Featured Advisory Papers
Workplace Innovation
As a Service
Security Leadership
Governance & Planning
Infrastructure
Applications
Sourcing & Staffing
Operations & Service Delivery
Workplace Innovation
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The journey to Office 365 Part 6: Mixing up Microsoft’s 365 licensing and future compliance risks
Conclusion: Under its 365 umbrella, Microsoft offers a portfolio of plans with different packages of products and services. These Enterprise plans vary in terms of Features, Analytics, Security...
- Joseph Sweeney -
Special Report: The journey to Office 365 Part 7: Understanding Unified Support
Conclusion: Microsoft is pushing its enterprise clients from Premier Support to Unified Support. Unified Support bundles many new and existing support services into a single program. As a result, the...
- Joseph Sweeney -
Key lessons from the executive roundtable on data, analytics and business value
Conclusion: On 16 May 2019, IBRS conducted a peer roundtable on issues related to data, analytics and business value. The focus of the roundtable was to allow senior IT executives to explore how...
- Joseph Sweeney -
How not to innovate
Conclusion: Innovation is a growing key competency for organisations in the public sector and seemingly an imperative for the commercial and not-for-profit sectors to grow or maintain market share and...
- Sue Johnston -
Analytics artificial intelligence maturity model
Conclusion: Artificial intelligence technologies are available in various places such as robotic process automation (RPA), virtual agents and analytics. The purpose of this paper is to provide an AI...
- Wissam Raffoul
As a Service
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Running IT-as-a-Service Part 56: Digital transformation systems should cope with stress
Conclusion: IT organisations challenged with predicting performance requirements of new digital applications should undertake end-to-end stress tests that can detect systems performance problems prior...
- Wissam Raffoul -
Running IT-as-a-Service Part 55: IBRS Infrastructure Maturity Model
Conclusion: Delivering mature infrastructure services depends on many factors. For example, the service levels may vary significantly. Some organisations opt for non-stop operations, others seek basic...
- Wissam Raffoul -
Running IT-as-a-Service Part 54: Release and change management facelift
Conclusion: While release and change management processes have been contributing to good service availability during the last 20 years, the increased service architecture complexity caused by...
- Wissam Raffoul -
Running IT-as-a-Service Part 53: Strategic skill building versus technical skill exploitation
Conclusion: The increased use of technical point-solutions has created the need for establishing an in-house core team of generalists capable of defining a coherent set of services that can improve...
- Wissam Raffoul -
Running IT-as-a-Service Part 52: The new generation business relationship manager’s role
Conclusion: Running IT-as-a-Service requires emulating vendors’ account management function by creating a business relationship manager (BRM) role. The role’s rationale is to provide strategic advice...
- Wissam Raffoul
Security Leadership
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Embracing security evolution with zero trust networking
Conclusion: Current network and security deployments make many assumptions about the threat environment and which controls are effective. Many of these assumptions are predicated on an older...
- Peter Sandilands -
Data loss by the back door, slipping away unnoticed
Conclusion: Organisations would hope that their data protection policies are in place and effective. Data loss protection is active on the email channel and data is encrypted while at rest within...
- Peter Sandilands -
A fresh look at identity management
Conclusion: Identity has historically been a thorny problem with concerns over identity theft and the need for verification. Now that biometrics are becoming so accessible to register and verify...
- Mike Mitchelmore -
Business email compromise, the modern scourge of commerce
Conclusion: Many organisations are finding themselves being defrauded, especially when making or receiving payments electronically. It is not that the end systems are compromised but rather the...
- Peter Sandilands -
Notifiable data breaches: Time to revisit data loss prevention?
Conclusion: The notifiable data breach regulations have had an impact on business priorities. For any organisation subject to the regulations, protection of personal information should have become a...
- Peter Sandilands
Governance & Planning
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The rise of pragmatic enterprise architecture thinking
Conclusion: Despite its widespread adoption, enterprise architecture (EA) continues to suffer from the perception that in a world of lean start-ups, design thinking and agile delivery, it is simply not...
- Sam Higgins -
Prevention better than cure – get requirements right first time
Conclusion: Unless the attributes of user stories (agile) or high-level requirements (waterfall) are succinct and testable, business systems specifications will lack rigour and could compromise the...
- Alan Hansell -
Digital transformation lessons
Conclusion: Digital transformation is a journey that will require an organisation to undergo metamorphosis. Unlike projects, it does not always have a short-term or long-term timeline. However,...
- Sue Johnston -
Being a good customer of consulting Part 2: Driving value and successful outcomes by aligning RFP scope to supplier skills
Conclusion: When engaging the market for consulting services, estimating the resource mix, including experience and skills, can form an excellent basis for evaluating if what is being proposed by...
- Michael Smit -
Meetings: Tips for improving productivity and effectiveness
Conclusion: A recent Harvard business review article1 reinforced the view that meetings have increased in length and frequency over time from 20 % to nearly 50 % of the working week. This time does...
- Peter Bickerton
Infrastructure
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Asset management maturity model: Are the processes a living part of your organisation?
Conclusion: Asset management can be described as ‘the life cycle management of physical assets to achieve the stated outputs of the enterprise’. To achieve the appropriate level of asset...
- Mark Unwin -
ICT health check: Win-win for ICT and business
Conclusion: ICT health checks enable organisations to better understand risks and prioritise activities to both maintain and improve the performance and reliability of ICT in support of business...
- Mike Mitchelmore -
Telecommunications capability: Not the way we have always done it
Conclusion: Telecommunications services and the supporting infrastructure have historically been complex, costly and difficult to change. The modern technology landscape now allows for greater...
- Mike Mitchelmore -
PROTECTED Cloud: Cyber considerations
Conclusion: The Agency Head/CEO is responsible to accredit the ICT system for use at the PROTECTED level. The accreditation process is specific to the services being delivered for the organisation....
- Mike Mitchelmore -
ICT monitoring strategy: First principles
Conclusion: What to monitor and how you respond to the data is often poorly documented and not fully understood until after a failure occurs. In this world of “no surprises”, effective monitoring is a key...
- Mike Mitchelmore
Applications
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Workforce transformation Part 2: The evolving role of folders for controlled collaboration
Conclusion: Dropbox’s announcement of a new interface may seem trivial, but its repositioning of ‘folders’ heralds the next disruptive phase of information management. By changing folders from being...
- Joseph Sweeney -
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) Part 2: Planning the ERP strategy for modernisation
Conclusion: Reimagining the ERP strategy will require IT and business collaboration to ensure requirements are clear. Retaining the 5–10 year old ERP system1 may serve back office functions but this...
- Mark Unwin -
CRM modernisation Part 5: Microsoft Dynamics vs Salesforce total cost of service
Conclusion: The aim of IBRS’s CRM modernisation series of advisory papers is to help organisations create a contemporary CRM strategy, not to advocate for specific solutions. Many organisations are...
- Joseph Sweeney -
Email/social platforms: Policy, etiquette and best practices
Conclusion: Email is one of the most pervasive IT applications spread throughout organisations of all sizes. It is hard to imagine any employee in any organisation not having an email account. It is...
- Peter Hall -
Familiarity can create blind spots
Conclusion: Agile approaches are being applied to a wide range of projects and activities within organisations including infrastructure upgrade projects of known tools and devices and across...
- Sue Johnston
Sourcing & Staffing
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Software licensing tactics: Delay, delay, pay, pay
Conclusion: It is not uncommon for IBRS to see vendors delaying licensing negotiation for renewals until the very last month via a variety of tactics. By delaying negotiation vendors can limit...
- Joseph Sweeney -
Employee onboarding: Digitising can improve consistency and save significant time
Conclusion: Onboarding is a critical process when hiring new employees. Poor first impressions can impact the potential success of new employees, and potentially the productivity or benefits that an...
- Peter Hall -
Sourcing Monthly October 2019 – November 2019
Conclusion: This month, the launch of plans to develop new data centres have been prominent. The market has experienced a heightened demand for storage and associated services, with adoption driven...
- Irene Pimentel -
Onboarding: First impressions count
Conclusion: Hiring is costly, time-consuming and fraught with risk. Hiring decisions can impact organisations in either positive or negative ways. A critical step in the hiring process is...
- Peter Hall -
Sourcing Monthly September 2019 – October 2019
Conclusion: This month, discussions regarding partnerships and acquisitions with the specific aim of expanding reseller businesses to include managed services have been prominent. Specifically there...
- Irene Pimentel
Operations & Service Delivery
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Improve the customer experience within a digitally transformed world
Conclusion: In this day and age, customers expect to be able to complete a transaction across multiple touch points and for each touch point to be aware of where they are in the transaction process, and...
- Mike Mitchelmore -
Are your KPIs slowing down your service transformation?
Conclusion: Shifting end users to a digital service delivery channel is more cost-effective for most scenarios and most organisations. The return on investment is through a reduced volume of...
- David Beal -
Laying the business foundation for IT: Selecting an IT service management partner
Conclusion: Today’s business activities are heavily reliant on constantly commoditising IT functions. Faced with this reality, few organisations would now deny that improving the delivery of...
- Sam Higgins -
Contact centre trends update in 2019/2020
Conclusion: Since the earlier IBRS contact centre trend report was released at the beginning of 20171, it is time to reflect on those trends and reassess what improvements have been made....
- Peter Bickerton -
Tips for managers implementing the new risk management framework in an ICT environment
Conclusion: The adherence to the recently introduced guidelines under ISO:31000 20181 is key to every ICT manager’s responsibilities and leadership remit as they are key in driving and leading the...
- Peter Bickerton
