demonstrate an understanding of their business issues and articulate how to solve them. Enter the VP of "broken things": the leader who is helping shape an emerging discipline into a strategic function: sales enablement. 

During a webinar this coming Wednesday February 15th, I will share Forrester's latest insight into: 

• What is the state of the gap today between what buyers expect and what sales is communicating?
• What successful frameworks and approaches are sales enablement leaders using in 2012?
• How can you engage with Forrester and your peers to advance your company's sales enablement practices and elevate your own role?

Webinar attendees will also receive an exclusive discount off an event ticket to Forrester's Technology Sales Enablement Forum 2012 in San Francisco!

I hope you will join. Thanks, Brad

It started as a blog called Giving Back To The IT Service Management Community – a personal plea for anyone involved in IT operations, IT service delivery, IT support, etc., to “give back” to the larger community. Hopefully it highlighted (or reminded us of) the need for the creation of lower-level, more granular, and ultimately more practical best/good practice information that is freely available to IT service management (ITSM) practitioners; as a quick start mechanism and/or to prevent the continued reinvention of the wheel by organizations wishing to better themselves.

Many (OK, some) ask “Where has this gone?” or “Where is the free content?” Great questions, but ones that I will conveniently avoid (hopefully like a skilled politician); although others involved, I expect and hope, will provide updates on this in the comments section below.

To some Back2ITSM might appear yet another forum for “the usual suspects” (bagsy me be Verbal Kint) to “socialize” themselves to their ultimate downfall. However, I beg to differ. I feel that this has legs, no matter how short those legs might eventually be; which brings me to the reasons for this quickly written blog:

• I still need to feedback the limited but interesting responses to the Back2ITSM survey.
• I want to publicize some Back2ITSM “coming soons.”