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 8: Is a third-party backup or archival solution needed?
Conclusion: Being Cloud-based, Microsoft’s Office 365 includes features that would traditionally be considered backup. According to the Microsoft Office Trust Center, Microsoft establishes itself as...
- Joseph Sweeney -
Designing next-gen workspaces: Environmental considerations
Conclusion: Many organisations are interested in next-generation office space designs that leverage technology to promote collaboration and workforce transformation. Leaders in this field...
- Joseph Sweeney -
Designing next-gen workplaces: The human considerations
Conclusion: To support the changing workforce, businesses should look at adaptingtransformative workplace designs to maximise productivity and collaborative efforts. Early adopters of modern...
- Joseph Sweeney -
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
As a Service
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Running IT-as-a-Service Part 58: Digital transformation requires effective IT value creation and management
Conclusion: Digital transformation is more than another software development stream to replace legacy systems by mobile applications. Digital transformation includes building a new IT capability...
- Wissam Raffoul -
Running IT-as-a-Service Part 57: Cloud migration strategy – pragmatic approach
Conclusion: IT organisations wishing to migrate to Cloud should adopt a pragmatic approach that strikes a balance between migration cost, Cloud risks and benefits. The bottom line is to avoid the...
- Wissam Raffoul -
Get board agreement to the Cloud strategy
Conclusion: Cloud services have now been around for over a decade and since that time many of the services available have evolved in both scope and maturity. Most organisations now have a range of...
- Philip Nesci -
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
Security Leadership
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Cyber security considerations for COVID-19
Conclusion: With cases of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) emerging across Australia, many businesses are or should bewell into pandemic planning to ensure they maintain essential services....
- Philip Nesci -
Does your organisation have a cyber incident response plan?
Conclusion: With an ever-increasing number of cyber-related incidents, cyber security risk has evolved from a technical risk to a strategic enterprise risk. While many organisations have enterprise...
- Philip Nesci -
Ransomware: Don’t just defend, plan to recover
Conclusion: Ransomware attacks have been in the news lately with Toll, Talman, Travelex and Manheim Auctions all having their day-to-day operations completely shattered. Many pundits and security...
- Peter Sandilands -
Pandemic planning
Conclusion: Pandemic planning is a strategic approach to business continuity that anticipates and prepares for a widespread outbreak of an infectious disease. Business continuity planning can have...
- Peter Hall -
Patch the systems: A simple task or not?
Conclusions: Patching systems is regularly touted as the panacea for security breaches, yet many organisations continue to struggle with that seemingly simple process. There is obviously more to the...
- Peter Sandilands
Governance & Planning
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Marketing KPIs that drive your digital strategy
Conclusion: A common pitfall experienced by service-orientated organisations is the disconnect between its digital efforts and its marketing program. In good practice, marketing efforts should...
- David Beal -
Modern telephony: Considerations
Conclusion: Organisations that are nearing the end of life for their current voice platforms or have a compelling event to hinge the replacement of their voice service, need to review their use of...
- Mike Mitchelmore -
Maximising the benefit of ERP health checks
Conclusion: An ERP implementation can be one of an organisation’s biggest investments when considering implementation services, licences, hosting and support. ERP implementations and major version...
- Michael Smit -
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) Part 4: SAP licensing pitfalls – indirect licensing
Conclusion: Increasingly, organisations are looking to improve customer experiences through effective business processes. A ready portfolio of electronic services is expected by the market which...
- Mark Unwin -
When and how to shut down a failing project
Conclusion: Projects in trouble or failing need to be assessed with two main possible outcomes: rescue or discontinue. Organisations should carefully consider whether shutting down a project is a...
- Sue Johnston
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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Managing cultural diversity
Conclusion: Organisations will typically have employees of different cultural backgrounds. As teams expand and organisations become more global, managers may find themselves managing whole teams based...
- Peter Hall -
Sourcing Monthly February 2020 – March 2020
Conclusion: This month, discussions regarding the COVID-19 outbreak and the range of impacts on industry have been prominent. While extreme and unforeseen impacts of seemingly small events have been...
- Irene Pimentel -
Working From Home Policy Template
Is your Working From Home Policy causing you grief? Most organisations’ Working From Home policies are created under the assumption that people would be seeking permission to remote work. As a...
- Joseph Sweeney -
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) Part 3: SAP certified vendors make S/4HANA migration more streamlined
Conclusion: Choosing to simplify the SAP migration project by removing irrelevant KPIs could increase adoption. This is the common thread for organisations that have successfully undertaken the SAP...
- Mark Unwin -
Giving organisational context quickly to consultants is key to maximising the value of your engagement
Conclusion: As Australia’s use of consultancy services continues to grow, so too does the need for businesses to obtain value from these engagements quickly and effectively. Key to obtaining this...
- David Beal
Operations & Service Delivery
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Will combining SPOC activities yield low hanging, juicy or sour fruit?
Conclusion: When cost cutting of IT services is on the executive agenda, due to the impact of COVID-19 virus, will it yield low hanging or sour fruit? One area often regarded as low hanging fruit is...
- Alan Hansell -
Business continuity planning exercise - Pandemic scenario template
With the outbreak and continued spread of the recent Coranavirus, or COVID-19, your business continuity plan (BCP) may need to be put in motion. IBRS has created the Business Continuity Planning:...
- Peter Bickerton -
BCP Steps and Checklist
Being prepared: IBRS has created a BCP checklist to help you create and/or update your business continuity plan. This diagram is to be used in the following ways: A checklist to ensure all BCP steps...
- Peter Bickerton -
Incident response planning: Key artefacts
Conclusion: Two key supporting artefacts in the creation of pragmatic incident response plans are the incident response action flow chart and the severity assessment table. Take time to develop,...
- Peter Bickerton -
The human element of disaster management
Conclusion: Australian organisations must have strong disaster recovery plans, be it for natural disasters or man-made disasters. The plans need to deal with the protection and recovery of...
- Peter Hall
