Blogs
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Work Like Sherlock with Business Analytics
by Martyn Hart, Chairman, National Outsourcing Association
You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles,” said Sherlock Holmes. And maybe surprisingly, the Victorian sleuth is a lucid commentator on a major outsourcing trend for 2012: Business Analytics.
Analytics is a singular topic at the forefront of every CIO’s mind at the moment. According to the Gartner CIO Agenda survey, it is the number one technology - ahead of mobile at number two, and cloud at three - that CIOs see as their priority in 2012....
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How to Avoid Throwing the Baby Out with the IT Services Bath Water
by By Pat Phillips, Practice Director, Professional Services firm Xceed
In a changing world, it's important to stay on top of how new trends and developments can impact on you and the way you and your business operates. The ongoing financial uncertainty in Europe, combined with an increase in those willing to adopt new, innovative services means that the world of IT outsourcing, perhaps more than any other industry, has been affected by change.
Indeed, in recent years we've started to see the slow evolution of IT into a commoditised service, or a utility, which has been encouraged by more widespread adoption of more innovative solutions such as cloud based services, as more and more organisations look to cut costs and increase efficiency. What this means is that the ITskills which will be required to design, build and maintain these services could migrate to cloud service providers and that we'll start to see many firms ceasing to have an ‘IT Department’ as we know it.
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Monday, February 27, 2012
Innovation is a Team Sport by Jim Stikeleather, Chief Innovation Officer at Dell Services,
If you consider that innovation is a team sport, and that the most important players are your customers, then innovation requires new, robust forms of collaboration with your customers. It is about turning a company, and its entire value chain, over to the command and control of customers. This new reality demands a shift in our thinking about innovation. Winning companies will be so close to their customers, they will be able to anticipate their needs, even before their customers do, and then turn to open innovation to find compelling value to meet those needs. Because your customers are your only true asset in the new world of low‐cost suppliers, your business model will likely need to be expanded so that you can fulfil as many of your customers’ needs as possible....
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Thursday, February 23, 2012
Stand Up and Fight, or Stand and Deliver by Martyn Hart, Chairman National Outsourcing Association
There’s much ado about cyber-crime at the moment.
Last week’s report by McAfee and the Security & Defence Agenda (SDA) Cyber Security: The Vexed Question considered the opinions of 330 policymakers and cyber security experts in government, business and academia worldwide. The consensus is that there is a cyber-war ‘arms race’ afoot – 57% of those surveyed think this. 45% think cyber defence is as important as border security.
According to a report in 2011 by Detica, acting for the Cabinet Office, cyber-crime costs UK PLC £1,000 per second, or a gargantuan £27bn per year…..
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Thursday, February 16, 2012
Cloud in 2012: Don’t be Down and Outage
by Mark Herbert, Founder & Business Development Director, intY
While 2011 saw cloud come of age with increased business adoption, for many, it was characterised by a series of high profile outages, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Amazon all fell – the collective grumblings of customers becoming headlines the world over.
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Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Business Innovation
by Jim Stikeleather, Chief Innovation Officer at Dell Services, discusses business innovation
A business innovation initiative starts with building processes, systems, education programs, and obtaining funding that can be integrated into day‐to‐day operations as well as the culture of a company.
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Monday, February 13, 2012
Is the Management & Delivery of Brand Content as Important to Brand Owners as the Creative Product?
by Steve Puttock, Managing Director, Schawk
Decoupling the production of print and press advertising away from advertising agencies and into specialist production companies is nothing new. However, through the unquestioned value that the decoupling process brings to brand owners, it is likely to be of increasing interest over the coming 12 months given the austere times we are all experiencing.
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Salary sacrifice: making sure it’s right for your business
by Paul Tooth, General Manager at Sage HR & Payroll
Paul Tooth, General Manager at Sage HR & Payroll, examines why salary sacrifice should be part of an organisation’s armoury and explores the key considerations firms should make before implementing a scheme
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Friday, February 10, 2012
Innovation is Often a Bricolage
by Martyn Hart, NOA Chairman
Necessity is the mother of invention. And when the City of London decided it had a litter problem, it turned to some rather inventive outsourcers to solve it.
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Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Consumerisation and Beyond…
by Jon Pickering, MD of Block Solutions
Over the last twelve months consumer devices have become the real game changer when it comes to implementing new technologies in the workplace. So it comes as no surprise that 2012 will be the year for consumer IT to flood the workplace.
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