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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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 -
Digital Strategy Part 1: What are the traits of digital leaders?
Conclusion:CEOs need their CIOs to be out on the cutting edge to decide which technology to incorporate so that the organisation can adapt and transform in a rapidly changing landscape. As the...
- Karen Scott Davie -
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
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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
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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 -
Top 10 considerations when running an incident response drill
Conclusion: There has been a lot of talk about incident response since the new data breach laws came into effect in Australia and Europe. But the laws alone should not be the driving force to having a...
- Claire Pales -
Is security really an IT problem?
Conclusion: If the broader business is to commit to investing in security, both emotionally and financially, they will need to buy into their responsibility. Security is likely to be seen as an IT...
- Claire Pales -
Security policies: More documentation is not risk management
Conclusion: A major benefit from using a framework is to support better decision making and help deliver consistent outcomes. When it comes to security and risk, a framework is only as useful as the...
- James Turner
Governance & Planning
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Why benchmarking IT costs and staffing is important
Conclusion: Carried out using reliable cost and performance metrics, a benchmarking exercise can yield significant benefits. Conversely, when costs are unclear and few performance measures are...
- Alan Hansell -
Project boards: Setting the tone
Conclusion: Project management principles and frameworks are now implemented in the majority of organisations, including public, commercial and the not-for-profit sectors across Australia. While...
- Sue Johnston -
Who should lead digital transformation?
Conclusion: The CIO’s role has changed considerably over the past couple of decades, from “keeping the lights on” and working on cost-saving initiatives (automation) to expanding into embracing new...
- Peter Bickerton -
Helping newly appointed IT managers succeed
Conclusion: The differences in roles and responsibilities between an IT professional and line manager are many and need to be understood quickly by the new managers and their peers. Not only will...
- Alan Hansell -
Digital transformation: Top 4 lessons
Conclusion: Organisations either recognised early that digital transformation was essential to meet the competitive demands of their respective markets or accepted that general community...
- Sue Johnston
Infrastructure
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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
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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 -
CRM modernisation Part 1: Strategy, planning & selection
Conclusion: The potential, and corresponding increased expectations of, modern CRM is causing many organisations to re-evaluate their existing CRM solution (or multiple solutions) with a CRM...
- Joseph Sweeney -
CRM modernisation Part 2A: Creating a public sector stakeholder experience strategy
Conclusion: The availability of modern, Cloud-based, omnichannel-focused stakeholder and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions is disrupting expectations of how public sector...
- Joseph Sweeney -
CRM modernisation Part 2B: Creating a customer experience strategy
Conclusion: The availability of modern, Cloud-based, omnichannel-focused stakeholder and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions is disrupting customer expectations. It is not just that new...
- Joseph Sweeney
Sourcing & Staffing
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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 -
CRM modernisation Part 3: Roles & responsibilities
Conclusion: Since CRM modernisation will impact many major functional areas of the organisation, developing a communication plan to ensure the strategy is developed and executed in a consistent and...
- Joseph Sweeney -
Tech companies tapping into high performing workforce candidates
Conclusion: Whilst many organisations in Australia cite the lack of available IT skills to be a threat to their future growth or ability to complete digital transformation initiatives, Australia has a large...
- Peter Hall -
Sourcing Monthly August 2018 – September 2018
Conclusion: This month, discussions regarding enterprise agreements combining products and services to provide highly tailored solutions have been prominent. In particular, market transformation...
- Irene Pimentel
Operations & Service Delivery
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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 -
Is AWS “Connect” the path to exquisitely automated customer service?
Conclusion:The future of customer service will rely heavily on automating assistance with targeted empathy1. Expect virtual digital assistants to heavily reduce the need for contact centre...
- Geoff Johnson
