Management Briefing

Why bother benchmarking?

Management Briefing — Thu, 09 May 2013 11:37:12 GMT

IT benchmarking can seem esoteric, dull or even nerdy - until you realise that it is can be a critical catalyst for business transformation. How so? Because as the saying goes: ‘You cannot aim to go somewhere unless you know...

Gartner: CRM should be about earning customers for life

Management Briefing — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 14:54:03 GMT

A recent survey of 119 end-user organisations in Europe conducted by Gartner found that 48 per cent will increase their budget for customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives in 2013. Only five per cent will decrease their CRM budget this year,...

Outsourcing: Beyond cheap labour

Management Briefing — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 10:34:20 GMT

Is the IT offshoring trend we have seen over the last few decades now beginning to reverse whereby outsourcers and their customers are beginning now to opt for an ‘onshoring’ alternative? It is true that traditional lower cost IT centres...

Data centres: Taking control of TCO

Management Briefing — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 11:38:39 GMT

Ask an enterprise about the TCO of its IT services and you would expect a swift answer. However, this will most likely be at best an estimate of the true figure. While this is acceptable for an off-the-cuff answer, it...

Mobile: Cost reduction or business transformation?

Management Briefing — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 10:17:08 GMT

Analyst group IDC is predicting that the mobility market will be worth $12.2 billion by 2015, so businesses and IT professionals and their suppliers, quite rightly think constantly about how they communicate with employees and customers. Mobility can enable employees...

Big Data's reluctant forty percent

Management Briefing — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 04:51:57 GMT

A worrying proportion of the Global 9000 - the 9,000 public companies reporting a billion dollars or more in revenue per year - are doing nothing, about Big Data. We recently commissioned an independent survey from King Research to find...

MDM: Harnessing the power of your data

Management Briefing — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 05:37:17 GMT

The ever-growing volume and complexity of data presents businesses with a complicated mix of challenges and opportunities. If this data can be harnessed into an accurate, useable form, it conceals an opportunity to gain insight that can then be used...

The Test Data Warehouse - managing quality into your data

Management Briefing — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 19:23:02 GMT

We established in my last article that quality can’t simply be tested into software, but as Philip Crosby (1926-2001) eloquently suggests, it ‘has to be the result of a carefully constructed cultural environment. It has to be part of the...

Licensing under virtualisation - time for change

Management Briefing — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 13:27:53 GMT

Virtualisation has been the darling of CIOs for many years, and for good reason. By driving significant operational efficiencies and paving the way for cloud computing, virtualisation has enabled IT to be more flexible, dynamic and cost-effective. The popularity of...

Sharepoint 2013: Head in the Clouds

Management Briefing — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 15:29:34 GMT

As one of the top buzzwords in 2012, “the cloud” quickly changed from a mythical place in the sky where your data and information went to live, to the likely solution for businesses and organisations looking for the next best...

Taking business process management to the next level

Management Briefing — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 10:53:13 GMT

When we develop the content and agenda for a Gartner Summit, we begin by looking at who we expect the audience to be and the challenges they face. In the case of business process management (BPM), practitioners are struggling with...

Financial services big data - the regulator is looking on

Management Briefing — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 11:31:09 GMT

You can’t avoid doing Big Data projects, and why would you want to? As you prepare for them, it is not just the data quality and the analytic tools you have to worry about, it is regulation too. The insurance...

Making a success of enterprise apps stores

Management Briefing — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 12:43:51 GMT

Gartner made headlines recently with its prediction that 25 per cent of organisations will have their own ‘app store’ by 2017. While this forecast is not outside the realms of possibility, will these app stores be a success? Delivering an...

Paving the way for private cloud deployments

Management Briefing — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 17:31:48 GMT

Technology has gone through significant and rapid changes, with the transition from in-house managed data centres to virtualised infrastructures. These virtual environments are once more evolving as enterprises move their IT into a cloud offering, enabling a scalability and flexibility...

Making sense of Big Data without a data scientist in sight

Management Briefing — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 12:45:50 GMT

Everywhere you look people are discussing Big Data and the opportunities that it presents for enterprises. However, recent headlines like “A shortage of data analysts is the main challenge of Big Data” and “Big Data's Big Problem: Little Talent” have...

SharePoint 2013: Preparing for the future

Management Briefing — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 16:30:51 GMT

Microsoft SharePoint 2013 will transform the way organisations connect knowledge workers, business processes, and enterprise-wide content worldwide. New features including enhanced document management capabilities around sharing and contributing content, improved social features, a new app model and marketplace as well...

The Great University Challenge

Management Briefing — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:58:44 GMT

Higher tuition fees have resulted in lower student intake. This has forced universities to look for greater cost efficiencies and to find improved ways to attract students, academics and research funding. Technology has a major role to play in this...

Gartner: Master Data Management promises assured business outcomes and transformation

Management Briefing — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 13:04:04 GMT

Organisations focused on improving service levels, optimising costs and creating new business models and markets need a solid foundation of information, as the data that identifies and describes fundamental aspects of business, such as customers, products, suppliers and locations, is...

Seven steps for measuring social enterprise Return on Investment

Management Briefing — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:08:00 GMT

The social enterprise is increasingly being touted as a game changer when it comes to improving how organisations collaborate and share knowledge to the greater good of the business. Wisely, savvy managers want to know what Return on Investment (ROI) they...

The new frontiers of data consumption

Management Briefing — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 12:00:00 GMT

The information life cycle, from data to insight to action is moving rapidly to mobile devices as they overtake desktops and laptops as a preferred medium of data consumption. In the race to achieve competitive advantage, the need for organisations...

What does quality look like?

Management Briefing — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 17:06:31 GMT

As John Ruskin, the great Victorian social thinker, once famously argued, ‘Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of intelligent effort.’ This is the principle that underpins the current buzz around ‘building quality into the enterprise’. But...

How to decrease the carbon footprint of your data centre - part 2

Management Briefing — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 11:00:00 GMT

In part one, David Barker looked at how to decrease your data centre’s carbon footprint through optimisation of air-conditioning and deploying new cooling technologies. In part two, he looks at how to optimise your electrical infrastructure and make the most...

Using the new year to reassess Microsoft SharePoint deployments

Management Briefing — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 15:00:00 GMT

Every year brings about an itch to set new personal goals to achieve. 2013 will be no different for the average organisation, particularly in terms of business goals for their use of SharePoint. While the announcement of SharePoint 2013 may change...

Building the business case for data governance

Management Briefing — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 01:11:29 GMT

Data governance may be the most talked about, yet elusive prize, in the data management space. It is highly coveted by people who work with data because practitioners know the mission-critical role governance plays in achieving desired data outcomes. At...

Have confidence in your compliance policies

Management Briefing — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 16:14:00 GMT

There are many factors that go into the determination of an organisation’s privacy policy, including statutory and regulatory requirements, company or organisational best practices, and market demands. It is important to understand that regardless of the source of the mandate,...