vital Inspiration for the modern business volume 5 : Issue 3 : January / February 2012
why the technology sector needs women Is a lack of female inuence holding the IT industry back?
social it means business! Social media is changing how businesses use IT
2012 the year of democratisation? What our industry experts predict for the next twelve months Visit VitaL onLine at: www.VitaL-Mag.net
LeADeR
A welcome revamp for IT in schools Leader R
ead the news story on page seven of this issue and you will discover that the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove has announced a consultation to scrap the ICT programme of study in UK schools from September 2012. That sounds pretty drastic, but we are advised that this is “a vital and historic step towards creating a new approach to teaching IT in schools”. My experience with IT education in schools dates back to somewhere before the Jurassic era when dinosaurs like Research Machines and the BBC Micro Model Bs lumbered about a primordial landscape and it was enough to learn a few lines of Basic so you could get a rude message to repeat on the screen of a ZX spectrum in wH smiths on a saturday morning, so I’m far from being an expert. what I do know, with two daughters in state primary education, is that the picture I mentioned above is distant history and now IT, or ICT as they would have it, forms an integral part of their educational experience from an early age. “The door is now wide open to create a new and relevant curriculum that will inspire students and ensure that the UK can retain its position at the forefront of technology,” according to Karen Price OBe, CeO of e-skills UK. “IT drives productivity in every sector and is the engine for growth across the whole economy. That is why we are working with leading to create a new GCse in IT.” The intention, we are told, “is to create a qualification that students find stimulating, and that is at the same time highly regarded by universities and employers.” This it has to be said sounds very encouraging, and the companies involved – these include Blitz Games, BT, Cisco, Microsoft, John Lewis Partnership, the BBC, sAs, Capgemini, Deloitte, Google, A1-Technologies, storythings, BAFTA, Interactive Opportunities, Accenture, DXw, The Open Rights Group, nokia and Autonomy – are an impressive list. Many of these names are rightly praised for their service Management approach and are at the cutting edge of the IT business, so any involvement has to be a good thing, as long as those creating the curriculum do not lose sight of the fact that the point of the exercise is to broadly educate the young of the nation in the wonders, capabilities and potential of IT and not only to prepare them to fit into the world of work.
Matt Bailey, editor
if you have any thoughts, feedback, or suggestions on how we can improve VitaL Magazine, please feel free to email me matthew.bailey@31media.co.uk
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vital Inspiration for the modern business Volume 5 : Issue 3 : January / February 2012
COnTenTs
Contents 6 news the VitaL coVer story
10 2012 the year of democratisation? Matt BaiLey At the start of a new year VitAL takes the temperature of the IT world. Editor Matt Bailey speaks to some leading lights in the industry and detects a hint of the ‘Arab Spring’ abroad with democratisation on the cards.
Why the technology sector needs women Is a lack of female influence holding the IT industry back?
Social IT means business! Social media is changing how businesses use IT Volume 5 : Issue 3 : January/February 2012
2012 the year of democratisation? What our industry experts predict for the next twelve months VISIT VITAL ONLINE AT: WWW.VITAL-MAG.NET
editor Matthew Bailey matthew.bailey@31media.co.uk Tel: +44 (0)203 056 4599 To advertise contact: Grant Farrell grant.farrell@31media.co.uk Tel: +44 (0)203 056 4598 Production & Design Toni Barrington toni.barrington@31media.co.uk Dean Cook dean.cook@31media.co.uk editorial & Advertising enquiries Tel: Fax: email: web:
+44 (0) 870 863 6930 +44 (0) 870 085 8837 info@31media.co.uk www.vital-mag.net
Printed by Pensord, Tram Road, Pontllanfraith, Blackwood. nP12 2YA © 2012 31 Media Limited. All rights reserved. vitAL Magazine is edited, designed, and published by 31 Media Limited. no part of vitAL Magazine may be reproduced, transmitted, stored electronically, distributed, or copied, in whole or part without the prior written consent of the publisher. A reprint service is available. Opinions expressed in this journal do not necessarily reflect those of the editor or vitAL Magazine or its publisher, 31 Media Limited. Issn 1755-6465 Published by:
VitaL signs – Life in a worLd with it
15 Getting to the bottom of ‘The chicken conundrum’ steVe white This issue, Steve White, explores why major incident managers are a unique breed.
VitaL ManageMent
16 A service-based strategy for the creative industries Matt BaiLey With an explosion of channels both broadcast and Internet – the ‘media’ is undergoing something of a revolution. VitAL speaks to Sammy Aindow, a solutions architect at Jigsaw Systems, a specialist IT supplier and technical support service organisation that is focussed on this dynamic market.
20 Why the technology sector needs women paM Maynard Is a lack of female influence holding the IT industry back? Pam Maynard outlines how attracting women into technology is vital for its future success and how the whole industry needs to pull together and make it a more inviting place for females to work and grow their careers.
22 Six steps to policy excellence vitAL Magazine, Proud to be the UKCMG’s Official Publication ITIL® is a Registered Trade Mark, and a Registered Community Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce, and is Registered in the U.s. Patent and Trademark Office.
doMinic saunders Organisations need to take a systematic and proactive approach to risk mitigation if they are to be better prepared to satisfy evolving legal and regulatory requirements. Dominic Saunders gives an IT security expert’s view on best practice policy management.
PRInCe2® is the Registered Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce MsP® is the Registered Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce
suBscriBing to VitaL Magazine
VitAL Magazine is published six times per year for directors, department heads, and managers who are looking to improve the impact that IT implementation has on their customers and business. For a fREE annual subscription to vitAL Magazine please visit: www.vital-mag.net/subscribe January / February 2012 : VitAL
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Subscribe FREE to the most VitAL source of information Inspiration for the modern business Volume 5 : Issue 1 : September / October 2011
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Inspira tion for the moder n busine ss Volume 5 : Issue 2 : November / December 2011
2011 2011 July/August 5 : May/June 6 Volume 4 : Issue
Volume 5 : Issue 5 : September/October 2011
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CE EN ER E NF SSU CO W I F M HO itS S
2011 June 2011 May // August 5 : July Volume 4 : Issue 6
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12 -p In ag si e V de itA : LD ige st
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COntents
Contents 26 Open source salvation?
46 Self-service solution
Bertrand Diard Open source is not the panacea of Government ICT, nothing is, but it can contribute to curing many of its current ailments according to Bertrand Diard.
Helen Stewart The London Borough of Bromley has implemented an online selfservice solution. VitAL talks to Helen Stewart, information services manager, who discusses the challenges she faced when trying to implement a self-service model.
50 Learning from the private sector Wasteful public sector IT projects make big news, but one city council found a way to cut its IT costs while at the same time, improving its service.
52 Tackling the software waste headache Geoff Collins
VitAL support
In the UK alone, there is over £1.7 billion worth of preventable and ongoing cost associated with unused software and shelfware. Geoff Collins aims to put this right.
30 Better ‘second-line’ support Noel Bruton Desktop Support is the forgotten resource. We spend so much time, effort and money worrying about how we handle incoming incidents – but what about how we solve those that still remain open after we hang up the phone? Noel Bruton explains.
32 Social IT is here, and it means business! Maff Rigby Love it or loathe it, social media is here and it will change how businesses use IT to get stuff done. The IT department needs be a step ahead, embrace social media and lead the way for the rest of the business says Maff Rigby.
36 ‘Bring Your Own Device’ culture shakes up IT Farhan Mirza Has the trend for employees to bring their own devices – iPads, tablets, smartphones, laptops etc – into the corporate environment signalled the death of standardisation. Farhan Mirza finds out.
VitAL processes
40 PCs – down but certainly not out Simon Bain Are we the post-PC generation? Simon Bain argues that despite the growth of tablets and smartphones in the workplace, when it comes to serious business you still can’t beat a PC.
42 The death of the server Andrew Peddie The IT landscape is in the process of massive change. Andrew Peddie reviews the tectonic shifts in the office IT landscape and looks at the future of IT usage, storage and security.
www.vital-mag.net
VitAL eyes on
55 QR codes – fad or fabulous? Jonathan Westlake This issue Jonathan Westlake takes a look at QR codes – the ‘quick response’ barcodes that seem to be popping up all over the place these days.
56 Ten ways of tackling ineffectual leadership in business Gareth Chick There can be little more frustrating than ineffectual leadership. Gareth Chick, offers ten ways of getting to grips with an ineffectual leader.
VitAL planet
58 Green IT: still plenty of reasons for growth Mark Lyttle Rather than being kicked into the long grass, the current squeeze on IT budgets is provoking a revival of interest in green IT. Mark Lyttle explains how a good green IT strategy can help to drive cost savings.
60 Making meters smarter Mark England Mark England explains how a smart IT infrastructure and accessible information will help consumers to see the benefits of smart meters.
64 Secret of my success David Wilson, Service Desk manager, East Coast Main Line Trains.
January / February 2012 : VitAL
5
news
Everything under one roof
T
he Service Desk & IT Support Show will be returning to Earls Court on 2425 April 2012, and promises to be one of the biggest and best ever according to the organiser. The UK’s leading IT service management and support event will feature a comprehensive exhibition alongside a conference-quality education programme, all at no cost to the visitor and once again VitAL is the events media partner.. The exhibition features over 80 of the leading suppliers demonstrating 250 plus products and services. “Whether you are looking for updates to an existing system, training suppliers, or inspiration for new solutions to, you will find it all under one roof at SDITS,” says the organiser. “Add to this, access to Infosecurity, Europe’s premier security event
taking place next door, and a visit becomes your key opportunity of the year to keep abreast of all that is new in service management and security.” The Service Desk Institute will be present at the show on The SDI Knowledge Centre where they will be helping visitors to start their continual service improvement journey. They’ll be offering advice on everything you need to know about becoming a five-star service desk in 2012 – from leadership and culture to performance, results and customer engagement. They will also be leading a number of seminar sessions including a chance to find out how fit your IT service is. SDITS 2012 sees three dedicated theatres on the exhibition floor, alongside the popular Hot Topic Roundtables. The theatres will
cover a whole range of topics including the Service Catalogue, Lean IT, ITIL 2011, SaaS and managing and motivating your staff. The Hot Topic Roundtables will give visitors the opportunity to discuss a host of key issues with professional facilitators and industry colleagues. The Keynote Theatre, sponsored by Ovum will be offering inspiration and insight on a whole host of topics. Taking place above the exhibition floor in a purpose-built conference theatre, the sessions will be a mix of presentations, panel discussions and debate on current issues. Leading Ovum analysts will also be offering a strategic outlook on the upcoming challenges that service desks may face. Another highlight of the show will be the release of a new White Paper, ‘Empowering people on the move: how embracing mobile can help transform the delivery of business services’, on the first day of the event (24 April). This new research will look at how the IT support industry is handling mobile, offer practical advice on implementing support, and explore how mobile can drive business forward. The findings will be discussed at a Breakfast Briefing on Tuesday 24 April. To find out more about the event, and to register for free (please use priority code SD1007) entry please visit: www.servic edeskshow.com.
UK employers out of touch with Generation Facebook E mployers who impose strict policies against the use of social networking tools designed for business are at risk of alienating ‘Generation Facebook’ from joining their organisation according to new research from hyphen, a recruitment solutions provider. Nearly half (47.8 percent) of younger workers (aged 16 – 24) claim they would not work for companies who impose such measures. The research finds that the use of online networking sites such as LinkedIn while at work is now an expected norm for younger people. Nearly two thirds (58.7 percent) of ‘Generation Facebook’ believe that having access to social networking tools at work actually increases their effectiveness as an employee. The poll of 1,000 workers shows a clear discrepancy of attitudes to social media between young and older workers. Less than a third (28.3 percent) of 35-44 year olds say they wouldn’t work for companies that banned social media and this drops to a fifth (19.8 percent) in the 45-54 age bracket. The research also suggests that employer concerns over employees wasting time on social networking sites could be ill-founded with over half (55.5 percent) of the total workforce claiming to spend less than ten minutes a day on their personal affairs and, of this, close to a third not spending any time at all using social media for personal use during work time.
6 VitAL : January / February 2012
It is evident that the UK’s ‘Generation Facebook’ has a very clear set of expectations from their working life, counting holidays for birthdays and duvet days, gym membership and social events among their top choices for employment benefits. This contrasts with 35-54 year olds who rate pensions, flexitime and medical insurance as more important. Zain Wadee, Managing Director at hyphen said:“The impact of social media on the UK’s younger workforce is very evident and is something that should be both accounted for and sufficiently appraised by businesses. ‘Generation Facebook’ has grown up with 24/7 social media access and they see no reason why LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter should not also play a part in their working life. From my experience with clients, they are increasingly adopting flexible policies towards social media use, which is the right approach. For some organisations, there are benefits to having their employees use social media in a sensible way. There are several potential business development opportunities that social media channels could also present and managers may in fact benefit from listening to ‘Generation Facebook’, whose insights into the new shape of business to business communication could be hugely valuable for their organisation.”
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news
New approach for IT in schools T he Uk Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove has announced a consultation to scrap the ICT programme of study in schools from September 2012. e-skills UK, the Sector Skills Council for Business and IT, believes the announcement is a vital and historic step towards creating a new approach to teaching IT in schools. “The door is now wide open to create a new and relevant curriculum that will inspire students and ensure that the UK can retain its position at the forefront of technology,” comments Karen Price OBE, CEO of e-skills UK. “IT drives productivity in every sector and is the engine for growth across the whole economy. That is why we are working with leading employers through our Behind the Screen project to create a new GCSE in IT.” The Minister acknowledges e-skills UK’s Behind the Screen project, which is already underway to create a new IT GCSE and delivery methodology. Behind the Screen is a unique partnership between business and education, with employers, schools, universities and awarding bodies working with e-skills UK. The current pilot in 20 schools will help determine three critical aspects of the new GCSE. First, the right balance of skills and knowledge; ensuring coding and computational principles, software development and logic skills are combined with creativity, design and teamwork. Secondly, that a robust and rigorous assessment process is in place. And finally, that resources to help teachers deliver the new qualification, and students achieve it, are comprehensive, inspiring, challenging, and based on real-world application. The intention is to create a qualification that students find stimulating, and that is at the same time highly regarded by universities and employers. According to e-skills the enthusiasm and commitment of employers, combined with the innovative real-world resources they
are contributing, will help reverse the dramatic decline in the number of young people studying IT and considering careers in the sector. IBM is one of the group of leading employers working with e-skills UK on Behind the Screen. Stephen Leonard, Chief Executive IBM UK and Ireland, said: “We are long overdue a completely new approach to teaching IT as a subject. With our work, we will make IT inspiring to young people and put the UK on the world stage in educating the technologists of the future. We are putting the weight of industry behind a transformation in education, working with schools and universities to create courses of academic substance and industry relevance.” Other employers participating in Behind the Screen include Blitz Games, BT, Cisco, Microsoft, John Lewis Partnership, the BBC, SAS, Capgemini, Deloitte, Google, A1-Technologies, Storythings, BAFTA, Interactive Opportunities, Accenture, DXW, The Open Rights Group, Nokia and Autonomy.
Where are the women? A
recent survey of over 150 recently women graduates working for some of the top names in the IT industry found that women brought more key and different skills to work than men and that mixed gender teams worked far more constructively than all male or male-dominated teams. The survey was carried out by the leading IT graduate careers website TARGETjobsIT.co.uk over a three week period in October and was launched at the annual ‘IT’s not just for the boys’ event, organised by TARGETevents before an audience of female undergraduates and the sponsors Bloomberg, Nomura, Barclays, CHP Consulting and BCS late last year. The women surveyed heartily recommended IT as a fantastic career for women and were convinced that women had complementary skills to offer. They felt that women, in general, had a greater attention to detail, better organisation skills and could multitask better than men. They also said that women possessed more developed ‘soft’ skills and were more sensitive and more effective www.vital-mag.net
communicators. They made the point that mixed gender teams encouraged efficient working with a greater level of innovation and creativity as women definitely had a ‘different way of looking at things’. Despite their positive encouragement of undergraduate women to join the industry, they did have a number of concerns. They pointed out that it was sometimes lonely and isolated being in such a male-dominated work environment and the lack of women in senior roles was discouraging. This sometimes led, they felt, to women having to push themselves forward more at work to avoid being underestimated. They also had strong but unproven suspicions that senior men earned better salaries than women and put this down to men being more assertive in salary negotiations. One key piece of advice they offered was not to think all IT recruiters were the same. They urged undergraduates to research the working culture of organisations before applying. They suggested looking especially for senior women in the organisation and a record of promoting
and developing female talent. For an in depth look at issues facing women in IT, see the feature on page 20 of this issue.
January / February 2012 : VitAL 7
news
Computer says no: Changing brief Public sector leads to failure in two thirds of IT projects need to get Agile
B
usinesses are wasting valuable IT budget and resource by failing to set sufficient briefs for IT projects according to new research from MSM Software. The company conducted research among over 200 IT professionals involved in IT integration projects. The results show that two thirds of IT projects fail because the brief changes after the project has begun. In addition, two thirds of respondents said they have been involved in IT projects which have not been as successful as they could have been. Despite IT budgets continuing to be constrained, meaning that when IT projects are given the go ahead it is even more imperative that they are made a success, still many are failing to set their brief to avoid failure. Statistics from the British Computer Society show that between 1998 and 2005 across the European Union only one in eight IT projects were considered successful. The
rest were cancelled, suffered significant cost or time overruns. Thomas Coles, managing director of MSM Software, says, “Software projects are resource intensive and complex, and have a reputation for being both expensive and risky. This reputation is all too often validated by an abundance of projects failing. Yet, the failure of an IT project due to a changing brief is completely avoidable. In my view, the success rate of IT projects would be significantly increased if businesses and suppliers worked more closely, and transparently, at the discovery phase of a project. By doing this, long-term business processes can be established and technology designed specifically to support the individual business requirements. Collaborative working in this way is fundamental as the success or failure of a software project can also determine the future (or failure) of a business.”
Survey dispels ‘myths’ about Consumerisation of IT A report titled Dispelling Six Myths of Consumerisation of IT, based on a survey of more than 600 senior business and IT leaders conducted in 17 countries has been published by managed services provider Avanade. According to the company the report challenges commonly held beliefs about the consumerisation of IT – including executive perspectives on Millennials as the driving force, employee brand preferences, and hesitance of business leaders to embrace the trend. The report also found an unstoppable shift in the use of consumer technologies in the workplace and significant IT investments being made to manage this trend. Globally, 88 percent of executives report employees are using their own personal computing technologies for business purposes today. Much has been made of companies embracing “bring your own device” (BYOD) policies to accommodate younger employees and attract the best new recruits. Yet, according to executive respondents, allowing personal technologies in the workplace is not a strong recruitment or retention tool. Less than one-third (32 percent) of business leaders have changed policies to make their workplace more appealing to younger employees. Even
8 VitAL : January / February 2012
fewer (20 percent) believe allowing personal computing technologies in the enterprise will benefit recruitment and retention efforts. In fact, when asked about the impact of personal computing technologies on company culture, the majority of executive respondents (58 percent) said the greatest outcome was the ability for their employees to work from anywhere, followed by their employees being more willing to work after hours (42 percent). Though media coverage has made iPhones and iPads synonymous with consumerisation, the survey found that while Apple is certainly a factor, it is far from alone in driving the trend. According to business and IT leaders, the most popular consumerowned devices being used in the enterprise are Android smartphones, BlackBerry smartphones and Apple laptops. Another related myth is that these devices are being used to check email and browse social networks. But Avanade’s research revealed a major shift in the way employees are using their personal technologies in the enterprise. Employees have evolved beyond straight content consumption – checking email or Facebook – and are now increasingly using missioncritical enterprise applications.
T
he prediction by Ovum that Agile development will accompany cloud computing and data analytics, as core trends adopted by governments in response to fiscal austerity next year, is long overdue. This is according to Andy Margolis, director at Totally Communications, the web-enabled technology provider, which says it has long championed the benefits of Agile methodology in IT projects and development. “When an Agile methodology is not introduced in a design or development process, a development team only has one chance to get each facet of a project right,” said Margolis. “In an Agile model, each and every aspect of the development (design for example) is frequently revisited throughout the lifecycle of the project. When a team stops to re-evaluate the direction of a project at regular intervals, there’s always time to steer the project back in the right direction if it starts to fall off brief. This saves on both time and money.” He added: “Everyone is aware about the economic difficulties that remain on the horizon for both governments and industry so it is logical that project managers and developers evaluate cost efficient practices. What makes Agile methodology such an effective tool in reducing costs is that it doesn’t cost anything itself. The skill to successfully introducing an Agile model is to first comprehend where your existing business processes can be improved on.” Jessica Hawkins, analyst at Ovum and a co-author of the report commented: “Tightening of budgets makes it all the more important that IT projects both cost less to implement and actually deliver as promised, on time and on budget. In this context, there is increasing enthusiasm for more Agile approaches to systems development and applications lifestyle management.” Margolis concluded: “Government IT projects have long fulfilled the stereotypes of ballooning in cost and lacking in flexibility, however circumstances now dictate that this is unacceptable. Managers should think hard about the context that they are now performing their IT operations in, if they want to continue to succeed they need to adapt for the road ahead.”
www.vital-mag.net
COveR sTORY
2012 the year of democratisation? At the start of a new year VitAL takes the temperature of the IT world. Editor Matt Bailey speaks to some leading lights in the industry and detects a hint of the ‘Arab Spring’ abroad with democratisation on the cards.
I
T SEEMS that wherever you go in the world, 2012 is going to be a tough year and the IT world is no different, but the straightened circumstances provide a golden opportunity for IT departments to prove their mettle to the rest of the business by delivering increasing value and ef ficiency through emerging technologies like the cloud and the ‘consumerisation’ of IT. some would take that a step further. According to Chris Rixon, principal solutions
10 VitAL : January / February 2012
manager at BMC, 2012 heralds the democratisation of IT. “If the ‘consumerisation of IT’ gained momentum in 2011, then 2012 will see the birth of the ‘democratisation of IT’, posing challenges the IT service management industry has never experienced before,” he predicts. This democratisation will be driven by more and more people being involved in the purchasing of IT equipment, “service management professionals will be compelled to adapt the way they provide support for www.vital-mag.net
cover story
the myriad of resources and devices with network access that form the enterprise IT landscape,” says Rixon. “The ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) trend will alter the way that the Service Management industry operates,” comments Rixon. “BYOD, whilst revolutionary and offering increased ease of use for employees, can lead to the risk of non-IT managers purchasing IT solutions. The advent of cloud computing only serves to accelerate this trend as employees purchase and use cloud-based applications more frequently, but the reality is that non-IT managers can fall foul of their own inexperience when it comes to the intricacies of IT procurement and the ongoing management of the technology. Service Management professionals will therefore have to adjust accordingly.” With staff perhaps getting out of their depth in this new world, Rixon suggests that education will be the way forward. “Given the inevitability of the BYOD trend, IT managers would be well advised to provide more internal training courses to advise non-IT specialists on IT procurement and management. These courses, which could range from courses on purchasing the best IT hardware to how to purchase the correct SLA for applications, will become a bigger responsibility for Service Management professionals, who as always, will be keen to maintain the integrity of their systems.” Bring your own device, with its obvious business benefits of allowing employees to use the devices and applications with which they are most familiar, will be here to stay in 2012 according to Rixon, but it comes with a caveat. “One danger of moving away from the one size fits all method of IT procurement rests with IT support,” he says. “No matter what device or application an employee uses, they will continue to call IT Support if there is a problem. This represents a major challenge for IT managers, requiring them to have a working knowledge of a variety of devices and business applications in order to maintain a satisfactory service. “The challenge then for IT Service Management in 2012 will be how to insert IT support into the BYOD discussion at boardroom level in the first instance and www.vital-mag.net
educate non-IT specialists from the top down on what they need to know when purchasing IT devices and applications. The BYOD tide will continue to sweep through businesses across the country and IT managers need to learn to embrace it. The democratisation of IT is not going away and the way IT managers deal with this in the coming year will be pivotal to the industry for years to come.” There are other points of view of course. Asked how far consumerisation will go and what effect it will have on the business, Robert Rutherford, MD of IT service, consultancy and support provider QuoStar Solutions is far more circumspect: “There aren’t many IT leaders who would allow uncontrolled consumer devices access to the corporate network,” he warns. “You’ll see some marketing push from the thin-client and security industry but I don’t believe you’ll see significant growth, maybe some in 2012 but it will drop back going forward. You rarely see first wave success in IT.” The democratic revolution of BYOD is far from being the only issue on the table. Our correspondents noted a range of issues that were of importance and clearly those that address the economic climate are crucial. Robert Rutherford sees one in particular as especially helpful. “There are numerous ways IT can help the business at this time,” he says, “but cloud services can certainly deliver significant savings across the board, but beware of hidden risks and costs. Outsourcing of the IT operations within a business can certainly reduce costs, and will often improve service. It all depends on your vendor selection – choose the right partner and you are a hero, choose the wrong one and the consequences can be career-affecting.”
“The BYOD tide will continue to sweep through businesses across the country and IT managers need to learn to embrace it. The democratisation of IT is not going away and the way IT managers deal with this in the coming year will be pivotal to the industry for years to come.”
Cloud computing The cloud remains one of the principle routes to reduced overheads and the case has been made numerous times in these pages for a Software as a Service (SaaS) approach. Matt Davies, director of product marketing at business process management specialist Cordys predicts that: “More of the middleware market will move from on-premise solutions to the cloud in 2012. At this stage, there doesn’t seem to be a specific preference for public, January / February 2012 : VitAL 11
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private or hybrid solutions but we may see this change in the coming months. “In addition, the number of telcos, system integrators and large multi-nationals acting as cloud brokers will grow dramatically. Platformas-a-service (Paas) will transcend from being used mainly by developers, to being far more focused on business users. In fact, companies looking to become cloud service providers will start to offer their own Paas capability, providing personalised, high margin, value added services.” Robert Rutherford is also cautious about the cloud, he says, “Cloud and mobility will grow significantly but will still remain relatively disjointed. Rationalisation is needed within both markets, along with proven success stories. The threat landscape is also getting enormous so it’s likely that we’ll see some big security scandals.” Mark seager, vice president of technology eMeA at data integration company Informatica is more optimistic: “Cloud computing will continue to change the way we do business. But in 2012, europe has some catching up to do, as rates of adoption have been slow in comparison to the Us. The year ahead will see an upturn in cloud adoption, driven by the need for organisations to be more agile, as well as the need to cut costs. with existing IT frameworks often made up of data siloes, cloud technology can help create a dynamic architecture to accommodate any data, in any location. Businesses who want to respond and act faster in today’s economic climate have to look to the cloud if they haven’t already. After all, the challenge for cloud adoption until now has been inertia, and many businesses have therefore not gained the benefits cloud computing can offer. Organisations need to be aggressive, but smart as they make the move to the cloud.”
Continuing trends Jon Milward, director of managed and support services at IT consultancy northdoor, sees 2012 as a year of continuing trends: “Our 2012 predictions include a number of the technologies that really took off in 2011, since we’ve only just scratched the surface when it comes to areas like cloud computing and collaborative working. Over 80 percent of the sMes we have spoken to this year show strong interest in moving to the cloud, and we’re also seeing an extraordinary amount of interest from companies that want to use the very latest technology to keep their employees 12 VitAL : January / February 2012
mobile and communicating effectively. 2012 will be a very exciting year for all of these technologies, as their ease of use, flexibility and functionality continue to build. About a half of all sMes are already using cloud for part, if not all, of their IT services.” Milward also predicts a big rise in unified communications solutions that allow integrated presence, instant messaging, telephony and video conferencing for emerging and fast-growing sMes. Collaborative working already gained a lot of attention in 2011 with Microsoft’s portals and collaborations tools, like sharePoint, but Milward is expecting to see even greater interest in this area during 2012, as new products like Microsoft Lync will make business communications even more effective and immediate.
Mobility Mobility is a key part of the process of democratisation and it seems the trend for increasingly sophisticated personal mobile devices – smartphones, tablets etc – being brought to the office will continue and accelerate a number of other trends in 2012. Mark seager comments: “Mobile technology will be the accelerator for a number of important industry trends in 2012. Over the years we’ve seen mobile functionality escalate at lightning speed – the last ten years alone have seen mobile subscribers increase from one to an anticipated six billion worldwide by the end of november in 2011. not only is the number of mobile handsets still on the rise, but what we do with them is now contributing hugely to the data flood. with more and more organisations implementing ‘bring your own’ device initiatives in a bid to lower IT spend while supporting flexible working practices, keeping control of corporate data will continue to be a big pressure point for businesses. ensuring that the right data management practices are in place to ease the pain of this fragmented information access will be critical to helping companies maintain control of company data.” Jon Milward comments on the mobility explosion: “The new Year will reveal a number opportunities with mobile applications, as sMes continue to increase their use of mobile devices. not only will employees expect to have the same capabilities whether they are using a PC, a smartphone or a tablet, but they will increasingly want to switch www.vital-mag.net
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between all of these devices quickly and easily. As a consequence, improving the security and integration of applications across different devices will be critical. Using mobile technologies to manage key business processes and deliver services to customers is also an untapped area for sMes.”
Social media “social media is one in a long line of industry trends to fuels the data torrent,” says Mark seager, “adding a new dimension to the challenge for businesses when managing the exponential growth of information. with a myriad of data types to handle, an increase in merger and acquisition activity and an explosion of virtual technology initiatives, the task of protecting customer intimacy and maintaining meaningful customer interaction is set to become a much harder task for businesses in 2012. “The challenge is two-fold. Firstly, the rise of this social media generation is fuelling an explosive growth of data. It means a big step up for brands when it comes to understanding consumers – both in terms of managing the stream of live data through social communities, and integrating it with ‘traditional’ data types. secondly, it’s creating a landscape of fresh opportunity. Organisations have a real opening to strike out beyond traditional approaches, implementing holistic brand strategies that incorporate proactive customer engagement, and timely sentiment analysis. In 2012, brands must act quickly to ride the social data wave, and extract the customer intelligence that simply wasn’t available before.”
Security & regulation Of course this more open IT estate model and the prevalence of social media bring with them a number of security challenges. Mark seager comments, “The rising numbers of online tools and social networks are making it increasingly easy to share and exchange information. It presents a big opportunity for businesses to utilise big data to understand their customers better, however this also presents a conundrum when it comes to asking ‘how much is too much information?’ “Although the older generation is generally more cautious about how much information they reveal, today’s youth is sharing everything www.vital-mag.net
they do, at every moment of the day via social networks,” says seager. “As thousands of consumers are sharing more of their identity online, for businesses in 2012 the matter of data privacy will continue to shake up process and protocol. with increasing volumes of intelligence on consumers now available, brands must tread a very fine line when it comes to what data they gather and how they manage it, to avoid overstepping the mark or making critical errors. And, over time, consumers must begin to consider the extent of the information that they are truly prepared to share with organisations. It’s still a very grey area, which in the coming 12 months will require some extensive exploration.” In addition, seager says that businesses need to get regulator-savvy. “with regulatory bodies under pressure to up their game in 2012, companies will continue to feel the sting of hefty fines unless they address the challenges they face when it comes to protecting data – whether in the cloud or on premise. Poor management of customer data, resulting in errors, loss and theft will continue to be a stumbling block unless organisations make themselves equipped to deal with it. with regulators set to continue to wage war against businesses failing to implement the right information management procedures, businesses must act quickly to ensure they aren’t in the firing line for a hefty fine. “Measures are beginning to be put in place to address this challenge,” adds seager, “solvency II, for example, aims to establish a revised set of eU-wide capital requirements and risk management standards that will replace the current solvency requirements. The directive is due to come into full effect in late 2012 and will allow companies to leverage value by integrating their corporate governance, risk management and regulatory compliance. In 2012, the focus across all sectors on improved information governance and regulatory compliance will continue to intensify.”
The year ahead will see an upturn in cloud adoption, driven by the need for organisations to be more agile, as well as the need to cut costs. with existing IT frameworks often made up of data siloes, cloud technology can help create a dynamic architecture to accommodate any data, in any location. Businesses who want to respond and act faster in today’s economic climate have to look to the cloud if they haven’t already.
The network with the massive increase in devices using mobile data and the increasing traffic over the backbone of the telecoms infrastructure, will the network be able to cope? specialist broadband journalist and editor of the thinkbroadband.com January / February 2012 : VitAL 13
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site Andrew Ferguson, thinks we are at a broadband crossroads: “Developments in the broadband infrastructure predicted to take place in the coming year, combined with growing consumer demand for data-hungry products and services, such as smart-Tv and internet-enabled connectivity between computing devices, are helping to make additional investment in superfast broadband and speed upgrades of existing solutions commercially viable,” he says. “Mobile broadband became increasingly popular during 2011, mainly due to the rise in smartphone ownership, but has unfortunately not progressed. Limited trials are underway which will tease us with the potential speeds from 4G services, but no actual roll-out is expected in 2012. This delay to 4G means that any illusions the mobile operators had of competing head to head with fixed-line broadband in cities are quickly vanishing. Once 4G gets moving, new proposals from Ofcom should help see coverage reach 98 percent of the population from at least one provider, although this level of coverage won’t be required until 2017. we hope that these exciting developments will enable the UK to finally compete with the likes of sweden and the netherlands in terms of internet connectivity. However, we will have to wait until the end of this year to see if the UK has been able to achieve Lord Carter’s ambitious target as set out in the Digital Britain report back in 2009: broadband for all in 2012.”
The Wi-fi tycoon chris Bull founded selective Media four years ago when he was just 19 years old. The company’s aim is the monetising of free wi-Fi connections via advertising, it had almost no initial funding and has seen purely organic growth, becoming profitable within two months of launch. Recently the company was one of the partners involved in the launch of free wi-Fi across Central London with nokia. Here Chris Bull makes some predictions about the IT sector for 2012. “e-commerce will grow significantly in 2012,” says Bull. “This will have a knock on effect in the technology arena. There is a real gap in the market opening up for a cheaper alternative to Apple’s iPad. Most apps are now cross-platform and while the user experience may not be quite as good on a cheaper option, many will be willing to put up with that for a lower price.” with the coming of 4G many are predicting a rise in the uptake of mobile contracts. “I think on the mobile technology front we will see pay-as-you-go increasing rather than decreasing as many had predicted,” says Bull. “Because of this trend, wi-Fi will become an extremely important medium for anyone that buys a pay-as-you-go smartphone. networks like 3G will become very overloaded – especially at events like the Olympics, so free wi-Fi will really come into its own.” As a technology company, selective Media has benefitted from a move into the cloud. “we now have everything hosted on the cloud,” says Bull. “All our infrastructure is on the cloud which has made it much easier for us to move our operations in anticipation of the Olympics this summer.”
“There are numerous ways IT can help the business at this time but cloud services can certainly deliver significant savings across the board, but beware of hidden risks and costs. Outsourcing of the IT operations within a business can certainly reduce costs, and will often improve service. It all depends on your vendor selection – choose the right partner and you are a hero, choose the wrong one and the consequences can be career-affecting.” robert rutherford, Md, Quostar solutions.
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vitAL SIGnS: LIFe In THe wORLD wITH IT
“with regulatory bodies under pressure to up their game in 2012,
Getting to the bottom of ‘The chicken conundrum’.
companies will continue to feel the sting of hefty fines unless they
Steve White, explores why MIMs are a unique breed.
address the challenges they face when it comes to protecting data – whether in the cloud or on premise. Poor management of customer data, resulting in errors, loss and theft will continue to be a stumbling block unless organisations make themselves equipped to deal with it.”
I
ncident managers are very special animals. They don’t think like normal people. They really do cut the waffle and get right to the core of the issue. Now I am going to introduce some country stereotypes into this article as well. But that’s just the way it happened… I have a case study I sometimes run when delivering Kepner-Tregoe workshops for problem managers and incident managers. Its purpose is to exercise the incident management process on an issue that is outside the usual subject matter for an IT crowd. The case study relates to a farmer and a journalist who observe some strange behaviour from a chicken. The journalist says he’ll write a story about the chicken at the weekend, and while ‘any news is good news’, the farmer has his concerns about a silly story about his chicken breaking in the national press, distracting the core workings of his dairy and grain distribution business. The desired response from the workshop participants is exploration of the strange behaviour of the chicken. If there is a rational explanation - then there is no silly story, and life can go on. It’s a made up case that’s quite fun to do and I’d used it so many times that I thought I’d explored every avenue in it... Until the day I used it with some Major Incident Managers (hold that thought). On a separate occasion, a group and I were working on a Kepner-Tregoe case study involving latency of login transactions on a particular server. Once the incident management group had understood the situation they pressed the poor soul who was playing the role of ‘the business’ and began to explore just how much the business needed the latency issue to be resolved. It was just possible that the simulation position was being played by a less assertive member
of the team, and having been rounded on by the others, he capitulated and invented a story about it not being quite so important: “I’m sorry to have disturbed you. I’ll switch it off and back on again and see if it still breaks.” Then one of the incident managers piped up: “better latency than never” and declared the incident managed. I’m thinking of printing the t-shirt.
understanding the root cause of the chicken issue now back to the chicken. The usual route through this case is to explore the reason why the chicken is exhibiting this strange behaviour. Observed evidence is that there appears to be absolutely no motivation for the peripatetic poultry perambulations. The group of incident managers contained an Italian and a Canadian. In a flash of stereotypical inspiration the Italian offered a resolution of the incident which involved ‘eradicating’ the journalist. “That’s the way we’d handle it in Italy” he detailed. well, that would undeniably (if unethically) mean the incident was managed. Incident resolved. The Canadian offered that we should dispose of the chicken, then there would be no incident as such. we might have then taken forward what he said to include eating it. so, the resolution of that incident – “Kill the journalist, eat the chicken”. Incident closed. However, the murderous and gluttonous incident managers are missing out on the key dynamic of the task: the resolution of the puzzle, the man behind the mask as it were. Because if they explored the problem enough to understand it slightly more fully in the first place they’d have understood why the chicken was crossing the road! VitAL you can now contact steve white at: stevescolumn@vital-mag.net January / February 2012 : VitAL 15
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A service-based strategy for the creative industries With an explosion of channels – both broadcast and Internet – the ‘media’ is undergoing something of a revolution. Matt Bailey spoke to Sammy Aindow, a solutions architect at Jigsaw Systems, a specialist IT supplier and technical support service organisation that is focussed on this dynamic market.
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“We have a team of around 20 people on first line support, a mixture of technical support and customer services staff with different specialities – audio, video, servers, networks etc – who will answer a call within ten seconds and diagnose any issues,”
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hich facet ofJigsaw Systems was formed in 1992 and is one of the UK’s leading specialist IT suppliers and its largest Apple and Adobe dealer focussed on business and professional customers. Solutions architect Sammy Aindow is one of the company’s longest serving workflow specialists. He provides consultancy and support for large media and entertainment companies. An Apple Certified Systems Administrator, Avid Certified Support Representative and VMWare Technical Sales Professional, Sammy’s field of expertise has seen him design and implement systems for a large number of high-profile clients including Trinity Mirror, York University, UNIT Media, Chello Zone, the National Theatre and more. “I’ve been at Jigsaw since I was 18 and I’m now 31,” says Aindow. “I started out on technical support and worked my way up through the service organisation. We specialise in supplying computers to the creative industries; the company actually started out as an Apple supplier, so our market is the people that use a lot of Macs and on the whole this tends to be the creative industries.” Working in the Mac sphere, desk top publishing (DTP) systems like Quark Xpress and Adobe products have always been supported as well as video and broadcast systems. Aidow himself is heavily involved in broadcast and video consultancy and support. “We have a team of around 20 people on first line support, a mixture of technical support and customer services staff with different specialities – audio, video, servers, networks etc – who will answer a call within ten seconds and diagnose any issues,” says Aindow. “If the call needs escalation to a manufacturer, they can arrange that. If the www.vital-mag.net
request is beyond their basic knowledge it gets escalated to a second line.
Best practice Customer service is central to the way the company works. “We have a servicebased strategy’” says Aindow, “our product specialists, project managers and technical consultants work together to design and implement creative workflow solutions. These include cross-platform integration, high speed/capacity storage and networking, archiving systems, proxy video servers, render farms, conferencing systems and much more.” The business covers the ‘creative industries’ comprehensively. “Our consultants provide solutions for design, print and publishing, pro video, pro audio, AV networks and digital signage, animation and 3D visualisation, technical design (AEC) and photography,” says Aindow. “Our range of services includes storage for staged rollout, preinstallation testing, configuration, software imaging, asset tagging, deployment and onsite installation, warranty registration, integration planning, project management and on-site and remote support maintenance contracts with SLAs.” Since the company was founded in 1992, the role of best practice has increased. “We now have a couple of practitioners in our organisation with ITIL expertise,” says Aindow. “And as the company has grown we have had to use ITIL processes to build up best practice.”
Clear skies While many sectors are pointing their wagons in the direction of the cloud and anticipating a number of benefits, Sammy Aindow says January / February 2012 : VitAL 17
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“All those channels need content and that content has to be made on something. You can’t these days make a song or a TV programme without using IT. Even when they film on old style ‘celluloid’, they still scan it in to edit it in a computer before running it out as film again.”
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there are limitations for the creative industries. “Generally the data and network requirements of the businesses we’re in don’t fit very well into the cloud model because of the quantities of data involved,” he says. “I can see how if you are a small business, like perhaps an accountancy firm, you don’t really need any in-house IT, you could outsource all that activity to the cloud, but when you need 20-30 terabytes of storage and you need to have a dozen workstations all reading over a fibre channel network because they are editing high definition video, then you can’t really put that wholesale into the cloud, it wouldn’t work or would be massively cost prohibitive.” But that isn’t the end of the story. “You can of course use the cloud for back up services for individual machines and email – all the back office stuff. We are certainly seeing these sorts of functions going into the cloud,” says Aindow. Similarly, virtualisation isn’t really a good fit either: “If we’re talking about high definition video, you need direct access to the I/O for throughput,” explains Aindow. “There are other areas where virtualisation works really well – for the generic IT stuff – but for a lot of our clients, the amount of data being thrown across the network is too much and the cost of putting in a big enough data link to the data centre are prohibitive. Much of the work we do day to day doesn’t really fit in well with the vitualisation/cloud model.”
Going mobile As a specialist in Apple products, you might expect Jigsaw to be banging the ‘consumerisation’ drum, but on the whole, as with the cloud, its niches and their core processes don’t really benefit. “In the general business we are talking to customers about mobile device management and being able to lock down and track devices, and bring your own device (BYOD) is becoming more prevalent,” says Aindow. “There’s loads of individuals in companys brining their own deives and managing those devices is a struggle. So, yes, we are seeing quite a lot of traction with that as a company. In to the media market, the less corporate companies – the more niche guys – don’t really
mind: ‘It’s your own phone you can do what you like with it’ seems to be the mindset. We have set up wireless networks so they can use their iPads and smartphones on the Internet in the office, but their use for applications like video is limited. “With iPads for instance you have to find a suitable method for getting video on to them,” explains Aindow, “that’s the kind of service we try to provide. If you are shooting a film and you need to be able to view things back, the iPad is a great portable device to do it on. Film can be shot on to a card in a camera, the card goes into a computer and as soon as it’s there you can transfer it to your iPad. In that respect they are brilliant. “Wireless is fine for most of the sorts of things people use it for, but you wouldn’t have a video workstation that was only linked by wireless,” he adds. “It’s a means to let people with laptops and tablets get their email and surf the web. It remains to be seen whether crowds of people will be sitting in Starbucks come the summer watching the Olympics on their iPads and smartphones using the free Wi-Fi. Will people really be walking down Oxford Street watching TV on their iPhones?”
What’s in store Sammy Aindow is excited about the future of IT in the creative industries. “Apple/Intel’s Thunderbolt technology is starting to take off with a lot of direct attached video input/output devices and storage,” he says, “but the one thing we are seeing the most growth with is 10GB Ethernet. It is the one thing we are putting more and more of in because people want to send things across networks quicker and it’s reached a price point where it is a bit more affordable. “People are still buying stuff. Apple sells out of every product it brings out. In the entertainment industry there are more and more channels and in the absence of any money people tend to stay in and watch TV. All those channels need content and that content has to be made on something. You can’t these days make a song or a TV programme without using IT. Even when they film on old style ‘celluloid’, they still scan it in to edit it in a computer before running it out as film again.” VitAL www.vital-mag.net
YEARS!
Taking the headache out of Recruitment T: 01288 355800 E: info@globaltechnologysolutions.com www.globaltechnologysolutions.com
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Why the technology sector needs women A lack of female influence is holding the IT industry back, according to Pam Maynard Maynard. In this feature she outlines how attracting women into technology is vital for its future success and how the whole industry needs to pull together and make it a more inviting place for females to work and grow their careers.
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echnology is a fascinating growth industry but, for an industry that is constantly innovating, it continues to be male dominated and has repeatedly failed to attract female graduates in any great numbers. For a woman, starting a career in technology can be a daunting experience. A lack of peers and role models can mean that entering the world of technology can feel worryingly like stepping into the lion’s den for young females. But, getting them into the lion’s den is exactly what needs to happen. Males and females bring different skill sets to any work place and a balanced gender mix is optimal for the success of any business. From what I have observed, males tend to be direct and are more singleminded in their approach to problems, while females are more observant and collaborative. A mix of these views can be really beneficial to the progress of any organisation.
Image problems According to a study carried out by e-skills, the UK Skills Council for Business and Information Technology, females only make up 19 percent of ITC managers and only 14 percent of IT strategy and planning professionals in the UK. What is preventing females from pursuing careers in technology and what can be done to remedy this? One view is that the technology sector is the domain of geeky boys and that it is this image that may be putting some females off when considering their career options. Technology does seem to have a bit of an image problem, and the lack of female leadership in the area only exacerbates the situation, with many women feeling that they cannot rise to the top. Indeed, only six females were included in Silicon magazine’s 2010 list of the 50 most influential CIOs (chief information officers). Unfortunately the shortage of female role models does not have a quick fix, so for now, women who are planning a career in technology need to think of themselves as pioneers. Women need to be bolder in the office environment and not constrain themselves, they need to put themselves out there and take risks.
Education The state of IT education for women isn’t much prettier. The e-skills study also shows www.vital-mag.net
that females account for just 15 percent of applications for Computer Science and IT related subjects in higher education. However, one positive take-away is that female students have consistently outperformed their male counterparts in these subjects. Results would suggest that if more female students took up these subjects it would greatly improve the talent pool available to the technology industry. This is where employers need to come in. It is in the interest of every organisation that offers IT services to promote technology as a genuine career choice for women. Employers must influence cultures and perceptions internally and allow strong female role models to emerge from within. Organisations need to be considerate, flexible and supportive to females’ needs in a male dominated environment and must actively pursue a policy of attracting talented females to positions of influence. When changes have taken place at the industry level, then perhaps the technology sector can shake off its geeky image and attract female school leavers into what is a very fast-paced innovative industry.
Gender balance Bringing a gender balance to an organisation ensures that there is a variety of skills and opinions, which in turn fosters different viewpoints and ideas. It is vitally important to be able to link technology with business outcomes and women are frequently a natural fit to deliver the creativity needed to deliver a full IT solution. At Avanade, we launched our Women in IT programme for Europe in February last year. The idea behind this programme was to strengthen the female presence within Avanade, especially in the consulting sector of the business. The goal is to attract new female recruits and create opportunities for women within the company with roles that are challenging and highly visible. This in turn can create the platform and the support network that females looking to break into the industry need to not just survive, but to thrive. Attracting women into technology is vital for the future success of the industry. This isn’t going to happen by itself. The whole of the industry needs to pull together and make it a more inviting place for females to work and grow their careers. It won’t happen overnight, but we can get there together. VitAL www.avanade.com
For a woman, starting a career in technology can be a daunting experience. A lack of peers and role models can mean that entering the world of technology can feel worryingly like stepping into the lion’s den for young females.
About the author Pam Maynard is general manager of business technology services provider Avanade UK. Maynard joined Avanade in 2008 from Capgemini where she led IT performance improvement for global clients. With over 15 years of experience in IT and consulting services, she has also held positions in IT strategy and programme management at Ernst and Young, and consultancy roles at Oracle. Prior to accepting the role of Avanade UK GM, Maynard was the vice president of enterprise applications and integration. In this role, she was responsible for application development, information management and collaboration, infrastructure consulting, and project management and outsourcing for Avanade UK.
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Six steps to policy excellence Organisations need to take a systematic and proactive approach to risk mitigation if they are to be better prepared to satisfy evolving legal and regulatory requirements says Dominic Saunders. Here he gives an IT security expert’s view on best practice policy management.
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triking the right balance between risk mitigation and the commercial demands of the business is an essential skill, which must be adapted according to the nature of your industry and the size, culture and risk appetite of your organisation. This role needs to have clear ownership at senior management level. Organisations need to take a systematic and proactive approach to risk mitigation if they are to be better prepared to satisfy evolving legal and regulatory requirements, manage the costs of compliance and realise competitive advantage. Achieving and maintaining policy compliance becomes more difficult to sustain as organisations grow, become more geographically dispersed and more highly regulated. But, it doesn’t have to be this way.
The purpose of policies and procedures Policies and procedures establish guidelines to behaviour and business processes in accordance with an organisation’s strategic objectives. Whilst typically developed in response to legal and regulatory requirements, their primary purpose should be to convey accumulated wisdom on how best to get things done in a risk-free, efficient and compliant way. Policy Pitfalls Here are some of the most common grounds for policy non-compliance: Poorly worded policies; Badly structured policies; Out-of-date policies; Inadequately communicated policies: Un-enforced policies; Lack of management scrutiny. So, what is the secret for effective policy management?
Policy excellence in six steps Step one – Create/review: It is important to understand, when creating policies, that those created purely to satisfy auditors and regulatory bodies are unlikely to improve business performance or bring about policy compliance, as they rarely change employee www.vital-mag.net
behaviour appropriately. While satisfying legal departments, and looking impressive to auditors and regulators, busy employees will instantly be turned off by lengthy policy documents full of technical and legal jargon. External factors that affect policies are evolving all the time: for example technology advances may lead to information security policies and procedures becoming obsolete. Additionally, changes in the law or industry regulations require operational policies to be frequently adjusted. Some policies, such as Payment Card Industry DSS compliance, have to be re-presented and signed up to on an annual basis. Typically, most ‘policy’ documents are lengthy, onerous and largely unreadable – many are written using complex jargon, and most contain extraneous content which would be better classed as procedures, standards, guidelines and forms. Such documents should be associated with the policy. Documents must be written using language that is appropriate for the target audience and should spell out the consequences of non-compliance. Smaller, more manageable documents are easier for an organisation to review and update, whilst also being more palatable for the intended recipients. Inadequate version control and high production costs can be reduced by automating the entire process using an electronic system. Step two – Distribute: A key step in the policy management lifecycle is to ensure that staff are aware of relevant policies and procedures. Organisations need to effectively distribute policies, both new and updated, in a timely and efficient manner. These need to be consistently enforced across an organisation. After all, what is the point of expending considerable effort and cost to write and approve policies, if they are not effectively distributed and read?
Documents must be written using language that is appropriate for the target audience and should spell out the consequences of noncompliance. Smaller, more manageable documents are easier for an organisation to review and update, whilst also being more palatable for the intended recipients.
Step three – Achieve consent: In many cases, regulatory requirements call for evidence of policy acceptance, demanding a more pro-active and thorough approach to the policy management lifecycle. January / February 2012 : VitAL 23
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For those organisations that are serious about staff reading, understanding and signing up to policies, they should consider adopting automated policy management software. This raises standards of policy compliance and provides managers with practical tools to improve policy uptake and adherence.
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A process needs to be implemented that monitors users’ response to policies. Policy distribution should be prioritised, ensuring that higher risk policies are signed off earlier by users than other lower risk documents. For example, an organisation may want to ensure that a user signs up to their Information Governance policy on the first day that they start employment, whilst having up to two weeks to sign up to the Travel & expense Policy. systems need to in place to grant a user two weeks to process a particular document, after which the system should automatically force the user to process it. step four – understanding: To monitor and measure staff comprehension and effectiveness of policies and associated documentation, organisations should test all, or perhaps a subset of, users. Any areas that show weaknesses can be identified and corrected accordingly. Additional training or guidance may be necessary or, if it’s the policy that is causing confusion, it can be reworded or simplified. step five – auditability: In many cases regulatory requirements call for evidence of policy acceptance, which demands a more pro-active and thorough approach to the policy management lifecycle. The full revision history of all documents needs to be maintained as well as who has read what, when and, if possible, how long it took; who declined a policy and why. This record should be stored for future reference and may be stored in conjunction with test results. step six – reporting: To affect change and improve compliance it helps if key performance indicators relating to policy uptake are clearly visible across all levels of an enterprise. Dashboard visibility of policy uptake compliance by geographical or functional business units helps to consolidate information and highlights exceptions. Being able to quickly drill down for specific details in areas of poor policy compliance dramatically improves management’s ability to understand and address underlying issues.
Bringing it all together To check the level of policy compliance that exists within your organisation you need to periodically answer the following questions: Where are you current policies? – Are the accessible to staff? Who has seen your current policies? Who has read your current policies? Do your staff understand them? Are your policies being followed by everyone? Are your policies effectively managed? Are your policies up to date? And can you prove this to the Auditors? For those organisations that are serious about staff reading, understanding and signing up to policies, they should consider adopting automated policy management software. This raises standards of policy compliance and provides managers with practical tools to improve policy uptake and adherence.
Doing the right thing Ultimately, policy compliance is about getting people to do the right thing, in the right way, every time. ensuring everyone understands what is expected of them and how they are required to carry out their jobs according to corporate policies and procedures is not a new practice. embedding an automated policy management solution into an organisation is really the only viable way to create and sustain a culture of compliance, where people understand their responsibilities and the importance of adhering to corporate standards. Doing so empowers people to do their jobs within an acceptable governance framework rather than constrained by a rigid set of unenforceable rules. By effectively handling the policy management lifecycle you can create a firm foundation for effective risk mitigation and governance. Automation helps the benefits of policy compliance for The Board, line managers and the general workforce get to grips with policy compliance and puts forward a cost-efficient approach for achieving policy excellence. VitAL www.cryptzone.com
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vitAL MAnAGeMenT
Open source salvation? Open source is not the panacea of Government ICT, nothing is, but it can contribute to curing many of its current ailments according to Bertrand Diard.
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The victim of over-charging The findings by the public administration committee that Government departments have been the victims of commercial over charging by what they describe as a ‘cartel’ of big IT firms, wasting ‘obscene amounts of public money’, does raise the question of why is open source not being considered for use in the public sector? It seems that the UK Government is stuck in a ‘groundhog day’ situation with procurement. Yet again another committee has concluded that IT contracts are dominated by the same ‘oligopoly of suppliers’; and the new findings makes the u-turn on the open standards promise made in the Cabinet Office’s ICT strategy seem even more peculiar now. The importance of ICT is probably still somewhat underestimated by most people, who take it for granted as a way of performing the most basic of day to day tasks. Almost all of the employed population use technology in one way or another as a standard, with at least one generation having never experienced the more draconian methods of performing business, such as typing on a typewriter. Government is now solely reliant on ensuring that their ICT infrastructure performs at the highest possible standard, keeping data secure and increasing efficiency at a lower cost where possible. This is where open source technology can provide its greatest support to the mechanisms of power in Westminster and across the public sector.
Government is now solely reliant on ensuring that their ICT infrastructure performs at the highest possible standard, keeping data secure and increasing efficiency at a lower cost where possible. This is where open source technology can provide its greatest support to
Homogenous procurement
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here is a changing tide in UK politics, after nearly a decade of affluence and accessible credit, the necessity of balancing the accounts has heaped an enormous amount of pressure on the coalition to bring the economy to order. The decision to cut swathes of spending from the public sector, coupled with a slower than expected growth in the private sector has seen an emergence of discontent with Government policy from the UK electorate. I am not arguing that IT is the root of the problems. Clearly, as larger and more delicately balanced economies such as the USA and Euro Zone continue to face threats from bankruptcy, the troubles are all encompassing. What I struggle to comprehend however, is that having been debated, considered and ratified, open source now continues to be ignored by the UK Government. Especially as they pursue a reduction in IT spending.
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The report from the administration committee highlighted how the suppliers of software to Government departments were negotiating licenses at one rate with one department and then supplying a different department at a separate rate. If a homogenous procurement plan was to be implemented using open source software, each department could purchase the new packages at a standard rate from one supplier, and have it rolled out across a number of departments or organisations. This can supply a cost saving through the process of procurement, whilst the complexity of implementation would be reduced thanks to the intrinsic flexibility of open source, its ability to integrate with all existing legacy systems. Critics of open source always point to security as the core deficiency of the option when compared to proprietary alternatives, however I stand confidently behind my opinion that open source is equal to, if not more secure than,
the mechanisms of power in Westminster and across the public sector.
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By rolling out an open standard across all departments, the UK Government will be able to utilise a more comprehensive framework within which data can be easily and securely shared and managed. If each department could go into a central data warehouse to search and extract data that has gone through a central quality control, then it will save both time and money.
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proprietary software. I believe this comes from the global open source community. Across the world there is a huge number of technically proficient individuals who collaborate amongst themselves highlighting bugs in software and identifying areas where the software could be improved. This community is what really sets open source apart from proprietary, as it allows development to come from outside of the initial company or individual who designed and developed the software. This continually provides a higher number of different options for developers as it allows for the idiosyncratic contribution of each individual on how best to make improvements, thus increasing the security and performance of the software.
Data protection By rolling out an open standard across all departments, the UK Government will be able to utilise a more comprehensive framework within which data can be easily and securely shared and managed. If each department could go into a central data warehouse to search and extract data that has gone through a central quality control, then it will save both time and money. Data protection is essential to all Government departments due to its sensitive content nature. The introduction of open standards across a number of departments is not an invitation for all and sundry to access the data, but is the creation of a platform that can drive huge efficiencies into the processes and operations of each department. There does not need to be open access to all data the central and local Government bodies possess on the population, but by opening up access to data from outside of each department is a quicker process. I do accept that this creates a larger responsibility for management, as they must make sure that only those who are authorised to view the data, can access it. The creation of different levels of access rights can easily be established as an initial check and balance, and supplemented with user monitoring, as should be standard within a civil service. Data management is continually at the forefront of Government performance. now the type of software you use cannot protect you from someone leaving a CD on a train, or having a laptop stolen, what software can provide is an apparatus that will increase the quality of the data by sieving it through
a data quality and cleansing package creating a single version of truth data file and removing duplication. Here open source software provides the flexibility to alter the code so that the package can be tailored to suit the specific needs to Government. This permits Government with the opportunity to manipulate the software to their specific needs rather than attempting to work within the rigid framework of a proprietary option.
Competitive advantage The evidence is there from the private sector, that open source software can provide competitive advantages through increasing efficiency and reduces operating costs. Furthermore, open source has managed to carve into the market share of proprietary software year on year, especially under the recent advent of Master Data Management, a package of data management applications that is now a business essential for any organisation that relies on good data. I find it bizarre that given the enormous emphasis placed on reducing the budget deficit, a simple change in direction on procurement that could cut a significant amount from spending, continues to be ignored. Open standards and open source software will provide the public sector with flexibility and scalability that not only reduces costs, it will seamlessly integrate with existing legacy systems, and as such would incur an unreasonable cost when adopting in place of the current system. what is more is that by inviting providers of open source software to tender for contracts, the Government will increase market competition forcing both open source and proprietary software developers to continue to innovate and improve. The benefits of which will be reaped by those serviced by a better product. As the Universal Credit scheme, the new social benefits system, which is not just one of the coalition’s key mega projects but also the largest active ICT project, is moved online, it will be interesting to see if, and how, the costs of implementing it escalate. If Government does not learn their lessons from using the same IT suppliers, who continue to charge exorbitant amounts of money for their services, it will expose the lack of understanding of how to make IT cost effective that I believe exists among decision makers. VitAL www.talend.com www.vital-mag.net
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Better ‘second-line’ support ‘Desktop Support’ is a common name for the second line of support beyond the Service Desk. It is the forgotten resource. We spend so much time, effort and money worrying about how we handle incoming incidents – but what about how we solve those that still remain open after we hang up the phone? Noel Bruton explains.
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RETTy MUCH every IT support operation has a desktop support group – those who visit the user to resolve issues that cannot be fixed remotely. It’s what the users ‘see’ as IT support. It is the next step on the ladder for the aspiring Service Desk worker. It is our history, the very acorn from which user support grew and yet the industry standard process framework makes scant mention of this ubiquitous and crucial resource. Maybe that lack of industry focus partly explains the results of two surveys I made of the industry several years apart, which showed that while the first line’s productivity was steadily increasing, that of the second line was static, if not stagnant. In my view, Desktop support is simply not sufficiently noticed by the industry, nor by the limited management framework we tend to follow, nor by the tools we install.
be made here, making it particularly deserving of management priority. And third, because in studying second line work, a whole different way of doing user support emerges – one that is typically cheaper, faster, more direct, higher quality, more efficient and more rewarding for the staff to work in than the outmoded convention in which we seem to have become blinded over the past decade. In my function as a consultant who advises companies on how to improve user support (see my website), I have had twenty years of opportunities to observe, design, advise, train and from time to time run world-class IT support services. whenever I get the chance, I always focus primarily on Desktop support because that’s usually where the biggest service improvements can be made most quickly – especially so for those clients who want the service improvement project to show some ‘quick wins’.
Management priority
Logical
But it should be – and for three simple reasons: firstly, because the work done by the second line is the essence and cause of all user support, namely because it focuses on getting users back working when they have been impeded by an IT issue. secondly, a query going to second line incurs many times the cost of one going to first line, both inside IT and to the business as a whole (see below), so there are big cost wastes and savings to
It’s a logical starting point – assuming that by and large the IT works, then the user’s incoming question can probably be resolved from within existing system parameters or procedural options, so the overwhelming likelihood is that the fix to the vast majority of enquiries will come either from first line, network administration or desktop support. network admin will create the account or change the password when they get
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round to it (clerical jobs that expensive network technicians probably shouldn’t be doing anyway) and the first line either can or cannot answer the user’s question. That leaves good old desktop support, with its disparate workload, natural delays and usually horrendous backlog. Users dissatisfied with the service? They forget when the first line fixed it in seconds, but remember when nobody got back to them for days or weeks – that’ll frequently be desktop support. Then there are the costs; if a first liner takes a typical 42 calls per day, then the average first line handling cost in salary terms only is around £2 or less per enquiry. If the first liner resolves the enquiry then that £2 also includes the cost of the fix. However, if the enquiry goes second line, then the minimum additional internal IT salary cost is around £7.40, so the fix costs a total £9.40-ish, more if the second liner doesn’t fix it at his first pass, more still if he then sends it back to the first line to be ‘closed’. But then there is the additional business cost of the user productivity lost in the delay between the first liner logging the call and the second-liner picking it up and resolving it. This is a function of employee hourly contribution to corporate turnover factored for dependency on the computer. It’s usually a further tens but can run into hundreds of pounds per enquiry.
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Merging first and (desktop) second line also promises the end to another problem that technocracy has held us back from solving, namely the real-time issue. If your service is typical, you’ll get more calls in the morning and fewer in the afternoon – and yet you’ll have pretty much the same number of people available to deal with the enquiries throughout the day.
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up unnecessary annual costs of hundreds of thousands, occasionally even millions of pounds; and fixing that is why I can always justify my consultancy fee. Of course if you’re forced by circumstance to adhere to the traditional ‘Service Desk’ policy of having most enquiries or incidents touched by at least two owners, then your support costs will tend toward the maximum anyway. In bigger corporations, that cost may have to be borne simply because the sheer scale and complexity of the IT estate makes a first line fix unlikely. But for smaller organisations – say about 1500 IT users or fewer – in many, probably most cases, the way you structure first and second line will make an enormous difference to your costs and quality. And one of the curious things here is, get that structure right, and almost without exception, the better the service then becomes from the users’ point of view, so the cheaper it is to provide it. This is because a faster service has fewer costly delays and ownership changes. Not only that, but the more fun it is for the staff to work in it. So if you’re not Megacorporation Unlimited PLC and most of your IT users are in one location, you may have an opportunity to do something extraordinary with IT support. However, for it to work well, you’re going to have to dispense with a sacred cow or two – maybe three.
Take my mother-in-law First of these is the oh-so-eighties idea of the ‘one-stop-shop’ for IT support. It simply isn’t necessary any more. It first became popular back when computers recognised each other’s messages by exchanging tokens on cables as thick as water pipes and Tim Berners-Lee hadn’t yet changed the world. The technology was so fragile that most enquiries needed diagnosis. Nowadays though, stuff generally works and when it doesn’t… Well let’s just say that even my dear old technophobic motherin-law (bless her) can, without her brain exploding, handle the idea that if she wants to get her vacuum cleaner repaired she needs to talk to somebody different than if she wants to buy a new one. Let’s give the users some credit for being able to decide whether they need something new or changed, or whether the equipment they already have is broken. Separate service/ change requests from support requests and send them down different routes, even if just chosen by options on the telephone system. Where possible, automate requests that can be dealt with just by completing a form.
Why? Because service administration clerks and websites containing change request forms tend to cost less than technicians. It is a waste of money, skills and staff motivation to have trained technicians routinely doing clerical work they didn’t sign up for – it also risks undermining morale and thus translating into lower service quality.
Real time Another of the cows of support’s past, upon which my musket now draws a bead, is the anachronistic split between first and second line. This belongs to a technocratic era, and times have changed. Users are no longer as inept and equipment no longer so fragile – the need is no longer so great for the highly knowledgeable, peripatetic break-fix technician. Much that was done at the user’s desk can be done remotely – to the point that we now need those diagnosticians manning the remote control stations too. Merging first and (desktop) second line also promises the end to another problem that technocracy has held us back from solving, namely the real-time issue. If your service is typical, you’ll get more calls in the morning and fewer in the afternoon – and yet you’ll have pretty much the same number of people available to deal with the enquiries throughout the day. Consequently we struggle to deal with the peak in the morning and so callers wait until afternoon for a resolution. Merge first and second with flexible staff – then it’s everybody manning the phones in the morning with a high first-line fix rate, and freeing up resource to deal only with the non-urgent stuff after lunch. This is a model I’ve encouraged, seen and proven in numerous organisations. This is a huge topic and there isn’t room to deal with it all here, especially the complexities of how you implement it, measure its need and successes and so on. I cover it in far more depth in ‘How to Manage the IT Helpdesk’, which you can now download straight to your desktop from my Website. VitAL www.noelbruton.com Noel Bruton is a UK-based, independent consultant and trainer who since 1991 has advised companies all over the world and in a wide range of industries on the practical realities of IT support improvement. He is the author of the best selling ‘How To Manage the IT Helpdesk’ and ‘Managing the IT Services Process’. See more of his work at www.noelbruton.com. January / February 2012 : VitAL 31
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Social IT is here, and it means business! Love it or loathe it, social media is here and it will change how businesses use IT to get stuff done. The IT department needs to step up to the challenge; embrace social media. be one step ahead and lead the way for the rest of the business says Maff Rigby.
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OCIAL MEDIA is transforming business at an exhilarating pace! It is ripping up the very foundations of how we communicate and turning established working practises on their head. As a result, there is much confusion about what social media actually means for business, and consequently what it means for the IT industry. Love it or loathe it, Social media is here and it will change how businesses use IT to get stuff done. The IT Department needs to step up to the challenge; embrace Social media. be one step ahead and lead the way for the rest of the business.
The rise of social media when we think of social media we immediately think of Facebook and Twitter, but in reality it is much, much more! From real-time chat applications to blogging sites to mobile location-based services – we are more connected now than ever before to more and more people and in a never-ending range of innovative ways! Over the last ten years we’ve seen the concepts of social media entering the workplace. This could be in the form of team wikis, instant messenger applications, or full-blown social enterprise platforms such as socialCast or Yammer. Businesses are using social media both internally and externally to create a highly interactive community with collaborative knowledge sharing firmly at the centre. www.vital-mag.net
Social media adoption for businesses Using social media within the workplace can lead towards an ‘edge of chaos’ style of working, where the structure and governance within an organisation is just tight enough to hold the business together, yet loose enough to allow empowered and innovative working to happen. As such, social media working practises are more suited to small, loosely structured organisations rather than large, highly structured ones. However, I have witnessed first-hand in a large multinational organisation where the CeO regularly engaged with all levels of the business through a social platform, often answering some very difficult questions quite openly. If you’re looking to adopt social media practises within your business you should consider the following areas: external use of social media (for establishing a connection with your customers) work out the context in which you need to have a social media presence – ie, do your customers use it, if so, in what way and on which platforms? It wouldn’t be prudent for a bank to carry out all its customer support on Twitter! engaging with customers on Twitter who complain about their service and ushering them into established support channels might be a better focus. January / February 2012 : VitAL 33
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My advice is this – exploit the aspects of social media that can give your business a competitive advantage, and put in place coping mechanisms for those aspects of Social media that may prove
Internal Social media policy (can or can’t you access Facebook in work?) Re-visit your policies on the use of external social media platforms within the office environment and relax them wherever possible, because you cannot fully embrace social media as an organisation if your culture opposes the use of it within the workplace. By preventing your employees from fully engaging with social media, you risk losing any credibility in your external social media engagement due to the transparency that Social media brings with it. Internal use of social media (for increasing productivity) As with the use of social media externally, the same advice applies. Define the benefits you can gain from introducing social media tools to your business. Again, if it doesn’t make sense to use social media tools within certain areas of your organisation don’t do it. Just be sure that you’re saying ‘no’ for the right reasons and it’s not just a knee-jerk reaction against social media adoption.
What is social IT?
troublesome or you just don’t yet fully understand.
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Social IT takes the concepts and ways of working that have emerged from social media, and incorporates them into how we work (or should work) in the IT Department. Social IT enables us to pro-actively engage with the users of our IT services in an open and collaborative manner, enabling our customers to use IT services in the ways they have become accustomed to through their use of social media. Traditionally the IT Department has been the gatekeeper of technology, showcasing the latest and greatest gadgets to the rest of
the business and patiently waiting for them to understand and catch up with us. Social media has broken this model, not only because it has arisen from the consumer space but because it is so easy to understand and use. As a result, Social media has ‘snuck in’ to business without the IT Department’s knowledge, and in many cases without its consent.
Why should we embrace social IT? I often use the analogy of the music industry, and how the emergence of file-sharing through digital technology disrupted the highly controlled physical distribution channels owned by the major record labels. Instead of embracing this emerging technology the labels opposed it, and as a result they suffered huge losses (in both cash and industry leadership). The IT Department is in danger of going down the same path if we don’t embrace this new technology quickly! My advice is this – exploit the aspects of social media that can give your business a competitive advantage, and put in place coping mechanisms for those aspects of Social media that may prove troublesome or you just don’t yet fully understand.
Potential benefits of social IT Social IT offers us an opportunity to embrace the IT knowledge that exists within the organisation. Enable the IT users to fix each other’s printer issues and free up the IT Department to focus on those business-critical, highly technical projects that can drive your business forward! The argument of “employees should be focusing on doing their proper jobs rather than www.vital-mag.net
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fixing other people’s IT issues” simply doesn’t hold anymore. Today’s IT users expect realtime responses and super-fast results, which the traditional IT Department struggles to deliver. As a result, IT users have been fixing their own issues for quite some time now. Capture that knowledge and transform it into a positive force that can help the community of IT users within your organisation help themselves. There is also a great opportunity with social IT to break down the ‘us vs. them’ barrier that seems to have become the norm for most IT Departments within larger organisations. IT refers to the rest of the organisation as ‘the business’, and seems to try and block business initiatives if they don’t fit into the IT Department’s ways of thinking or working. One of the key aspects of Social media is usability and the customer experience. Platforms or applications are so simple and intuitive that you become immediately immersed in them and find them hard to leave! Imagine bringing this kind of user experience into an IT Service Desk platform, where the IT users actually enjoyed logging calls in the Service Desk, and where you didn’t need to send your entire organisation on a four-hour training course in order to use it.
Potential drawbacks of social IT Some people in the IT industry may see social IT as a threat to their profession. The argument goes something along the lines of, “if we give the IT users the ability to help themselves and each other, then we’re putting ourselves out of a job”. Again, think of the other things you could be doing if you weren’t looking after that first line of IT support – all those business critical projects that are waiting to be completed but you just don’t have the time. www.vital-mag.net
Security is often a big area of concern when it comes to changing any IT technology or practise, and the adoption of social IT is no different. However, the challenges around managing the security of information in social IT systems is no different than for existing systems such as email or PCs. Define security policies that best fit your situation depending on the sensitivity of the business you are conducting, and ensure access to whatever system you use (whether it is social or any other type of system) is properly managed and understood.
Turning tide Social media is everywhere, and most people enjoy the benefits it brings us both in and out of the workplace. There is still some reluctance within the IT Department to embrace the concepts of social media and start to practise social IT, however the tide is slowly turning. We still have an opportunity to radically change how we’re working and reposition the IT Department within the larger organisation to be a leader in social IT rather than a reluctant follow, but we need to act now before the social IT movement passes us by! VitAL www.itsmartdesk.com
About the Author Maff Rigby has over 12 years of experience in IT support and operations management. He is the founder of IT SmartDesk – a social IT Service Management platform which enables an organisation’s IT users to help themselves and each other.
Social IT offers us an opportunity to embrace the IT knowledge that exists within the organisation. Enable the IT users to fix each other’s printer issues and free up the IT Department to focus on those business-critical, highly technical projects that can drive your business forward!
January / February 2012 : VitAL 35
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‘Bring Your Own Device’ culture shakes up IT departments Farhan Mirza asks if the trend for employees to bring their own devices – iPads, tablets, smartphones, laptops etc – into the corporate environment has signalled the death of standardisation.
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ith the Facebook generation growing in size within the workplace, employees are quietly bringing their personal devices such as the iPad into the office – and forward-thinking companies are responding with their own initiatives to harness the momentum. Yet, while the greater connectivity and functionality promise increased productivity— and a boost to IT’s image overnight—this workplace revolution is not without its challenges. An integrated ‘bring your own device’ concept can help maximise the benefits while minimising the risks.
The Facebook generation The Facebook generation has been entering the workforce in waves for many years now. Having grown up with the ubiquitous availability of IT, its members accept and expect high levels of automation, 24-7 communication, and seamless connectivity as a way of life. www.vital-mag.net
With their more open attitude toward data privacy and a general disdain for controls and standardisation, they come equipped with a ‘plug and play’ mindset, experience in leadingedge IT concepts, and familiarity with devices such as the MacBook, iPhone, and iPad and applications such as Facebook, Skype, and Twitter. For the Facebook generation employee, it is their personal IT experience that defines their baseline expectation of IT tools and services in the corporate environment. Findings in our recent survey of German companies support this, indicating a clear trend toward the use of personal IT devices in the corporate environment, with almost 40 percent of respondents saying they use at least one personal IT device for business purposes. Clearly, the computer is no longer perceived as just the electronic means of getting the job done—it has become a design tool that fosters personal expression and creativity, and not just in fields such as advertising and marketing but also in less conventional areas such as distribution. A fault line between IT standardisation and IT personalisation has started to emerge and requires management attention.
A well-designed BYOD strategy and implementation will ensure that personal IT devices boost employee productivity and satisfaction rates without increasing costs.
So how does that work? For companies, it is difficult to reconcile people using their own devices at work against the practices and norms that have traditionally pervaded corporate IT: cost efficiency predicated on standardised hardware and software that is tightly controlled and governed. A well-designed BYOD strategy and implementation will ensure that personal IT devices boost employee productivity and satisfaction rates without increasing costs. However, the number of companies whose IT departments are open to this new trend is rising, and they are beginning to accept a variety of IT devices and applications that are also used on a personal basis. The umbrella term used to describe this concept is ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD). BYOD encompasses a broad range of possibilities, from the simple connection of personal IT devices (such as tablets and January / February 2012 : VitAL 37
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Because companies and employees share the cost of purchasing some IT devices, the burden on the IT budget is lower. Employees also benefit because they do not have to buy a second device for personal use. This assumes that their devices substitute, rather than supplement, the equipment already provided by the company.
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smartphones) to the corporate network, up to complex funding models in which employees either receive a stipend for buying their own work equipment or contribute to any additional costs of a higher-value IT device in exchange for some personal usage rights. The result? Companies report improved productivity and efficiency and lower costs. For example, a software firm ran a global pilot in which employees chose their own company computer and the company supported each purchase with a payment of up to $2,000, on condition that an external three-year maintenance contract was part of the deal. From the pilot alone, the company was able to reduce device management costs by 20 percent and cut the budget for maintenance and upgrade tasks by 80 percent. For those successfully implementing BYOD initiatives, there are numerous benefits. Process times are shorter as employees use
their devices outside their regular working hours and are consequently available ‘after hours and out of the office’ to deal with basic tasks such as responding to emails and attending video meetings. In addition, employees who have tools tailored to their needs as they perform their duties, rather than tools that meet companywide standards, have a more positive attitude, and are more motivated and more efficient. And because companies and employees share the cost of purchasing some IT devices, the burden on the IT budget is lower. Employees also benefit because they do not have to buy a second device for personal use. This assumes that their devices substitute, rather than supplement, the equipment already provided by the company.
The downside The advantages of the BYOD concept are not, however, without certain challenges. www.vital-mag.net
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These include the following: Protecting data: Less attention is often paid to the security of sensitive corporate data on private systems than on dedicated business IT systems, which exposes the organisation to heightened risk. Furthermore, less standardisation means more potential security vulnerabilities. Providing IT support: It goes without saying that users expect comprehensive IT support regardless of the heterogeneous system landscape. IT support teams obviously need to widen their skills and re-tool to address a more diverse IT asset base, a greater variety of device configurations, and more software incompatibilities and system conflicts – quickly, competently, and cost effectively. Purchasing IT: Existing IT supply contracts will have to be recast, as fewer purchases make it difficult to obtain volume discounts on standard equipment and specifications. www.vital-mag.net
Given the attractiveness of BYOD on the one hand and the significant challenges on the other, A.T. Kearney has devised an integrated BYOD concept that addresses five core areas to help capitalise on the benefits while minimizing the associated risks: Adapt the procurement concept: Defining a catalogue of standard devices for various usage categories and including a list of highvalue devices allows employees to choose their own devices and use them on a personal basis, and pay for any additional associated costs. The ongoing maintenance services for the redefined catalogue is then outsourced to hardware suppliers. Because a BYOD concept generally means cost savings for both the employee and the company when it comes to replacing workplace computers, the outcome is a classic win-win situation for everyone. Even if you continue to run with a full IT budget based on historic hardware costs, any additional costs for maintenance, for example, are likely to be offset by employees contributing to their share of IT costs. Improve license and software management: The company benefits from centralising the packaging, distribution, provision, and management of software licenses for all applications. Define a comprehensive communications campaign: Implementing a communications campaign both within the company, for example in the form of IT governance guidelines, and outside the company, in the form of marketing measures, can highlight the company’s innovative practices. This external marketing of a BYOD initiative serves to increase its appeal to young, qualified potential employees. Expand the IT Help Desk: Expanding the capacity of the IT Help Desk will be necessary to cope with the heterogeneous IT landscape and anticipated rise in user queries following the introduction of the BYOD concept. This usually means revised training, new support portals, wikis for self-help, and redefined service levels. Alter the architecture (introduce virtualised work environments): The savings can only take effect at the workplace level when there is sufficient investment in a secure and capable IT architecture. Such investments should be seen in the context of the benefits already discussed – increased productivity and efficiency – and in the positive impact on the company’s image. Making core applications such as Microsoft Office available to employees via the corporate intranet, either as a
It goes without saying that users expect comprehensive IT support regardless of the heterogeneous system landscape.
browser solution or a virtual application, has enormous advantages in that the company’s actual application landscape is detached from the hardware-specific requirements of heterogeneous IT devices. These are equipped with an appropriate framework to ensure the secure access and use of enterprise applications. As the main applications and key data are provided over the Internet, IT security requirements and user-specific access and identitymanagement protocols are put in place. It is not simply a matter of providing access to data but also of safe-guarding the use of corporate applications via the Internet.
Getting personal pays off Relaxing standardisation with a successful BYOD concept begins with an analysis of the corporate culture to determine costs, benefits, potential users, and future IT requirements. Next, we make sure all statutory requirements regarding IT security, compliance, and tax legislation are addressed. Performing a pilot with select users is a good way to test the concept before going live. A well-designed strategy and implementation will ensure that personal IT devices boost employee productivity and satisfaction rates without increasing costs – leading to a lasting advantage for companies and their employees. VitAL www.atkearney.com January / February 2012 : VitAL 39
vitAL PROCesses
PCs - down but certainly not out Are we post-PC? Simon Bain, CTO Simplexo argues that despite the growth of tablets and smartphones in the workplace , when it comes to serious business you still can’t beat a PC.
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ALK OF the supposed ‘death-of-thePC’ is incredibly premature. The influx of tablets and smartphones will likely satisfy common everyday computing needs such as checking emails, listening to music, Tweeting, watching video content and opening basic applications, however to assume this will lead to the death of the PC is terribly naïve. At the start of the new Year we can look back towards the festive period, when people all over the world dropped boulder size hints to family and loved ones about what they expected to see sitting under their tree on Christmas morning. According to industry analysts, seeking Alpha, one item that was
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expected to be on most people’s list, over 20 million in fact, was the Apple iPad2. sales in Q4 2011 were expected to reach 22 million making the device a must have gadget. The demand for the iPad2 is not unexpected. Over the past year the market for tablet devices has grown dramatically. According to analyst house Gartner, sales of tablet devices, including Apple’s first generation iPad, have more than quadrupled from 15 million worldwide in 2010 to a projected 70 million by the end of 2011. This dramatic rise, also combined with the continual increase in smartphones sales, has lead to a number of suggestions stating that the PC will eventually be replaced. www.vital-mag.net
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A downward trend for PCs The current state of the PC market does suggest it is experiencing a steep decline in sales within the UK. Further research from Gartner highlights that PC sales in Western Europe continued to fall in the second quarter of 2011, dropping 19 percent to 12.7 million units, with sales down 15 percent. The reasons for this drop are seen to coincide with the increase in tablet devices. The decline in sales has lead to a number of industry experts suggesting that the PC will follow the same direction as the typewriter with it eventually being put out to pasture. The arrival of tablets, smartphones and Cloud computing have meant that users are able to consolidate their IT needs onto these new devices. Hardware and access devices are being deemed less important as consumer focus switches from silicon, to how technology links people today. The rise in social media has gone hand-inhand with the development of smartphones and tablets. Increasingly, devices are developed specifically to support these applications, with users finding less and less need to only rely on traditional software available on PCs. For consumers, these devices support their basic functions; there is no need for added extras.
A new digital era While there is an argument to suggest we are entering a new digital era, which is supported by the rise in mobile devices and decline in PC sales, to suggest the personal computer is dying is incredibly short sighted; it is merely evolving and diversifying. Along with terms such as ‘cloud computing’, ‘post-PC’ has very much become a buzzword used by the media. The notion behind this being the PC is dead and buried and all our IT needs are now carried out on tablets and smartphones. This is simply not the case. Tablets and smartphones might be useful when carrying out basic tasks such as accessing emails, checking your social media and watching video content but if you want to use office software you need access to specific businesses applications and faster processors; a lot of which aren’t offered and supported by smartphones and tablets yet. In addition, limited storage capabilities, connectivity and overall battery life also present shortcomings for smartphone and tablet devices. While all of these points are addressable, the use of tablet devices does also present wider issues that need to be considered by enterprises. The consumerisation of IT presents www.vital-mag.net
a number of challenges when it comes to managing data security. The rise of tablets and smartphones has seen the emergence of one single device to control both corporate and personal data. As a result, IT departments are coming under increasing pressure to support these devices. The knock on effect of this is how can these departments ensure data protection? Data residing behind a company’s firewall is easy to protect; the trouble arises when the data is moved beyond the firewall, particularly if the device is not controlled by the same security controls and policies as a corporate device would. In order to address this, IT departments need confidence that people are accessing information correctly in a secure manner. While mobile search applications are available to address this and provide the necessary security, there are still challenges with staff accessing company information on personal devices.
Consumerisation of IT For the PC, the ‘consumerisation of IT’ will present a period of transition. During this period, we’ll see a trend where one device will not be favoured over another, people will in fact rely on three devices – a PC, tablet and a smartphone, in order to support all their personal and business IT needs. At present each device does not have the capabilities to run key areas of our lives, all through one device. Generally, a person would not make a phone call via their tablet device, take a photo using their laptop, or access and save large files via their smartphone. Although there are applications available that can assist with this, they are not widely used by the general public and accepted as the norm. As technology evolves, we’ll likely see a movement from three to two devices, which will most probably include a handheld device and a tablet/ PC device, however, both these devices will include technologies encompassing all three, meeting both professional and personal IT and communication needs. As mentioned, the PC is very much in a stage of diversification and evolution. A number of the points highlighted within this article will be addressed and tablets as well as smartphones will become faster, safer with increased processing power and storage capabilities. However, there are limits to their technology for now. The PC is still a recognised tool within businesses and enterprises the world over, and this is not expected to change any time soon. VitAL www.simplexo.com
As technology evolves, we’ll likely see a movement from three to two devices, which will most probably include a handheld device and a tablet/ PC device, however, both these devices will include technologies encompassing all three, meeting both professional and personal IT and communication needs.
January / February 2012 : VitAL 41
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The death of the server The IT landscape is in the process of massive change. Andrew Peddie Peddie, managing director of First Hosted reviews the dramatic changes in the office IT landscape and looks at the future of IT usage, storage and security going forward.
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related to the loss of vital data, and the list just goes on. The traditional office server also takes up space, an expensive commodity these days, with many businesses diversifying and making allowance for flexible and home working to suit busy lifestyles and constricted budgets.
Up, up and away
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he officer server is to become a mere relic, an eBay listing, a forgotten piece of technology. CIOs and IT managers will no longer have a use for it. This is not because there is anything wrong with it, but because world-class technology is becoming more readily available, and is easier for staff to use, with cloud-based business applications, data storage and SaaS and PaaS becoming the norm for many businesses, the IT landscape is completely changing.
Storage stories For so many years now, the office server has been a central part of the workings of any IT set up. Considered the brain or hub of a company’s network, facilitating back-up and storage of its most vital completed work, the failure of this server has proved catastrophic for many businesses. Overloading, powerouts, overheating and downtime all cause dips in productivity, lost business, problems www.vital-mag.net
The emergence of the cloud was initially greeted with some trepidation by businesses, with many fears about security and reliability surfacing. Understandably businesses wanted to ensure its safety and efficacy before entrusting their precious business data, processes and applications to it. The concept of relying on an outsourced ‘invisible’ platform for everyday storage and business processes such as CRM, ERP and e-mail took a bit of adjusting to, but is now rapidly becoming a dominant business technology choice. Software as a service (SaaS) innovators such as Salesforce, NetSuite and Oracle have provided cloud-based ERP, CRM, e-commerce, accounting, supply chain management and inventory software to businesses across all manner of sectors, both improving their operational effectiveness through simple to use applications, and reducing their IT support and set up costs. Retail businesses can also now see the benefits of NetSuite point of sale applications fully integrated their back office function, which provide instant visibility of vital business and inventory information across any store. These applications have played their part in committing the office server to the annuls of history for many businesses, in turn also making the fallibilities of the back-up tape, VPNs, the IT department, patches, upgrades, maintenance, disk space, memory and uninterruptable power supplies a mere distant memory. Equally, data is stored securely as cloud-based solution providers implement all manner of internal controls into both their platforms and data-centres, meaning that users need not worry about any data security breaches.
The application of efficiency Increasingly, businesses are incorporating add-on applications to their businesses allowing them to integrate all manner of business functions through the cloud. These functions, which include sales dashboards, point of sale accounting and CRM to name a few, are often accessed by different staff in their relevant departments on varying scales. Cloud computing makes huge sense in these situations, as the required applications can be accessed by the staff via permission based access – passwords – through the cloud on a SaaS basis. This has a double edged efficiency saving for businesses. Firstly, cloud-based software and services are more cost effective as the company only pays for the levels of actual software usage, as opposed to a company purchasing 30 licenses which are not all used, or used enough to justify the cost. Adds, moves and changes may also be simplified, ensuring easy scaling up and down where required. In addition to this, accessing cloud-based platforms and software completely eradicates the requirement for on-site storage – an office server – and the associated support and maintenance costs. Any faults with the software are solved off-site and downtime is minimal. Equally, data is stored securely and businesses need no longer worry that a technical failure like a server explosion may damage their valuable data.
Fear factor Inevitably there are those who are still unconvinced by the cloud, and subscribe to some commonly held misconceptions. These range from the psychological barriers to storing valuable data off-site, to a fear of US-based data storage falling victim to hackers, in spite of all the incorporated security and back-up functions. These fears are unfounded, and when considering that a huge proportion of internet users regularly utilise online platforms like Facebook, internet banking and Gmail on a daily basis – also seem nonsensical. January / February 2012 : VitAL 43
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Cloud-based platforms and software completely eradicates the requirement for on-site storage – an office server – and the associated support and maintenance costs. Any faults with the software are solved off-site and downtime is minimal.
Perhaps part if the mental barrier to businesses trusting the cloud is the concept of the cloud itself, when even the name lends itself to the notion of an ethereal entity. Larry ellison voiced his concerns about the perception of the cloud back in 2009 at silicon valley business and technology forums the Churchill Club. He rightly pointed out that the cloud doesn’t actually exist, and would be better thought of as computers in a network, as the mythical image of the cloud is actually putting businesses off using it. After all, the cloud is not a new concept, and simply refers to accessing data and applications via the internet. ellison was also reported as saying that by comparing the cloud business model to rental (Paas or saas) and disregarding the ‘cloud’ concept, or just thinking of it as a term which replaced ‘software as a service as part of a fashion, the whole mythology around its existence (or not) would be eliminated. I have to agree with him and advocate the demystification of cloud technology. There will always be those who are early adopters as opposed to the laggards, but when there are so many strategic business benefits to be gained for those businesses using the cloud, it is key that this demystification is accelerated. It is also vital that businesses lose their negative, unfounded perceptions of cloud technology and focus instead on the myriad of efficiency savings it offers.
Transforming the business A good example of a company using cloudbased software to completely transform the way it does business is Reading-based ecocleen. The eco-cleaning and support service franchise business implemented a cloud-based business management platform which saw it become completely server-less and streamline its operation, enabling it to work more effectively. The company switched to a cloud-hosted integrated CRM platform which stored all 44 VitAL : January / February 2012
corporate data in one single database, with access to KPI data, integration with back-office accounting and eRP through simple dashboards. The implementation of this saas cloud-based platform enabled ecocleen to automate all customer billing in electronic format, adding to its eco credentials, and roll out a centrally-controlled e-marketing campaign. The business, which has a number of regional offices, had traditionally operated disparate, regional IT systems which had hindered a uniform, branded marketing and CRM strategy and visibility of customer activity. The self-service portal within the new solution will allow the regional ecocleen offices to quickly and easily access information relating to their transactions. The company had been using sage Line 50 and excel to collect and analyse KPI information, a time-consuming and complex process. Replacing these systems has allowed the regional offices to access KPI information in real time and benchmark their own performance against each other or their own targets, which works as a motivational tool. This, together with the efficiency-saving impact of the platform is projected to play its part ecocleen’s growth strategy, with predictions that the platform will assist it in going from 11 regional offices to an anticipated 25 over two years with a 120 per cent increase in revenue. It is clear from examples such as this that the implementation of a cloud-based solution can help improve the efficiency of a business, providing the opportunity to focus on and expand its core business to meet financial and business targets. This ‘work smarter, not harder’ concept along with the reduced costs, worries and inconveniences associated with cloud-based applications mean that when it comes to eliminating the traditional storage and software hub, the server, or ‘brain’ of an operation, the decision really is a no-brainer. VitAL www.lantronix.com www.vital-mag.net
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Self-service solution The London Borough of Bromley has implemented an online self-service solution. vitAL talks to Helen Stewart, information services manager, who discusses the challenges she faced when trying to implement a self-service model.
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ECENT PUBLIC sector spending cuts have raised serious concerns for councils, who are being left with gruelling decisions on what cuts they should be making. To ensure that further budgetary cuts have minimal impact on its citizens. The London Borough of Bromley has implemented an online self-service solution. A recent study revealed that 19 million UK households (77 percent) now have an internet connection and 30 million people use the internet on a daily basis; reflecting the need for a modernised social care system that offers local residents online access to essential support and advice 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The London Borough of Bromley is a large local authority in south east London, england, with a population of approximately 300,000. Following the introduction of the Personalisation Agenda and the ‘Think Local, Act Personal’ initiative, government focus shifted towards the transformation of adult social care. As a result, Bromley set-up an ‘advice and guidance’ portal on their website, to not only support the Personalisation Agenda, but also to address the need for local residents to be able to access information and advice. with this set-up, it quickly became apparent that the council needed an effective online self-service model to reduce the number of people coming through the referral section. This would guarantee a more efficient and personal service for every resident and would also result in substantial savings for the council. Bromley wanted to provide its residents with more choice and greater control, offering them easy access to important information; and the council soon realised quite how crucial this was. Identifying technology as the key factor in making the transition, the council reviewed the market for a solution.
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After assessing available solutions, it became apparent that MyLife was the only system that would meet all of the council’s needs and Personalisation Agenda requirements.
The challenges “we knew that the solution we chose would need to be easy to use, and the information needed to be appropriate, specific and accessible,” says Helen stewart, information services manager at Bromley Council. “Our ultimate aim was for the new system to encourage and enable our customers to independently source information and make informed decisions.” Usability was key for Bromley, as was the information that they would add to the system; “whichever technology we selected needed to allow customers to access appropriate content, whether they were familiar with technology or not”, stewart says. “Another challenge for us came in the form of content writing, which I think is the case for most councils. we have in-depth knowledge of information about services, but we are ‘service people’ not ‘web people’; we don’t know the best way to present the information. “In addition to all this,” stewart adds “we needed the system to act as a cost effective business tool, and so wanted the business as a whole to drive it forward, not just those with ‘technical’ knowledge. we were aware that in order to achieve this we would need to focus on employee buy-in.”
“Our ultimate aim was for the new system to encourage and enable our customers to independently source information and make informed decisions.”
Overcoming the challenges The self-service solution, MyLife was originally developed in partnership with six leading Local Authorities and tested with their residents. “The shared best practice was extremely useful and helped us gain a better understanding of the service,” says stewart. “we wanted to offer our customers January / February 2012 : VitAL 47
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“We really wanted our employees to buy-in to the portal, as we felt this was crucial in order for the system to be maintained in-house; and for this reason we gave staff ownership and control of it. Development was done from the practice end, so we asked employees to select and submit the content, and then through practice we decided what should be revised, included or removed; and this is something we will continue to do going forward. This process means that the system is constantly developing, whilst increasing end user experience at the same time.”
easy access to an exceptional online experience, which provided them with information and advice, and signposted them to information that was relevant to them specifically.” The amount of support that users may require was another factor in Helen Stewart’s decision; “The system is extremely user-friendly, particularly because it is a hosted solution, so it requires little technical knowledge to support it, which was important to us – a demanding system that required technical expertise would be far too much to maintain. The self-assessment tool enables users to control their interactions with the council, by automatically calculating a provisional Personal Budget against their chosen Resource Allocation System, this is seamlessly linked to our case management system, therefore within the council all information on the care of a citizen is held on one system.” Helen explains that cost was a deciding factor, crucially, the total cost of ownership; “Being able to control the cost of the project was vital for us. We needed a solution that didn’t come with a charge each time we wish to change or update information on the system – there are no hidden costs with MyLife; everything is under our control.” 48 VitAL : January / February 2012
Practice makes perfect “Bringing the staff at the council into the development process was a key factor in the system’s success”, says Stewart. “We really wanted our employees to buy-in to the portal, as we felt this was crucial in order for the system to be maintained in-house; and for this reason we gave staff ownership and control of it. Development was done from the practice end, so we asked employees to select and submit the content, and then through practice we decided what should be revised, included or removed; and this is something we will continue to do going forward. This process means that the system is constantly developing, whilst increasing end user experience at the same time.” The council reviewed the system after the first month of testing, finding that it had received approximately 800 visits, which increased to more than 1,000 visits in the second month. Stewart adds, “The number of page views and the length of time users stay on the site have also increased, and approximately 60 per cent of each month’s views are from new users.”
The benefits The benefits of having a system that could integrate seamlessly with existing solutions
were clear to Helen Stewart; “MyLife is fully integrated with CareFirst, the case management system that we use across adult and children’s services. We decided to implement both to create a seamless social care platform that is available from different access points for different stakeholders. The work we carried out to achieve this was a vital step towards effective self-service. The benefits are a dramatically improved experience for end users, as well as significant savings for the council. The training we received was extremely beneficial, and any feedback or suggestions that we have passed to our provider at OLM Systems have been dealt with.” Councillor Robert Evans, Adult and Community Services, Bromley, summarised the benefit of the solution and explained how it met one of Bromley’s key remits by saying; “More and more of us use new technology to manage our lives. We have launched MyLife so everyone, whether they are council funded or not, can have the right information at their fingertips about what’s out there to keep them as independent as possible and living in their own home in the community when they need care and support.” VitAL www.vital-mag.net
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Learning from the private sector Wasteful public sector IT projects make big news, but one city council found a way to cut its IT costs while at the same time, improving its service.
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t is increasingly imperative that Britain’s public-service providers demonstrate initiative in finding new ways to ease the strain on the public purse. The schools budget is falling faster than any time since the 1950s and councils face a £4.7 billion combined fall in their budgets, with 60 percent of the planned budget cuts yet to hit home. New IT technology is constantly trumpeted as a means of using innovations from private enterprise to improve public-service delivery and reduce the cost to taxpayers. Yet, too often, these projects fail to deliver what they say on the tin. Recent revelations of taxpayer-funded IT projects which turned into expensive ‘white elephants’ include a £12 billion NHS IT system which has now been scrapped, a new £650 million Government database that 50 VitAL : January / February 2012
could have been built for less than £1 million, and a £350 million IT system which made catastrophic errors. These stories cast public-services in an unflattering light, when contrasted with what is often seen as the ruthless streamlined efficiency of the private-sector. And Britain’s state-funded schools are no exception to this culture of taxpayer-cushioned inefficiency: when the economic downturn first hit in 2009, the Audit Commission found that Britain’s schools wasted £1 billion each year by failing to shop around for the best equipment and services.
Bucking the trend One City Council has been bucking the trend, by engaging with local service-users and pioneering cost-saving, efficient services to www.vital-mag.net
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New IT technology is constantly trumpeted as a means of using innovations from private enterprise to improve public-service delivery and reduce the cost to taxpayers. Yet, too often, these projects fail to deliver what they say on the tin.
save taxpayers money, while increasing the value they provide to local schools. The story indicates that, contrary to perceptions, the public sector can cut costs without impacting frontline services. In 2010, Bristol City Council, found itself facing the twin challenges of a public-sector budget squeeze and tough competition from low-cost private IT service providers offering innovative technologies. The Council’s team of 14 technicians risked losing their contracts to support 110 local schools unless they could find a way to make rapidly-contracting resources meet the requirements of a rapidlyexpanding school PC network. The existing system epitomised many of the flaws associated with public-sector IT; wasteful and inefficient technology, inflexible services and poor auditing of results. The council carried out widespread consultations with local service-users which helped pinpoint key deficiencies with the existing system of school support. This highlighted the inflexibility of the system to adapt to fluctuating school demands, a resource-intensive service delivery, and a heavily “reactive” response to IT problems. Schools had to manually record support requests on paper, increasing the admin burden and creating sluggish response times. Remote support was both infrequent and insufficient, while new installations and responses to downtimes were subject to constant delays. Even worse, as there was no integrated system, support staff were required to separately carry out system builds, monitoring, auditing and remote support through different systems, placing enormous strain on staff resources. With budget constraints preventing the council from increasing its heavilyoverstretched IT support team to match the www.vital-mag.net
huge growth in school reliance on IT, the support service looked set to deteriorate further, just at the moment when schools relied upon it most. Even worse, without any means of monitoring performance, the council had no way of demonstrating the extent of their work and the value they provided to schools.
Taking school support into the cloud Bristol City Council decided to harness cost-saving IT innovations from private enterprise, in order to outstrip its private competitors, and set a new benchmark in high-quality, low-cost public service. Bristol’s ICT team were aware of the costsaving, performance-enhancing benefits cloud-computing models had brought to many private sector companies, and sought to transfer those benefits to public-service provision. The council implemented a new online, remote device management solution based on CentraStage’s management framework and provided by cloud-based service provider, Redstor. Within months, Bristol’s ICT Support Service had transformed its reputation with local schools, beaten off stiff private-sector competition, triggered a flood of positive feedback and dramatically raised the bar in its service delivery.The key was to automate all of the most costly and labour-intensive functions through one central cloud-based management tool. The school adopted a single web-based system across its entire network, delivering everything from remote support, reporting, software deployment and device configuration to auditing and monitoring in a single payas-you-go model. The extraordinary speed and flexibility of the cloud-based service was already apparent on delivery; the new
software was “ready to go” from day one, and implemented across 110 schools within the first week. The old, labour-intensive paper logs were replaced with a system that automatically recorded phone-calls to an instantly-accessible online form. Engineers could automatically update and save online reports to a single, central repository, giving the council an up-to-the-minute overview of all operations and processes across their sprawling network of schools and devices. This also provided a bullet-proof audit-trail. The IT team were free to offer high-value consultancy services for schools and share vital knowledge with teachers, because many time-consuming ‘low-value’ functions were now automated by the new web-based service. The speed and quality of their IT support was dramatically improved, because knowledge and resources could now be pooled across the whole team, as the latest information on each school, was instantly accessible to everyone. This allowed the Council to move from a reactive to a proactive service. The online reports provide a permanent, readilyavailable proof of all the support the Council provide across each school. Critically, the system did not require new hardware or software and data-space could be quickly shrunk or expanded in sync with school requirements, on a pay-asyou-go basis. The way in which Bristol’s ICT Support services used the ‘austerity drive’ as an opportunity to move towards a hyper-efficient, cost-effective and improved service, offers a glimpse of what can be achieved across the education sector with forward-thinking publicsector leadership. VitAL www.redstor.com January / February 2012 : VitAL 51
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Tackling the software waste headache In the UK alone, there is over ÂŁ1.7 billion worth of preventable and ongoing cost associated with unused software and shelfware which still incurs maintenance and support charges. Geoff Collins aims to put this right.
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lobally, organisations will spend more than $8 trillion on IT in the next five years, according to IDC’s 2011 predictions. That is more than half the US GDP. But this vast sum is not all going towards delivering business value. Maintaining this huge amount of IT accounts for 70-80 percent of each year’s IT budget. CIOs want to reduce this figure to save money or to have more discretionary spend, but lack the tools to do so. With 50 percent of office PCs being left on overnight, this energy usage is wasting $2.8bn (e2.1 billion) per year in the US alone. Although the figures are alarming, this issue can be easily solved by installing automated power management software to manage PC downtime, powering down machines overnight, at weekends and when not in use. This can result in a significant reduction in costs and energy consumption without ever impacting user productivity. The endemic of waste in IT extends far deeper into an organisation’s network, with issues which can be harder to identify and seemingly more complex to solve. It’s a problem that 1E is dedicated to tackling on the desktop, in the data centre and on the network. Recently, we took a long hard look at software waste in corporate environments and what we found was astounding. In the UK alone, there is over £1.7 billion worth of preventable and ongoing cost associated with unused software and shelfware. Shelfware, as its name suggests, is software that is left to sit, unused on the proverbial shelf in a forgotten corner of the IT department. But even though it remains undeployed, shelfware still incurs maintenance and support charges.
The cost of shelfware Independent research conducted by Opinion Matters, commissioned by 1E, shows that when managing software licences and assets, most organisations focus on compliance, rather than on controlling costs. Organisations are simply buying more software than they use. Driven by the very real anxiety that a sudden software vendor audit could result in heavy fines or lengthy litigation, many organisations simply over license, buying more and more software just in case. Shockingly, 92 percent of managers admit to having shelfware, with an average of www.vital-mag.net
22 percent of products destined never to be deployed. Like Goldilocks and her porridge, when it comes to software governance and compliance, every organisation needs to get things ‘just right’. Spend too much and you risk making too big a dent in your budget and therefore limit your ability to invest in strategic projects. By contrast, spend too little and when software vendors approach you about your installed software base you run the risk of non-compliance, fines and legal action. You would think that CIOs and IT managers would want to do something about this waste, but 1E’s research reveals that just eight percent are actively trying to manage the problem by regularly identifying and reclaiming unused software across their organisations. This is due in part to the fact that over 80 percent of the CIOs and IT managers polled during the study felt that software asset management was overly complex. Forrester Research agrees, stating in April 2011 that businesses face ever-more complex licensing rules, increased licence audit activity and proliferating commercial models. Even detecting unused software and shelfware across a myriad of systems, locations, PCs and servers presents a very real challenge for most, never mind reclaiming and reusing those licences.
Shockingly, 92 percent of managers admit to having shelfware, with an average of 22 percent of products destined never to be deployed.
Getting it ‘just right’ So how can businesses go about controlling software costs? A simple way to get started is to follow this five step process: Step one – what do I have installed? The first step to compliance is getting control of what has been installed in your enterprise. While this may sound an obvious first step, the unfortunate truth for many organisations is that it will boil down to an approximation based on some raw data because of the uncontrolled manner in which software is installed and inventoried. Let’s assume you have been able to identify what you have installed, the next step is to identify how much of it is actually yours. Step two – what do I own? Our own research would suggest that nearly half of enterprises still use spreadsheets to record software licenses, with almost nine percent still using a paper-based filing system and a staggering 14 percent using nothing whatsoever. You must be able to identify January / February 2012 : VitAL 53
vital processes
what you own. Once you can accurately identify what software you have installed and how much of it you own, the next step is to understand how much of what you have is actually needed. Step three – what do I actually need? A review of your software estate may well determine how many copies of applications are installed on your systems and whether or not you have paid for those licenses, but you also need to determine which of these software applications are actually being used, by whom and how often. Without usage data, you may be purchasing software based on perceived requirements or user requests, not actual need. Once you know what software you have, how often you are using it, and how much your organisation has purchased, you have the information you need to make informed business decisions. This information will then enable you to deploy the right amount of software to keep your environment in an optimal state. Step four – manage liability and control: If you can find out what you have, how often you are using it and how much you are paying for it, how do you manage your liability and control your risk? The key point here is that licence management tools need to be “plugged-in” to the active software estate to consistently present compliance status to the IT department. Rather than simply identifying what has, or has not, been purchased, sophisticated tools can manage centralised deployment and removal of applications, auto-reclaim unused software on one client machine and deploy to another and even ‘rent’ applications to users on a temporary basis for only as long as they need them. This reduces shelfware from the business. It is these elements of advanced control that set some software licence tools apart. Step five – get it just right! Making sense of what software you have, why you have it, and where and how it is being used, can allow you to make informed strategic and operational decisions, putting you in a much stronger negotiating position when renewing maintenance or purchasing additional licenses. As the three bears quickly learned with their 54 VitAL : January / February 2012
porridge, getting it ‘just right’ is possible; you just have to know what to do.
Software satisfaction Software headaches can also be eased by empowering users to download only the software and services they need. With an automated solution the IT department stands to save a significant amount of time tracking and installing applications, while maintaining control of the number of deployments. Self-service automation of the request, approval and delivery process delivers savings of £24 on average per request. Independent research has revealed that two thirds of users in the United States and United Kingdom wait up to a week or more to get the software they request through their IT help desk. Automation enables users to install software, operating systems and services at a time when it suits them including immediate installs, without disrupting their daily workload. Microsoft Windows 7 uptake in the business community has turned into a surge as support for XP nears an end and today it is one of the highest profile and most challenging IT projects for organisations. Imagine a cure for two of the major headaches in a Windows 7 migration project – finding the best time to upgrade a user’s PC and ensuring that they retain the full suite of software they previously had. An automated solution can deliver this – allowing the IT department to focus on delivering business value. Organisations are frequently overlooking the huge waste involved in shelfware and unused software. Coupled with the complexity of software licensing, this is generating significant inefficiency and waste in many businesses. In addition, large amounts of time and money are spent on IT helpdesk requests, delivering the software users need. All these costs are largely preventable. By automating simple processes and managing software assets more efficiently, organisations can free up time and money which can be invested in delivering real business value. This endemic of waste is likely to get worse if organisations don’t act now to tackle the problem. There is a clear financial imperative in every organisation to do so. VitAL www.1e.com www.vital-mag.net
vitAL EYES On
QR codes – fad or fabulous? Making sense of what software you have,
This issue Jonathan Westlake takes a look at QR codes – for a ‘quick response,’click the example on this page to access the VitAL website!
why you have it, and where and how it is being used, can
For the provider it can be argued that QR
allow you to make
codes are providing a service and enriching
informed strategic and
the customer experience by focusing on
operational decisions, putting you in a much stronger negotiating position when renewing maintenance or purchasing additional licenses.
the I in IT rather than just the T.
N
O DOUBT you have seen a QR code recently? you may not have used one but it is clear their use proliferated during 2011. They have appeared in magazines, pizza flyers and other marketing material. QR stands for ‘quick response’ and they are fundamentally a two-dimensional bar code which gives access to information online quickly. They are easy to create and a unique QR code can be created very, very cheaply. Other reasons for their recent popularity include the rise of the smartphone during 2011 and the availability of free QR reader apps. To read the QR code the camera on the smartphone takes a photograph(scans) of the code and the website of the relevant information is automatically uploaded to your phone. so rather than being a side street the QR code has moved effortlessly in to mainstream use. But hold on! we have to question whether QR codes are useful or not. what is in it for the user and what does the QR code provider hope to achieve? The evidence shows the most popular use of the QR codes to date tends to be url (weblink) to provide further information about a product or service. Other uses can be found however, giving directions, links to money saving vouchers and tracking. For the provider it can be argued that QR
codes are providing a service and enriching the customer experience by focusing on the I in IT rather than just the T. It is clear QR codes can enrich communication and the connection with the customer. I would encourage you to take a look at QR codes and give them a trial. I’ve found them useful at the University for open day treasure hunt activities amongst others. VitAL
useful references: The kit you will need: A smartphone or iPhone. A QR reader app from the phone provider’s app store. To create your own QR codes visit: http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ January / February 2012 : VitAL 55
vital processes
Ten ways of tackling ineffectual leadership in business There can be little more frustrating for all concerned than ineffectual leadership. Gareth Chick, director of Spring Partnerships offers ten ways of changing an ineffectual leader.
R
esearch published by talent management consultancy, DDI, and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) in August last year, shone a light on some of the leadership woes in UK organisations. Only a third (36 percent) of UK leaders and one in five (18 percent) UK HR professionals rate the quality of leadership as ‘high’ in their organisations and just four out of ten leaders said their company had an effective strategy for leadership development. Gareth Chick, Director of business consultancy Spring Partnerships comments, “This research highlights how many businesses are struggling under ineffectual leadership and few lack a strategy for developing future leaders so they are in danger of letting the situation get worse. “What is overlooked is the fact that people aren’t born great leaders – good leadership skills can be taught which begs the question why ineffectual leadership is still tolerated. Sadly, if you go into any UK company you will still see poor leadership at work – from the autocrat who drives fear into employees to obey his commands to the inclusive ‘Mr Nice Guy’ leader who defers decisions to others so often that nothing gets done and no one knows what they should be doing.” “Companies need to strive for authentic leadership,” argues Chick. “Like the inclusive leader, authentic leaders don’t do everything themselves and look to others to provide answers. But, they provide the vision first.
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They set big goals and crucially trust people to make them happen – and they are not motivated by being liked. They are passionate, great communicators and share openly the vision for the business and if it needs changing, they get people together, share the facts and get them to design the new strategy, gaining strength and unity from teamwork. “Good leaders don’t waver on big decisions. They honour their company’s roots and try and recapture the enthusiasm and passion that started the company and the fact is, anyone can learn these skills.”
Gareth Chick’s top tips for people on how to become great leaders: 1. Act like you just took over; 2. Trust employees with the truth;
“What is overlooked is the fact that people aren’t born great leaders – good leadership skills can be taught which begs the question why ineffectual leadership is still tolerated.
3. Set audacious goals; 4. Give creative space, but insist on decisions; 5. Don’t rescue people from events; 6. Stamp out ‘them and us’; 7. Honour the roots of the business; 8. Be radical, act swiftly; 9. Be decisive; 10. Be passionate, enthusiastic and proud – Believe.
www.vital-mag.net
vital ONLINE
Jobs Online
For the latest vacant situations in your sector visit the VitAL Jobs Board at:
www.vital-mag.net/category/jobsboard www.31media.co.uk
vitAL PLAneT
Green IT: still plenty of reasons for growth Rather than being kicked into the long grass, the current squeeze on IT budgets is provoking a revival of interest in green IT. Here, Mark Lyttle, chief executive officer at the service management and IT operations specialist, Fusion Business Solutions, explains how a good green IT strategy can help to drive cost savings
58 VitAL : January / February 2012
www.vital-mag.net
vital planet
W
ith the opportunity to improve environmental credentials, the green IT process was an attractive proposition for many large businesses seeking to improve their corporate responsibility metrics. In the past, improved corporate citizenship was a large enough driver to adoption. The economic squeeze has re-ignited interest in green IT, albeit with programmes geared as much towards saving money as the planet. Some IT programmes can take many years for the payback to be recognised. Over the last five years, Green IT processes have matured to the point where the financial returns can be recognised very quickly. It’s not uncommon for the return on investment to become positive within the same budgetary year as deployment.
Green data centres Data centre re-thinks, such as standardising on virtualised servers, offers a straightforward cost saving business case. Specifically, virtualisation significantly reduces energy consumption through lowering the number of physical servers in the data centre. In addition, the latest server hardware, on which virtualised servers are hosted, is significantly more environmentally-friendly than older technology. Their manufacture is more efficient and they are less power-hungry, with software and hardware components combining to throttle back the power used and shut down areas that are not needed. A recent business case for a large telecoms operator, for example, revealed that, in one part of their data centre estate, there was the potential to reduce fifty servers to just six – and achieve a ten-month return on investment. Over the following three years, a £400,000 saving was projected, which, if extended to the complete estate of 1,500 servers, would run into millions. Modernise storage, cooling and airflow in the data centre is another area in which great savings can be made. There still exists a common misconception that servers require constant checking and a cool environment. Yet most new equipment now requires much less cooling and, using a few simple techniques, it is possible to direct the cooling far more efficiently, which can equate to as much as a 20 percent reduction in power for the business as a whole.
More efficient cooling Even within an existing set-up, savings can be made through more efficient cooling. Many IT www.vital-mag.net
workers think that reducing cooling needs can’t be done effectively due to the way most data centres evolve, rather than being designed from new. New equipment is layered on top of old equipment, and cooling isn’t considered. Rather than redesign the entire data centre to optimise cooling, many organisations have found that simply moving equipment around to focus the cooling that exists more efficiently can result in a dramatic reduction in energy usage. Alternatively, if there is a combination of new and old equipment, it can simply be segregated into zones with a divider down the middle.
Printer consolidation Printer consolidation also delivers a quick return on investment. In particular, multifunctional devices (MFDs) make printing far more efficient. Unlike desktop printers, they are shared by many people and typically positioned a short walk away. This means that users must leave their desks to collect material, making it a bit more inconvenient for them to print and therefore more likely to consider what they are printing. The fact that MFDs save the business money is unlikely to convince users that the new devices are a good idea. Explaining that they are much more environmentally friendly however, will usually persuade users that these cost-saving machines are worthwhile. Similarly, desktop virtualisation and greater awareness of best-practice measures can also encourage small behavioural changes which, collectively, can make significant savings.
In the past, improved corporate citizenship was a large enough driver to adoption. The economic squeeze has re-ignited interest in green IT, albeit with programmes geared as much towards saving money as the planet.
Company-wide green IT Historically, IT systems were designed to be in use all the time because energy has always been cheap. Now that energy has become more expensive, more complicated changes such as the move to smaller, more energy efficient systems are more worthwhile than ever – and will provide demonstrable returns both in terms of money and carbon reductions. To achieve the most widespread gains, it is important to agree a company-wide green IT policy at board level and write cost and energy-saving measures into the broader IT operations strategy so that, for example, only the most energy-efficient equipment is procured as standard. As energy prices continue to rise, even the smallest investment in reducing energy could yield significant future dividends. January / February 2012 : VitAL 59
vitAL PLAneT
Making meters smarter Mark England England, CEO, Sentec, explains how a smart IT infrastructure and accessible information will help consumers to see the benefits of smart meters.
A
RECENT report from independent energy think tank VassaETT revealed that smart meters could cut household electricity bills by up to 8.5 percent, but this should come as no surprise. The energysaving benefits of smart meters are widely recognised and are trumpeted often. What hasn’t been discussed to-date, however, is the potential for smart meters to assess energy use, allowing customers to switch to energy tariffs which better meet their needs. In the current climate, finding the cheapest tariff from those on offer is a near impossible task. In October, a review by Ofgem found there were just too many tariffs, making it incredibly difficult for consumers to shop around for the best deal. To tackle this, the energy regulator announced that it was planning to introduce a simple unit price for energy and a fixed standing charge, as well as rolling out standardised price
60 VitAL : January / February 2012
information to enable customers to compare regular and more innovative tariffs. smart meters have the potential to play an important role in this transition.
Taking action smart meters work in a number of different ways to conventional meters. One such way is in the frequency at which the meter records energy consumption, typically at intervals of five, 10, 15, 20, 30, or 60 minutes. However, this data is only useful to the consumer if it can be transformed into actionable information. One way of doing this would be for energy suppliers to provide customers with a web portal, which works in tandem with their smart meters. This would allow customers to log on, view their energy usage, and provide a platform from which data can be downloaded and analysed. For example, it could be possible to time shift certain activities, such as running www.vital-mag.net
vital planet
the dish-washer or washing machine, to take advantage of a lower-priced time band. If a customer’s base load is high at night, this kind of portal would flag this up so they could check for appliances that have been left on accidentally or put on standby. Particularly for customers on tariffs where the cost of energy increases once a certain amount of usage is passed, timeshifting would make a significant amount of difference to their energy bills. Taking this one step further, presenting energy usage data to the customer in a format that allows them to easily compare their tariff with other options, via a third-party price comparison site for example, will demonstrate a transparency that will be crucial in restoring consumer trust. By empowering the customer to switch tariffs according to their energy use, suppliers will help to restore consumer trust, and reduce churn.
Consumption in real time However, in order to reap the benefits of this kind of service, energy suppliers will first need access to detailed historical consumption at a level far more granular than currently available. Energy suppliers at the moment have a crude historical record of energy consumption but this needs to become hourly or half-hourly. In order for consumers to benefit from tariff comparisons, they must be given access to sufficiently detailed data to apply all tariffs to data sets to find out which one costs the least. To further explain, while there are already comparison websites that offer to find customers their best-fit energy tariff, the vast majority of these rely on monthly bill averages to make the comparison, rather than looking at the energy used by individual appliances. Of course, for utilities to offer this kind of service there are obvious functionality issues which will have to be considered. In particular, how energy suppliers and consumers will gain access to that usage data. At the moment, the specification for smart meters includes an in home display (IHD), which, although offering information on real-time energy usage, will not allow analysis against different tariffs from different suppliers. While IHDs can deliver energy savings of 8.5 per cent, this is only a one-off reduction. As soon as consumption is reduced there is very little perceived benefit www.vital-mag.net
left to be had from them. Only by being on the appropriate tariff can customers achieve ongoing energy reductions. The ability to store data and present it back to the consumer should be a key consideration for the IT infrastructure associated with the smart meter rollout. In theory, it ought to be possible to offer real-time access to usage information as soon as smart meters are rolled out, so developing a portal as well as the associated infrastructure is something utilities must be thinking about now. This portal could give much more information than a simple IHD, including highlighting the best tariffs and most cost effective time to run loads.
Thinking ahead With energy prices on the rise and consumers becoming more concerned about the complexity of tariffs, energy suppliers need to think about the full system functionality they will provide from a consumer perspective. The last thing they want is to invest a lot of money into providing IHDs, only for them to end up in the kitchen drawer once the novelty has worn off After all, with consumers bearing the cost of the smart meter rollout, utilities need to be sure they are getting the best value for money and reaping the maximum benefit from their new meters. These smart meters need to be upgradeable, future-proof and suitable for future requirements enabling smarter functionality for the foreseeable future. Utilities need assurance that they will not have to revisit a rollout for a long time. Similarly, customers need assurances that they will reap maximum benefit from these new meters, in terms of both reducing their consumption and being able to manage the available tariffs easily to control and minimise their essential energy costs. So each utility should be thinking about what are the essential and desirable requirements for their smart metering systems and considering an appropriate solution to meet these requirements. One thing is for certain, that transparency will play an important part in maintaining customer relationships as energy prices rise. Providing access to information and presenting it in a straightforward format to enable tariff comparison is crucial to keeping customers happy.
One way of doing this would be for energy suppliers to provide customers with a web portal, which works in tandem with their smart meters. This would allow customers to log on, view their energy usage, and provide a platform from which data can be downloaded and analysed.
January / February 2012 : VitAL 61
directory
Hornbill Systems
Ares, Odyssey Business Park, West End Road, Ruislip, HA4 6QD T: 020 8582 8282 F: 020 8582 8288 W: www.hornbill.com C: sales@hornbill.com E: info@hornbill.com Hornbill develops and markets ‘Supportworks’, applications for IT Service Management (ITSM) and business helpdesks. Hornbill’s ITSM & service desk software with a ‘Human Touch’, enables its customers to provide excellent service while benefiting from consolidation on a single technology platform.
InfraVision
Delegate House, 30A Hart Street, Henley-on-Thames, Oxon, RG9 2AL T: +44 (0) 1491 635340 F: +44 (0) 1491 579835 W: www.infravision.com C: Nigel Todd E: info@infravision.com BMC Software’s #1 partner for Service Desk Express and the Alignability Process Model, delivering rapid implementation of proven ITIL aligned processes, procedures, work instructions and tool settings, and transformation to service-led approach in only 12 weeks!
Pink Elephant
Atlantic House, Imperial Way, Reading. RG2 0TD T: + 44 (0) 118 903 6824 F: + 44 (0) 118 903 6282 W: www.pinkelephant.com C: Frances Fenn E: info.emea@pinkelephant.com Acknowledged worldwide as niche, independent, IT Service Management Education and Consulting providers. Having trained more people than any other company in ITIL related subjects since 1987, we have contributed to all 3 versions of the ITIL books.
62 VitAL : January / February 2012
ICCM Solutions
Cedar House, Riverside Business Village, Swindon Road, Malmesbury, Wiltshire, SN16 9RS T: + 44 (0) 1666 828 600 F: + 44 (0) 1666 826 103 W: www.iccm.co.uk C: Kate Springer E: sales@iccm.co.uk One of the overriding directives of ICCM Solutions is the simplification of complexity in Service Management environments. ICCM provides a global client base with sophisticated ITIL aligned Service Management Solutions built on Business Process Management (BPM) Architecture, from Metastorm BPM®.
iCore
60 Lombard Street, London EC3V 9EA
T: +44 (0) 207 464 8883 F: +44 (0) 207 464 8888 W: www.icore-ltd.com E: sales@icore-ltd.com C: Greg Lake iCore is the largest specialist IT Service Management Consultancy in the UK. ICore has a long & impressive track record in delivering & embedding pragmatic IT service management, solutions, relying on the deep, real world experience of our mature & determined consultancy team.
Kepner-tregoe
NetSupport Software Ltd
Quayside House, Thames Side, Windsor, Berkshire, SL4 1QN T: +44 (0) 1753 856716 F: +44 (0) 1753 854929 W: www.kepner-tregoe.com C: Steve White E: swhite@kepner-tregoe.com Kepner-Tregoe provides consulting and training services to organizations worldwide. We collaborate with clients to implement their strategies by embedding problem-solving, decision-making, and project execution methods through individual and team skill development and process improvement. Clients build competitive advantage by using our systematic processes to achieve rapid, targeted results and create lasting value.
Towngate East, Market Deeping, Peterborough, PE6 8NE T: +44 (0) 1778 382270 F: +44 (0) 1778 382280 W: www.netsupportsoftware.co.uk C: Colette Reed E: colette@netsupportsoftware.co.uk NetSupport provides a range of complementary Remote Support and Service Management solutions that help organisations deliver a productive and cost effective IT support service. Products include multi-platform Remote Control solution NetSupport Manager, IT Asset Management suite NetSupport DNA and web based ITIL Service Management tool NetSupport ServiceDesk.
ManageEngine
G2G3
ZOHO Corp, 4900 Hopyard Rd, Suite 310, Pleasanton, CA – 94588, USA
T: 925-924-9500 F: 925-924-9600 W: www.manageengine.com E: eval@manageengine.com C: Gerald A. Raja ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is highly customizable, smart and flexible Help Desk Software used by more than 10,000 IT managers worldwide in 23 different languages. It helps you to implement ITIL best practices on the go and restore your IT services on-time. ManageEngine has a suite of software products in Enterprise IT management space like Network monitoring, Desktop Management, Applications, Logs, AD management, et al.
Panama House, 14 The High Street, Lasswade, EH18 1ND T: + 44 (0) 131 461 3333 F: + 44 (0) 131 663 8934 W: www.g2g3.com C: David Arrowsmith E: info@g2g3.com G2G3 is the leading provider of communication tools, gaming solutions and simulations that propel enterprise IT and business alignment. Headquartered in the UK, G2G3 has a strong global network of partners supporting the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. www.vital-mag.net
DIReCTORY
topdesk
siteheLpdesk.coM Ltd
apMg
61 southwark street, London, se1 0hL
eagle house, Lynchborough road, passfields , hants gu30 7sB
sword house, totteridge road, high wycombe, Buckinghamshire, uk
t: f: w: e:
t: f: w: e: c:
t: f: w: c: e:
+44 (0) 207 8034200 +44 (0) 207 8034215 www.topdesk.co.uk info@topdesk.co.uk
TOPdesk service Management software seamlessly integrates Facilities, HR and IT processes in a single 100% webbased tool. TOPdesk’s affordable and ITIL-compliant software has won several awards for user-friendliness. secure more time for your colleagues and customers with TOPdesk.
cherweLL software
+44 (0) 207 419 5174 +44 (0) 870 138 3824 www.sitehelpdesk.com sales@sitehelpdesk.com Bryan taylor
sitehelpdesk.com will take you to the forefront of service delivery with a suite of products designed to provide you with low cost web browser based action tracking and self-help, making your services instantly available 24 by 7.
soLisMa
Lime kiln house, Lime kiln, wooton Bassett, wiltshire, sn4 7hf t: + 44 (0) 1793 858181 w: www.cherwellsoftware.com/contact Cherwell service Management delivers ITIL v3 best practice ‘out-of-the-box’ including: Incident, Problem, Change, CMDB, sLA, Knowledge, selfservice and is PinkveRIFY certified. Our unique CBAT development platform empowers users to fully customise screens, workflow processes and develop additional business applications. The Cherwell solution is available via a standard license model or ‘On Demand’ saas service.
aVocent Landesk
t: +44 (0) 207 193 2085 w: www.solisma.com e: info@solisma.com c: sales@service-improvement.com service improvement Made simple! solisma is a leading global provider of ITIL and IsO/IeC 20000 courseware, training, consulting and assessment services, with a global partner network to help you quickly and cost-effectively improve your ITsM capability like never before. To learn more, contact us today or visit service-improvement.com
it serVice ManageMent foruM
+ 44 (0) 1494 452 450 + 44 (0) 1494 459559 www.apmg-uk.com nicola Mckinney nicola.mckinney@apmgroup.co.uk
As an accredited ITIL® Examination Institute, APMG offers our training organizations a range of benefits to help them demonstrate the quality and professionalism of their services. Call us to find out how your business could benefit from our accreditation services.
gLoBaL technoLogy soLutions Ltd
t: 01288 355800 w: www.globaltechnologysolutions.com e: info@globaltechnologysolutions.com
“Taking the headache out of recruitment” specialists in service Management and Technical resource throughout the UK and globally. we believe in “quality” not “quantity” when submitting cvs. Let GTs manage your recruitment process and allow us to become your most valued solution provider.
e-warehouse
dukes court, duke street, woking, surrey gu22 7ad
. 150 wharfedale road, winnersh triangle, wokingham, Berkshire. rg41 5rg
e-warehouse Ltd, hampden house, hampden house, Monument park, chalgrove,oxfordshire , oX44 7rw
t: +44 (0) 1483 744444 f: +44 (0) 1483 744401 w: www.landesk.com c: sarah Lewis e: sarah.lewis@avocent.com Avocent delivers IT operations management solutions that reduce operating costs, simplify management and increase the availability of critical IT environments 24/7 via integrated, centralized software. This includes systems Management, security Management, Data Centre Management and IT service Management.
t: f: w: c: e:
t: 0845 299 7539 f: 08717143802 w: www.oxygenservicedesk.com c: Victoria eggleton e: oxygen@e-warehouse.com
www.vital-mag.net
0118 918 6503 0118 969 9749 www.itsmf.co.uk Ben clacy ben.clacy@itsmf.co.uk
The itsMF is the only internationally recognised and independent organisation whose sole focus is on the on-going development and promotion of IT service Management ’best practice‘, standards and qualifications. The forum has 14,000 UK members and official itsMF chapters in 44 countries
Oxygen Service Desk is a process automation engine that simply interprets your pre-defined business processes and then mobilises the actual process, pushing work tasks to people and to systems, streamlining how the processes run across your entire department or organisation.
January / February 2012 : VitAL 63
seCReTs OF MY sUCCess
David Wilson Service Desk manager, East Coast Main Line Trains
VitaL: name, company and job title please? Married? Kids? david wilson: David wilson. I currently work for east Coast Main Line Trains as service Desk Manager. I have a lovely wife who I’ve been married to for five years, a three year old son and a new baby due in five weeks!
The staff at East Coast
VitaL: what got you started in IT? dw: My initial career was in hospitality management, centred around hotels and corporate events management. Perhaps not the most likely of starting places for a career in IT, but it has provided me with a solid grounding in customer skills that have been invaluable. The push into IT came when I returned to education and undertook a degree in computer science. This period of study enforced my desire to work in the IT sector and upon completion I began looking for work that would allow me to employ what I had learned and keep the use the customer skills I’d developed. IT services provides me with the perfect fit.
whom making this
VitaL: was there any one person or organisation that was your inspiration? dw: Certainly a strong work ethic was instilled at an early age by my parents, who are two of the hardest working people you will ever meet. In terms of an organisation that inspires me I have never ceased to be impressed by the resilience and ingenuity of the team I currently work with at east Coast. Many members of the team have been with the company for several years and have moved through organisational changes as the company has evolved through a number of incarnations into its current form as east Coast Main Line. Throughout these changes the team has never stopped being proactive and driven to improve the business. VitaL: what was your first IT job, what was your first major IT triumph? dw: My first job in IT? Aside from dismantling my Dad’s ZX spectrum at the age of six? I used to fill in the gaps in my university budget by building custom PCs and installing small 64 VitAL : January / February 2012
are a fantastic and dedicated bunch for
company a great success is paramount and,being in IT, we’re at the heart of it. We get to interact with all areas of the business, from our engineering teams and office staff through to the passengers on board our trains. home and office networks. My first full time job was as a first line service desk analyst and that is still a period I look back on very fondly. As for major IT triumphs, our success in hiving off our current service desk from our previous parent company using Hornbill’s supportworks has delivered
huge benefits to east Coast in terms of resource management, IT asset management and delivering vastly improved Is customer services. VitaL: Did you ever make any embarrassing mistakes? what did you learn from them? dw: I’ve made more mistakes than I care to remember, but that’s just human nature. The key is to pick yourself up, identify where you went wrong and make the changes to ensure they don’t occur again. VitaL: what do you like best about your job? dw: The people, without a doubt, the people. The staff at east Coast are a fantastic and dedicated bunch for whom making this company a great success is paramount and,being in IT, we’re at the heart of it. we get to interact with all areas of the business, from our engineering teams and office staff through to the passengers on board our trains. Knowing we’re providing the services that enable this business to deliver to its customers is very rewarding. VitaL: what is your biggest ambition? dw: I’m not content with just hitting various target KPIs and sLAs. Our ambition within the systems team at east Coast is to lead the rail industry forward in terms of IT. we want to do this through on-board communication, passenger information and world class IT service delivery. VitaL: what are your hobbies or interests? dw: I’m a keen distance runner and just completed the Great north Run and I also play guitar. Though I imagine my free time will become quite limited when our next child arrives. VitaL: what is the secret of your success? dw: Be honest with yourself and enjoy the work that you do. If you’re not enjoying it, you’re not doing it right. VitaL: David wilson, thank you very much. www.vital-mag.net
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