Karen Sleeth

With the economic crisis that began in 2008, a long-standing trend toward increased regulation is becoming a flood. The clamor for improved enterprise risk management and the complexity of multinational compliance present executives with a dramatically new array of challenges. Governance should offer solutions, but it is clear that yesterday’s governance practices aren’t up to the task. In both design and implementation, they are too disconnected and incomplete to fully address our complex compliance and risk management puzzle. Executives get only fragmented views of their true business performance, and inefficiencies drive up costs. The consequences of inadequate governance were demonstrated in the economic meltdown of 2008. As the world struggles to recover from that crisis, business is now faced with a confusing array of evolving regulations, the challenge of managing compliance across multinational organizations and a new imperative for risk management that is coordinated across the enterprise. It’s clear that yesterday’s governance practices don’t meet today’s need for centralized controls, integrated compliance and risk management and greater transparency. The need for organizations to change—and change now—is clear. Under Control captures decades of business governance experience from many of the leading authorities at CA, Inc. This book sets out not only to explain the essential challenges of effective business governance, but to help you build solutions for your organization based on lessons learned at CA from its customers and in its own corporate structure. From governing the organization’s policies as a whole instead of in silos, to a department-by-department look at the role and impact of governance, to governing your green initiatives, to the role of the board of directors, to the importance of risk management, this book lays out some of the strategies and processes that may help yourorganization manage its risk and regulatory requirements. It is clear that the governance standards in the past were inadequate, and that risks have not been properly assessed or understood. This book is a first step in solving this problem so that your organization is prepared and able to respond and thrive in today’s rapidly evolving environment. Under Control is the first book published in the new CAPress imprint, a joint publishing program between Apress and CA Inc. “One of the defining factors of the first decade of the 21st century has been the increase of regulation and governance. To explain these trends, and the various best practices for ensuring governance, enterprise IT management solutions provider CA Inc. enlisted more than a dozen subject matter experts from its ranks to contribute content. The resulting book explores the need for broad governance, different areas where governance is important, and various ways for organizations to manage and implement compliance, including IT governance, project portfolio management, information governance and sustainability management. The book, while largely vendor-neutral, draws on CA's experience creating governance solutions as well as managing its own governance issues.” —Aaron Smith, Projects@Work

The objective of APM Best Practices: Realizing Application Performance Management is to establish reliable application performance management (APM) practices—to demonstrate value, to do it quickly, and to adapt to the client circumstances. It's important to balance long-term goals with short-term deliverables, but without compromising usefulness or correctness. The successful strategy is to establish a few reasonable goals, achieve them quickly, and then iterate over the same topics two more times, with each successive iteration expanding the skills and capabilities of the APM team. This strategy is referred to as “Good, Better, Best”. The application performance monitoring marketplace is very focused on ease of installation, rapid time to usefulness, and overall ease of use. But these worthy platitudes do not really address the application performance management processes that ensure that you will deploy effectively, synergize on quality assurance test plans, triage accurately, and encourage collaboration across the application life cycle that ultimately lowers overall application cost and ensures a quality user experience. These are also fine platitudes but these are the ones that are of interest to your application sponsors. These are the ones for which you need to show value. This CA Press book employs this iterative approach, adapted pragmatically for the realities of your organizational and operational constraints, to realize a future state that your sponsors will find useful, predictable and manageable—and something that they will want to fund. In the meantime, you will learn the useful techniques needed to set up and maintain a useful performance management system utilizing best practices regardless of the software provider(s).

Technical Support Essentials is a book about the many facets of technical support. It attempts to provide a wide array of topics to serve as points of improvement, discussion, or simply topics that you might want to learn. The topics range from good work habits to the way technical support groups establish their own style of work. This book applies theories, models, and concepts synthesized from existing research in other fields—such as management, economics, leadership, and psychology—and connects them to technical support. The goal is to build on the work of others and allow their success to evolve the profession. The book’s broad perspective looks at proven practices, legal issues, dealing with customers, utilizing resources, and an array of other topics of interest to tech support professionals.