Interviews

The Joys and Challenges of an IT Manager: A Story About Budget Planning in the IT Department

Jozef Hlavac, IT Manager at Wittenstein, uses ALVAO Asset Management to plan IT budgets and technology purchases efficiently. Thanks to this tool, he has achieved full transparency and improved the overall effectiveness of his IT team. Here’s his story about how he manages IT budgeting in practice.

Pavlína Krajčíková

15.10.2025

3 minutes of reading

The IT Asset Management Struggles of SMBs: Why Good ITAM Still Feels Out of Reach (and What to Do About It)

An employee leaves your company, and you’re not sure if they returned their laptop. Or their monitor. Or their headset. You think it’s somewhere in storage… but you’re not sure. You check the spreadsheet and (surprise!), the last entry is from six months ago.

Jan Skrabanek

7.5.2025

7 minutes of reading

Interview: The opportunity to increase service maturity from low to high has never been better

Paul Wilkinson is the head of the business and marketing department at UK's largest independent IT Service Transformation Consultancy - iCore. He has spent the last 20 years supporting organizations on technology optimization and transformation journeys. In this interview we discussed why ITSM...

Jana Mancikova

24.10.2022

6 minutes of reading

Interview: What is the role of the CIO in digital transformation?

Martin Vitouš has been working in IT for almost 30 years. During that time he’s been through just about everything IT has to offer. His goal is always for customers and trainees to take away something that will help them and that makes sense.

Jan Skrabanek

30.8.2022

5 minutes of reading

Interview: Project management with Tomáš Gregor

Tomáš Gregor originally studied dam construction. However, he has spent most of his career managing large projects. In this interview, we talked about why the most important aspect of project management is the human factor and how to handle tense situations.

Jan Skrabanek

8.8.2022

9 minutes of reading

Interview: You can’t be dogmatic about ITIL®. But you won’t find any nonsense in it.

You won’t find a classic salesperson at ALVAO. Nor in the person of Zdeněk Jelínek, who has been in charge of our activities in Slovakia since September. Originally an IT manager and ITIL sceptic, he has become one of the few certified ITIL experts in the Czech Republic. We talked about ITIL 4 and...

Jan Skrabanek

29.6.2022

5 minutes of reading

Interview: Change Management can’t be done halfway

Rudolf Slaba is an ITIL Expert and Process Specialist at O2 Czech Republic. In addition, he owns a pack of working dogs for hunting wild boar and trains ITIL courses throughout the country. We talked about the change management process and its deployment in companies.

Jan Skrabanek

2.6.2022

7 minutes of reading

Interview: Systems failure can paralyze the hospital, yet health care has to keep going

David Zažímal manages IT at Jihlava hospital. We talked about what a critical outage looks like in a hospital, what specific problems one has to face, and why the computer labels have to be more durable than in other sectors.

Jan Skrabanek

17.5.2022

7 minutes of reading

Interview: ITAM needs to be proactive and look towards the future

David Foxen has years of experience in IT Asset Management and track record of saving companies millions of pounds through implementing and maturing successful ITAM functions. He is a founder of SAM Beast consultancy agency. He shares his passion for ITAM via live LinkedIn and Youtube stream. We...

Jan Skrabanek

24.2.2022

7 minutes of reading

Interview: ‘We still have the enthusiasm of a garage start-up,’ says Petr Němeček from Linet

Linet, the world’s leading manufacturer of hospital beds, has seen meteoric growth over the past year. The IT department is also a significant contributor to the growth of the company, as its manager Petr Němeček told us. We talked about project management and end-user satisfaction.

Jan Skrabanek

7.10.2021

8 minutes of reading

Interview: ITIL is no longer just an IT best practice

Miroslav Hlohovský, CEO of our partner company OMNICOM, has been in IT management for over 15 years. In addition to hundreds of training courses and consultations, he recently co-authored ITIL 4 manuals. We talked about empathy in Service Management, customer service mapping and the future of ITIL.

Jan Skrabanek

30.9.2021

7 minutes of reading

"ITIL 4 focuses on the ‘people side’ of things way more"

Philip Hearsum is one of the ITIL 4 lead architects. We spoke with him about why we needed a revised ITIL and how both IT and non-IT departments can benefit from it.

Lucie Rozmarinova

15.6.2021

6 minutes of reading

“LEAN IT is a set of techniques and approaches to help businesses with continuous improvement...”

Peter Hubbard is one of the main consultants of the prestigious Pink Elephant company. He has 20 years of experience in IT Service Management at companies like Rolls Royce, Heinz and British Petroleum. He speaks regularly at major industry conferences. He was the keynote speaker at ALVAO...

Lucie Rozmarinova

11.6.2021

5 minutes of reading