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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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 -
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
As a Service
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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 -
Running IT-as-a-Service Part 53: Strategic skill building versus technical skill exploitation
Conclusion: The increased use of technical point-solutions has created the need for establishing an in-house core team of generalists capable of defining a coherent set of services that can improve...
- Wissam Raffoul -
Running IT-as-a-Service Part 52: The new generation business relationship manager’s role
Conclusion: Running IT-as-a-Service requires emulating vendors’ account management function by creating a business relationship manager (BRM) role. The role’s rationale is to provide strategic advice...
- Wissam Raffoul -
Running IT-as-a-Service Part 51: Service integration and management (SIAM) pragmatic implementation
Conclusion: The success of digital transformation, hybrid Cloud deployment and multi-service providers’ governance largely depends on IT services being integrated and managed in a unified and...
- Wissam Raffoul -
The impact of Software-as-a-Service on enterprise solutions: Why you must run IT-as-a-Service
Conclusion: Business executives in different business units are bypassing ICT with enterprise Software-as-a-Service. Two early leaders in this trend – marketing and human resources departments – are...
- Joseph Sweeney
Security Leadership
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Business email compromise, the modern scourge of commerce
Conclusion: Many organisations are finding themselves being defrauded, especially when making or receiving payments electronically. It is not that the end systems are compromised but rather the...
- Peter Sandilands -
Notifiable data breaches: Time to revisit data loss prevention?
Conclusion: The notifiable data breach regulations have had an impact on business priorities. For any organisation subject to the regulations, protection of personal information should have become a...
- Peter Sandilands -
Improve security posture without buying the latest product du jour
Conclusion: Given the reality of shrinking budgets, organisations can struggle deciding what new products to purchase or techniques to implement. They hope the new capabilities will enhance their...
- Peter Sandilands -
Microsegmentation: Improving IT security
Conclusion: Recently, several architectural models and tools have become available to enable the microsegmentation of networks, which helps improve overall security within organisations and can help limit the...
- Peter Hall -
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
Governance & Planning
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Soft skills that make a CIO more effective
Conclusion: Analysts in general are correct to identify the challenges in the industry to develop appropriate skills, meet the demands of digitisation and to counter the security threats. When it is...
- Mike Mitchelmore -
A probabilistic approach to cost estimation
Conclusion: Deterministic1 project budgets do not convey any information about the range of possible outcomes for a project, or the associated risk factors driving the range. The ability to...
- Michael Smit -
Explaining the dynamic nature of IT value
Conclusion: Since the advent of the title of chief information officer (CIO), the reporting line for this critical role and those it has since spawned, such as the chief technology officer and chief...
- Sam Higgins -
Avoid surprises from business computing software
Conclusion: Increasing the IT literacy of business managers and professionals has sharpened their interest in buying off-the-shelf software to meet immediate business needs, but potentially without the...
- Alan Hansell -
Identify and accommodate age-diverse stakeholders
Conclusion: In an age-diverse workforce, it is important that IT managers and professionals understand the different expectations and management styles of stakeholders and accommodate them to gain their...
- Alan Hansell
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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Sourcing Monthly August 2019 – September 2019
Conclusion: This month, discussions regarding technologies used to facilitate highly specialised business functions have been prominent. Tailored solutions which focus on the performance of tasks, such...
- Irene Pimentel -
Emerging HR tech solutions striving to improve hiring outcomes
Conclusion: Successfully hiring new employees can bring lots of benefits to an organisation – improved productivity, employee morale or business outcomes, to name just a few. Equally, poor hiring...
- Peter Hall -
Leader transition: Beyond the three envelopes
Conclusion: The apocryphal ‘three envelopes’ story about the executive starting a new role is a cynical view of leadership transition. However, at its core, there are some uncomfortable truths about how...
- Ewan Perrin -
Sourcing Monthly July 2019 – August 2019
Conclusion: This month, there has been increased discussion regarding security services; in particular, the growth of the Australian security service provider industry and benefits associated with...
- Irene Pimentel -
Sourcing Monthly June 2019 – July 2019
Conclusion: This month, attention has been drawn to vendors and managed service providers requiring customer transformation or migration to new frameworks and associated customer reluctance to do...
- Irene Pimentel
Operations & Service Delivery
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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 -
IT service design is everyone’s responsibility
Conclusion: Despite being first published over 10 years ago, ITIL service design remains a pain point for both project delivery and service operations teams respectively. The former claims the...
- Sam Higgins -
Rethinking the request for proposal process by replacing written responses with a competitive discovery phase
Conclusion: When engaging the market for suppliers, the objective of the procurement process is to select the supplier with the most suitable approach, who is able to accurately define the scope, and...
- Michael Smit -
ICT disaster recovery plan challenges
Conclusion: ICT disaster recovery plans (DRPs) have been in place for many years. Fortunately, invoking these plans is rare, but just like insurance plans, it is wise to ensure the fine print is...
- Peter Bickerton -
Incident response planning: More than dealing with cyber security breaches and outages
Conclusion: In times of business disruption, the value of a pragmatic and accessible incident response plan (IRP) will become the main tool in getting the business back to normal operation, and...
- Peter Bickerton
