The last year saw unprecedented interest in Social Business. Most of our children and virtually all of our Gen Y employees willingly give up time to update their statuses on social media like Facebook, FourSquare and even a recently rejuvenated MySpace which is now owned by singer and movie star, Justin Timberlake. However, the business world remains unsure of the applicability of these media in fulfilling business objectives.

Easy-to-use social businesses tools like Quora, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter promised much and have found a place in the world of work. However, this year’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Facebook will see the spotlight fall once again on the difference between how freely information is shared at work verses outside of it. ...

The challenges our customers face are myriad. Some need to sell more goods and services, some to spend less on IT and others to exploit innovations they have developed. Some, like US Telco, Sprint, need to do all of the above, but most of all they need to get to market, fast. My hope is that all our customers will be able to tell similar tales at some point. 

With over 40,000 employees, a highly demanding 53 million strong customer base looking for the latest devices combined with customised call plans and formidable world-class innovations, Sprint relies on world-class technology from HP. 

Sports lovers among you will know that the Premiership is widely regarded as the best soccer league in the world. While the English national side is not threatening to hoist a World Cup any time soon, the competition in the Premier League is intense. Just 20 years after its formation, the Premier League attracts the best players in the world and draws global television audiences beyond anything seen previously. Truly it is a platform where supporters expect excellence. 

Our Exceed Expectations plan though bold, is much more about evolution from a now globally recognized level of outstanding customer service, than revolution. The team is constantly making lots of

little changes which add up to a significant uplift in our services. For this post, I asked Greg Zlatunich,

Program Manager, HP Software Support, to explain important upcoming enhancements which we hope our customers will see as positively as they did last year at Discover Building Bridges Article. Over to Greg...

In a previous blog I mentioned how proud we were as a team to achieve an ‘Outstanding’ accreditation from the TSIA. But behind any accolade worth having is a lot of hard work and dedication.

Having acknowledged experts from the world of customer service pore over your procedures, processes, tools and then evaluate your people too can be a nerve-wracking experience, but of course it is also a chance to learn from the best. 

None of us in the Software support community take any pleasure from outages – even to competitors. As a profession, we are all diminished a little when a team of fellow professionals is hit by unforeseen events whether a tsunami or a hardware failure and the spotlight falls on the difficulties of our profession.

However, being support engineers at heart, we all do have a detached professional interest, in fact a duty, to learn what we can from the travails of others. The technical details of the two day outage for some Blackberry services are not something I could or would comment on.