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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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 -
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
As a Service
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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 -
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
Security Leadership
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The cost of technical debt and cultural change inaction
Conclusion: Digital strategies often require organisations to complete major transformation projects to deliver the outcomes required of the strategy. A digital strategy is not just about...
- Mike Mitchelmore -
Implementing the ASD Essential Eight: A bigger challenge than expected
Conclusion: The Essential Eight from the Australian Signals Directorate constitutes a recommended set of strategies to reduce the risk of cyber intrusion. They are said to prevent up to 85% of...
- Peter Sandilands -
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
Governance & Planning
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Being a good customer of consulting Part 3: Maximising the value of stage gates through considered design and definition of unique objectives
Conclusion: Stage gate reviews can be a highly effective governance tool that can materially enhance project outcomes; however, their value can be eroded by poor design, a lack of planning, or if...
- Michael Smit -
Project delivery tracking: Careful of the blind spots
Conclusion: Most organisations across Australia have implemented project management methodologies to support successful project outcomes in a consistent manner. Project boards exist to provide...
- Sue Johnston -
Your enterprise architecture is incomplete without accurate cost models
Conclusion: Recognition of revenue and recording of objectively verifiable historical costs are the foundation of globally accepted accounting practices. These practices in turn provide transparency and...
- Sam Higgins -
Why investing in data governance makes good business sense
Conclusion: Not knowing where an organisation’s business-critical data is located, and its quality, can lead to many frustrating efforts to respond to management queries. When the converse is true...
- Alan Hansell -
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
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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Leadership practices over holiday breaks
Conclusion: There are many benefits in taking a break during the holidays that go beyond just recharging the batteries. However, along with the seemingly obvious benefits, there are also some traps...
- Peter Bickerton -
Sourcing Monthly November 2019 – December 2019
Conclusion: This month, regulatory frameworks for the ICT industry and their interaction with IT businesses and customers have been prominent. The private sector has been more vocal about the need...
- Irene Pimentel -
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
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
