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 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 -
Running IT-as-a-Service Part 43: Service level penalties and incentives for hybrid Cloud
Conclusion: Penalties and incentives are designed to ensure agreed critical service levels are achieved. Penalties are enforced whenever service levels are not met. Incentives are rewarded whenever...
- Wissam Raffoul -
Running IT-as-a-Service Part 42: Incident and problem management integration is critical for hybrid Cloud
Conclusion: Traditional outsourcing and managed service contracts primarily focus on incident management service levels and give little attention to problem management. For example, incident...
- Wissam Raffoul
Security Leadership
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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 -
Use the NIST cybersecurity framework to drive for visibility
Conclusion: The updated NIST cybersecurity framework (CSF) is a pragmatic tool to enable an organisation to gain clarity on its current level of capability for cyber risk management. Remembering...
- James Turner -
Three levers tightening up the cyber security of Australia
Conclusion: There are three levers being applied to the cyber security maturity of specific parts of the Australian economy. These three levers are the Notifiable Data Breaches Scheme, the Security of...
- James Turner
Governance & Planning
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Digital transformation will fail without capable leaders
Conclusion: Organisations planning to transform their business operations using IT must develop a shared vision of how to use IT to enable the transformation. Failure to provide a vision will...
- Alan Hansell -
Importance of a balanced ICT investment portfolio
Conclusion: Organisations undertake strategic planning activities on a regular basis, whether it be every three years or a rolling review every 12 months, to establish goals for the following three...
- Sue Johnston -
Pragmatic business continuity planning
Conclusion: Keeping business continuity plans (BCP) succinct, up to date and easy to read will reap rewards when they are required during a business disruption.
- Peter Bickerton
Innovation: Taking action in 2018
Conclusion: Innovation is top of mind for many CEOs across Australia. In fact, more than 86% recognise that they need to invest more in R&D and innovation as part of the company strategy. However,...
- Sue Johnston
Know how to sell ideas and support the digital strategy
Conclusion: Organisations are complex and diverse and do not change direction or a business process just because a manager or the Executive think it is a good idea. To sell the idea, managers and...
- Alan Hansell
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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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 -
Mergers and acquisitions: Opportunities for IT
Conclusion: Technology leaders in organisations brought together through a merger or acquisition (M&A) play an extremely important role and can significantly impact the potential economic benefits and...
- Peter Hall
Sourcing & Staffing
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Dealing with conflict in an IT environment
Conclusion: Being able to deal with workplace conflict quickly and effectively reaps many rewards. There are different strategies that can be used to deal with the differing types of conflict in the...
- Peter Bickerton -
Sourcing Monthly July 2018 – August 2018
Conclusion: This month, discussions regarding data-driven products and associated services have been prominent. There has been an increased interest in offerings that facilitate the collection,...
- Irene Pimentel -
How to succeed with eforms Part 4: Selection framework
Conclusion: Interest in eforms solutions is being driven by two drivers: First, the promise of enabling “citizen developers” within the organisation to take ownership of the creation of forms and...
- Joseph Sweeney -
Sourcing Monthly June 2018 – July 2018
Conclusion: This month has seen a high number of security incidents globally. The high demand for security services requires vendors to provide transparency with service offerings, implementation...
- Irene Pimentel -
Sourcing Monthly May 2018 – June 2018
Conclusion: This month, discussions regarding critical security issues have continued to be prominent. In particular, an increase in the ineffective management of security threats and incidents was...
- 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
