Palm Beach IT Group mtg at Christopher & Weisberg, P.A.

This month's meeting was hosted and presented by Karin Kennedy of Christopher & Weisberg, P.A.  The primary subject of the presentation was Service Management Agreement Contracts between IT service providers and their clients.  (Managed Services)

This story actually starts back several years ago when the Broward IT group was meeting at Citrix Hq in Ft Lauderdale.  Organizer, Scott brought in a presenter (I think from New Jersey) who had written a book promoting the concept of Managed Services for IT service providers.  Here we were introduced to concepts of service level agrements, menu of services available and bringing this together in the form of a contract.  I believe that there is also a gentleman in California that has written a similar book.

One important theme that is presented is that these contract concepts have to be modified / adapted to local city / county / state legal requirements.  One should not expect that templates for Sacramento, Ca. or Newton, NJ. to be legally sufficient in other areas.

Since that time, at locally hosted Microsoft Events, MS presenter J. J. Aquino has also given a Microsoft position talk on Microsoft's concept of IT Managed Services which (at least at that time) was highly encourage by Microsoft.

This meeting represents the first time that our groups (Broward & Palm) have reached out in a meeting to further develop the concept of Managed Services with a legal entity to address that portion of the concept.

One of the first things that we found out at this presentation was that presenters, Karin Kennedy and John Christopher are extremely technically knowledgeable.  They were quite comfortable discussing technical issues at our (tech) level.  There was a lot of education on both sides.  Among the subjects discussed were writing the contract for 'worst case scenarios' , setting of (client / vendor) expectations.  Precisely where is off-site back-up data physically stored - no cloudy answers - Shanghai may not be acceptable; how does one define the level of '(un)hackability' that is acceptable at what price level etc.

Got the drift?  Yes, if you didn't make it, you blew it again.  (Darn that ball game)  Regardless, I'm hoping that there will be follow-ups to this presentation, as ground seems to be just being broken and there is much more to learn.  Our thanks to John Vighetto (PBIT), Karin Kennedy and John Christopher (Christopher & Weisberg, P.A.) for this presentation.  See the photo's by clicking HERE  .