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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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 -
SNAPSHOT: From paper to digital thinking
Conclusion: Current approaches to knowledge management are being disrupted by a wave of new working practices that replace the paper-based metaphor that pre-dates the computer revolution, with a...
- Joseph Sweeney -
Digital transformation: More than a technology project
Conclusion: Organisations everywhere are thinking about, planning or undertaking digital transformation activities. While good progress is being made, there is still a tendency to view digital...
- Sue Johnston -
Leadership is critical to innovation
Conclusion:It is difficult to plan when innovation will occur. It is particularly difficult for established organisations to be innovative – they have been successful through sound business...
- Sue Johnston
As a Service
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Running IT-as-a-Service Part 49: The case for hybrid Cloud migration
Conclusion: Public Cloud is not the solution to all IT organisations’ technology and services problems. This is because most IT organisations use a portfolio of environments such as legacy systems,...
- Wissam Raffoul -
Running IT-as-a-Service Part 48: IT value creation accelerated approach – phase 2
Conclusion: IT organisations wishing to create value should initiate selling processes to define business needs, establish SLAs for mission-critical systems and provide IT solutions to key business...
- Wissam Raffoul -
Running IT-as-a-Service Part 47: IT value creation accelerated approach – phase 1
Conclusion: IT organisations wishing to create value are challenged by long implementation time-scales and inability to change the business perception of IT capability. To address these challenges,...
- Wissam Raffoul -
Running IT-as-a-Service Part 46: Mergers and acquisitions impact on service contracts
Conclusion: IT organisations revisiting their service contracts as a result of mergers and acquisitions should establish a federated vendor management arrangement. The rationale is to ensure central...
- Wissam Raffoul -
Running IT-as-a-Service Part 44: Multi-Cloud service level management foundation
Conclusion: Given that multi-Cloud is a combination of public/private Cloud and customised systems governed by in-house and/or outsourced arrangements, end-to-end service level management becomes a...
- Wissam Raffoul
Security Leadership
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Why the CISO should evolve into a CSO
Conclusion: Over the past decade, the role of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) has risen to be one of great importance in many large and mid-sized organisations. While this remains the...
- Claire Pales -
What is the security agenda for 2019?
Conclusion: Throughout the year, most businesses invite in a third party to conduct an information security risk assessment – as per best practice. Often this is a compliance exercise, other times...
- Claire Pales -
The security of third-party access
Conclusion: Relying on third parties to succeed in business has become the norm. Cost limitations and workforce requirements mean that businesses need to find efficient ways to achieve their goals. This...
- Claire Pales -
Should elements of your IT environments and data holdings be classified PROTECTED? Why and what to consider
Conclusion: CIOs should consider the environments for their PROTECTED information, both when building new capability and/or when renewing older infrastructure and services. The need to have...
- Mike Mitchelmore -
The difference between fraud and cybercrime
Conclusion: Fraud and cybercrime can both keep key stakeholders in a business awake at night. But these threats are often driven by very different malicious motivations. In the end, the two threats...
- Claire Pales
Governance & Planning
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Deriving ICT strategy from organisations’ guiding principles
Conclusion: Some ICT strategies are technology-centric while others are business-centric. The technology-centric strategies are usually developed without business stakeholders’ involvement resulting in...
- Wissam Raffoul -
To reduce system defects, tighten testing practices
Conclusion: Unless software testing practices are rigorous and enforced, system defects will continue and compromise meeting of service delivery objectives. Whilst defect-free code, and clean vendor...
- Alan Hansell -
Business continuity planning challenges
Conclusion: Organisations need to plan to quickly and successfully recover business operations by creating and updating business continuity plans (BCPs) supported by disaster recovery plans (DRPs)....
- Peter Bickerton -
Agility in strategic planning for the digital era
Conclusion: Agility has been introduced into organisations as part of their approach to increase the cadence, or velocity, of design, development and implementation cycles for project delivery....
- Sue Johnston -
IT Agile teams and why the product owner’s role is pivotal
Conclusion: Agile teams will struggle to deliver a viable solution (or product) unless they can tap into the business knowledge of an astute product owner who can communicate the objectives of the...
- Alan Hansell
Infrastructure
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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 -
The value proposition for PROTECTED Cloud
Conclusion: Cloud offerings are now commercially available, allowing CIOs to engage the technology offerings with a high degree of trust that the service is secure and responsive at reduced cost to...
- Mike Mitchelmore -
Keeping your mobile device strategies up to date
Conclusion: BYOD strategies need to be updated regularly to keep pace with the evolving nature of not just the devices themselves but also the increasing challenges and complexity to stay secure;...
- Peter Bickerton -
Volume does not equal value: Use data demographics to set your data storage strategies
Conclusion:Technologists consistently under-estimate the growth of data volumes. The result is tactical actions aimed at increasing capacity achieved by adding storage on-premise using traditional...
- Sam Higgins -
Complexity is costly, risky and unavoidable
Conclusion:Managing large IT environments and provisioning IT services within an organisation is complex and complexity will always exist. However, not all complexity is “bad”. “Good” complexity is the...
- Peter Hall
Applications
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Acknowledging the limits of machine learning during AI-enabled transformation
Conclusion: Increasingly, leaders in the field of AI adoption are calling out the limitations of the current machine learning techniques as they relate to knowledge representation and predictive...
- Sam Higgins -
Power BI is driving data democratisation: Prepare now
Conclusion: As self-service data analytics and visualisation becomes mainstream – due in no small part to Microsoft’s Power BI strategy – traditional data teams within IT groups need to reconsider...
- Joseph Sweeney -
10 years of blockchain: What is next for DLT?
Conclusion: In IBRS’s 2018 Top Business Technology Trends Priorities Report, we noted that despite significant media attention on blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT) in 2017, the...
- Sam Higgins -
Can you escape the power of Power BI?
Conclusion: Microsoft’s portfolio of business intelligence (BI) products now places the vendor in a market-leading position. Over the next three to five years, IBRS expects Microsoft to continue to...
- Joseph Sweeney -
Marketing Automation and Data Analytics
Conclusion: Automation is understood to facilitate repetitive but essentially simple tasks. In conjunction with general purpose machine intelligence, virtual personal assistants and technologies...
- Guy Cranswick
Sourcing & Staffing
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Sourcing Monthly January 2019 – February 2019
Conclusion: This month, discussions regarding offshoring initiatives have been prominent following announcements by two vendors that plans are in progress to send work overseas. Though offshoring can...
- Irene Pimentel -
Leadership mindset changes in a digital age
Conclusion: “C-suite” leaders including CIOs and IT managers must continually adapt and change their mindset to be digitally savvy in order to keep pace and influence the digital revolution at the...
- Peter Bickerton -
Sourcing Monthly December 2018 – January 2019
Conclusion: This month, security issues and responses to threats specific to managed service providers have been discussed. Attacks on vendors can be particularly serious because of provider...
- Irene Pimentel -
End-user computing managed services: 3 initial things to consider for the RFP
Conclusion: Increasingly, IT departments are looking for ways to divest their operations of undifferentiated activities – that is, activities that are common among most organisations. One technology that is...
- Joseph Sweeney -
Sourcing Monthly November 2018 – December 2018
Conclusion: This month, there has been a range of company acquisitions, consolidations and partnerships in the managed services industry. These types of purchases can allow vendors to obtain...
- Irene Pimentel
Operations & Service Delivery
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The IT Data Analyst: A crucial role and function for delivering IT-as-a-Service
Conclusion: The IT organisation in most enterprises suffers from the “Cobbler’s Children” syndrome – they give great advice but do not practise what they preach. A prime example is when IT does not apply...
- Sam Higgins -
What is the right digital strategy?
Conclusion: There are two broad groups of digital strategies – bold and defensive. Companies that choose bolder strategies tend to be more successful. However, there are good reasons why certain...
- Ewan Perrin -
Digital transformation: The challenges of scaling
Conclusion: Digital transformation is top of the agenda for most companies in 2019. Many organisations have initiated digital transformation programs and are seeing success with small-scale pilots....
- Ewan Perrin -
Business readiness for digital
Conclusion: Developing a digital strategy or embarking on a digital transformation program is now a common business narrative. For some organisations it is a process of recasting existing IT...
- Sue Johnston -
Identify the baton holders for effective ICT service delivery
Conclusion: Successful ICT life cycle service delivery from strategy development to system decommissioning relies on the person assigned the role picking up the work in progress and successfully...
- Alan Hansell
