Zen and Art of Service Levels (with apologies to Robert Pirsig and Eugen Herrigel)
“The aim of Zen practice is to discover [this] Buddha-nature within each person, through meditation and mindfulness of daily experiences. Zen practitioners believe that this provides new perspectives and insights on existence, which ultimately lead to enlightenment.” –Wikipedia As silly as it sounds, the way to master service levels is to draft them over and [...]
Service Level Basics
I eat out a lot – exempting breakfast (I don’t eat it), I would say that I’m at a restaurant for about 10 of every 14 available meals. Never mind what this does to my budget, let’s focus on the food. Now, I’m a pretty simple eater – in fact, I love things plain. When [...]
Services Descriptions
I saw an agreement the other day which listed the services in about two sentences. This might be an acceptable description if the services are personal lawnmowing… or room painting. Generally speaking, your services description for any project of any length of time needs to be more than a paragraph. No, it’s not about length [...]
Value of a Contracts Person
I’ve been asked, at every job I’ve been on, to justify my existence. Some places just want to know what I do. Others really care about the dollar value of the role to the company. E-mail did it once. Another was a full-blown business case. But the end result is always the same – somehow, [...]
Software Licensing Education Series – 300s Track Now Available!
Designed for the busy or on-the-go professional, the Software Licensing Education Series (SLES) is video-based training on the complete gamut of software licensing topics. Presented in a college-course level format, with topics increasing in complexity and building upon prior lessons, the SLES allows an audio-visual learner another way to gain knowledge on licensing topics. Each [...]
Creating the Batphone
One of the most common stumbling blocks most contracts people encounter is simply getting their business folks to come to them for help. In a great article from the Wisconsin Technology Network, Mark Foley lists 10 questions a business person should ask themselves to find out whether they should go get contracts assistance in a [...]
Consortia – the other side
Jason Busch over on SpendMatters was talking recently about consortiums. He was pretty positive about them – and praised their use as the “easiest way to save money while improving internal customer satisfaction inside a company”. I’m not as convinced. A few years ago, I was working for an organization that wanted to join a [...]
Airline Service… and contracts
When you buy a ticket to fly, you actually are saddled with an adhesion contract for carriage. You know it as your ticket. It’s an adhesion contract because you can’t fly without accepting the terms – and the terms are non-negotiable. And while you may have seen the brief version of them on the back [...]
99.999
Back in the day, we used to fight for five-nine availability. This meant that you would have access to the product or service 99.999% of the time. (If you’ve not read Wikipedia’s article on the Myth of the Nines, now’s your chance.) Mathematically, this equates to only having 5.26 minutes of downtime a year. Pretty [...]
Microsoft trying to convert you from perpetual to SaaS
Well, as I predicted years before I started writing this blog, Microsoft is now trying to convert the average home user from a perpetual software license model to “software as a service” (Saas). My knee-jerk reaction is that this isn’t going to be good for the average (any) user – business or consumer. But let’s [...]
« go back — keep looking »-
"an invaluable guide to one of the software’s industry’s most maddening and, at times, controversial topics..."
-Rick Chapman, Editor Soft*Letter
"I would endorse Jeff's book. It is so great I wish I wrote it myself!"
-Jim Geisman, Owner Marketshare, Inc. -
