Featured Advisory Papers
Workplace Innovation
As a Service
Security Leadership
Governance & Planning
Infrastructure
Applications
Sourcing & Staffing
Operations & Service Delivery
Workplace Innovation
-
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 -
Considering Chromebooks Part 2: Use cases
Conclusion:Unless an organisation has made a decision to go “all-in” with Google’s G Suite, Chromebooks (plus Chromeboxes and related Chrome devices) are best viewed as an adjunct to traditional...
- Joseph Sweeney
As a Service
-
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 -
Running IT-as-a-Service Part 45: Service Desk-as-a-Service
Conclusion: During the last two decades, service desks delivery had the following shortcomings: The service desk voice communication channel was characterised by a long waiting time to connect with...
- Wissam Raffoul
Security Leadership
-
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 -
2FA is a no-brainer
Conclusion: Passwords are the weakest link (some might say second to humans) in the enterprise security chain. With compromised credentials (a username and password) being the leading cause of data...
- Claire Pales -
When it comes to security, when is enough... enough?
Conclusion: The question of “how much security is enough” often stems from attempts to define ballpark security budgets, meet compliance obligations and scope out security team size and make-up. But...
- Claire Pales
Governance & Planning
-
Raise your operational effectiveness with better use of calendaring
Conclusion: The 2018 CIO survey1 revealed that the CIO’s influence is stalling, with fewer CIOs on executive boards. However, improving business processing is still the #1 operational priority. To...
- Peter Bickerton -
Present the right information at the right time to the executive
Conclusion: Keeping the executive informed on how the ICT function is performing while advising it how to take advantage of changes in business technology is an ongoing challenge for every CIO or...
- Alan Hansell -
Artificial intelligence Part 2: Deriving business principles
Conclusion: While the current artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives are data-driven, there are instances whereby the current data is insufficient to predict the future. For example, answering the...
- Wissam Raffoul -
Is technical debt applying the brakes on digital strategy?
Conclusion: Every dollar spent in supporting legacy systems or BAU (business as usual) represents a dollar that cannot be allocated to digital transformation initiatives. Conversely, organisations without...
- Alan Hansell -
Digital transformation: It’s the people
Conclusion: Digital transformation is happening everywhere. It is being included in organisational strategic plans for government service improvements and in commercial organisations to address market...
- Sue Johnston
Infrastructure
-
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 -
Preparing for networking in the Cloud
Conclusion:Preparing the modern business for Cloud requires a common computing and networking infrastructure with new Cloud architectures converging with data centres over a hybrid of both direct...
- Geoff Johnson -
Buying in Cloud Marketplaces
Conclusion:IBRS’ finding is that prominent Cloud marketplaces (CMPs) such as AWS Marketplace1, Microsoft Azure2, Google Cloud Platform3 and IBM Bluemix4 are gaining traction as alternatives to...
- Geoff Johnson
Applications
-
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
-
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 -
Sourcing Monthly October 2018 – November 2018
Conclusion: This month, discussions regarding the need to strengthen security and recovery solutions have been prevalent. The increased number of breaches which compromise private user data and...
- Irene Pimentel -
Sourcing Monthly September 2018 – October 2018
Conclusion: This month, IT vendor acquisitions and partnerships have been prominent. The incentive for companies with disparate products and services to consolidate has increased, resulting in...
- Irene Pimentel -
Understanding followership as a team leader
Conclusion: The role of being a supportive follower is overlooked as compared against the literature of being a leader. Everyone is a follower, yet by a factor of over 1,000 to 11, information is...
- Peter Bickerton
Operations & Service Delivery
-
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 -
Canberra-based Azure is about much more than security
Conclusion: On 3rd April 2018, Microsoft announced the availability of its Azure Cloud running within Canberra Data Centres (CDC) facilities, and officially rated for protected workloads....
- Joseph Sweeney -
Workforce transformation Part 1: Disrupting the very idea of paper is an important first step
Conclusion: Current approaches to knowledge management are being disrupted by a wave of new working practices that replace the paper-based metaphor which pre-dates the computer revolution, with a...
- Joseph Sweeney -
Understanding power in stakeholder management
Conclusion:Most organisations today understand that business change requires the effective management of stakeholders. Whether they be internal or external, the inclusion of their opinions, needs...
- Sue Johnston
