Freelance or Interim PMO & Project Manager

Jan232018 by adminNo Comments

NHS green-lights Cloud

NHS green-lights cloud technology for storing patient data NHS Digital has issued new national guidance for health and care organisations considering cloud services for storing patient information. The document outlines a framework for assessing and managing risk around the use of public cloud technologies in the health and social care sectors in England, including legalities around how data should be stored and used and considerations to be made by organisations when choosing a supplier. The guidance also contains best practice principles for handling customer data and highlights considerations to be made by trusts prior to the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on 25 May. The cloud has been widely embraced in other UK industries under the government’s 2013 ‘cloud first’ policy for public sector IT. While some parts…

Nov212016 by adminNo Comments

A digital transformation checklist

Home Page, Projects, Strategy

The market is filled with great insights on successful digital transformations. A recent report from McKinsey weighs the risks and benefits. Another, from MIT Sloan Management Review, compares digitally mature organisations with those still digitally adolescent. As with most adolescents, those less mature are noisier and messier, with the promise of better things to come! Where should you start when assessing the opportunities and risks for your organisation? In particular, what are the balance points, for and against, digital transformation? What is the expected speed of any such change? How do you plan? (Can you plan?) Here’s a high-level checklist — factors that influence success when driving a digital transformation: Complexity v. Benefits: be clear about what you seek from a digital transformation for your organisation. Consider what such a…

Oct182016 by adminNo Comments

10 Tips For Giving Effective Virtual Presentations

Me, Projects, Strategy

What to know before you go live. Presenting online? Try these suggestions to improve your results. | Illustration by Tricia Seibold As audiences go global and you need to reach more people through technology (including webinars, conference calls and teleconference), you must consider the challenges to connecting with a virtual audience. Here I pinpoint 10 valuable best practices to ensure you communicate successfully. 1. Be Brief Audiences begin to lose attention after roughly 10 minutes of hearing from the same presenter. If you have more than 10 minutes of content, use interactive activities to keep your audience engaged (for example, take a poll, give quizzes, or ask audience members for their opinions via chat). 2. Be Simple Keep slides simple — avoid too many words, graphics and animation features. Less…

Oct142016 by adminNo Comments

The 3 pillars of successful Service and Support

ITIL, Strategy

Failing to deliver on service and support can be extremely costly for any organisation, where according to statistics 91% of unhappy customers will not willingly do business with you again (Lee Resources). So in today’s competitive landscape, what exactly should you be expecting from your Call Recording and Workforce Optimisation Service and Support providers? With over 60% of Business Systems’ personnel residing in this division, we outline the 3 pillars of successful Service and Support which we (and our customers) have come to recognise first hand! 1. Strategy & Design They say ‘by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail’. The same maxim also holds true for major projects taking place in your organisation. Without a solid strategy and design in place to guide your project plan, desired objectives…

Oct92016 by adminNo Comments

WHAT DOES A PMO DO?

Home Page, Projects, Strategy

Program and Project Management Offices (PMOs) have been in the news. OK, you won’t have read about this in your daily paper, but in the UK the PMOSIG became incorporated as the Association for Project Management’s 13th specific interest group a couple of years back. While PMOs have been around for a long time, this was a big step forward for the recognition of the work they do. And they do a lot more than just produce reports. The role of a PMO A PMO is the backbone of a successful project management approach at an organization. It is a function that provides decision support information, although it doesn’t make any decisions itself. A PMO underpins the project delivery mechanisms by ensuring that all business change in an organization is managed…

Sep292016 by adminNo Comments

CIO: How to build your personal brand

Home Page, Strategy

As a CIO you have to carefully manage and nurture the perceptions that others have of you. By ‘others’ I mean internal staff and stakeholders, and outside of your company I’m talking about your peers, industry professionals, and thought-leaders. One of your key assets is your brand. Your brand expands upon more aspects of your character and your skillset than your job title, your CV and your career history. This article explains how you can build a brand that helps you to earn respect throughout your sector, and how the development of your brand can turn you into a sought-after personality in your marketplace. (more…)

Nov272015 by adminNo Comments

6 CRM predictions for 2016

CRM, Home Page, Strategy

So what will be the big trends in CRM in 2016? Here are six predictions. CRM software will become even more social. “In 2016, we'll see a lot more CRM providers adding new social media features, whether that be tracking customer interactions or suggesting new contacts,” says Marc Prosser, cofounder, Fit Small Business. “Nimble is out ahead on this, but expect others to add these features while their team (and others) devise new ways CRM can take advantage of social media.” Mobile CRM will become a must-have. In 2016, “we'll see CRM go mobile in a big way,” says Prosser. “So far, most mobile CRM apps have focused on providing a basic phone-ready version of the desktop version, usually without the full set of features.” Over the next 12 months,…

Nov262015 by adminNo Comments

True Cloud Architecture or just Cloud Hosted – Cirrus True Cloud

Home Page, Strategy

To take a single instance of a product, host it in a data centre and connect this up to your site or wide area network (WAN) you have simply changed the location of where your infrastructure sits. Yes a Telecity data centre in London will be far more secure than your own server room but the operating principles and single points of failure remain. For most services that are not business critical or what are called “high availability” services, this works and is enough. For services that would have a serious business impact were they to go down for an afternoon as we saw yesterday – you need to look at True Cloud. True Cloud is where you have multiple instances of your product in different locations, and services can…

Nov232015 by adminNo Comments

Cloud Applications – Out of Sight, Out of Mind?

CRM, Home Page, Strategy

Very interesting reminder.... I’m just completing a project where all the telephony for the client I am working for has moved to a cloud service provider – every part of the service from ACD, SIP Proxy, SBC and the associated reporting tools and user management all reside there. It has been a very interesting project from both a technical and planning perspective, one of the biggest learns that I have taken away from it is the knowledge that even though a platform might sit in the cloud it is very important to consider the service that is being provided and what you, as the client needs to have in place to make it an overall success. Of course it’s possible to have Cloud Storage as a Service or Telephony as…

Nov232015 by adminNo Comments

ITIL IT Service Management in 5 Minutes

Home Page, ITIL, Strategy

Organizations all over the world, from NASA to Disney, utilize ITIL to help improve their IT processes. But what is ITIL Service Management? Here’s what you need to know, and how you can use ITIL to benefit your own IT organization. What Does ITIL Stand For? ITIL is an acronym that stands for “IT Infrastructure Library”. It was originally developed in the UK as a series of books. These books explained procedures and best practices for the IT industry to follow. The goal was to standardize the management of IT, so everything wasn’t doing their own thing, but had a common set of IT standards to follow. How Does it Work? ITIL Service Management acts as a guideline for service delivery in the IT world. If you are committed to conducting…

Nov222015 by adminNo Comments

Microsoft Dynamics, the real ERP alternative to SAP

CRM, Home Page, Projects, Strategy

Last Thursday 19th of November, Microsoft gave at last more details about its new Microsoft Dynamics Ax and since them we can start giving more details about this new revolutionary ERP platform. Cloud based (but later alter mid 2016, also On-Premise), modern HTML5 interface based on Office 365 look and feel, Power BI, Real Time Analytics with On Memory Database Technology, Office 365 & CRM Integration, Machine Learning and much more. This new version present a huge leap in technology but maintaining the proven functionality that have helped thousand of companies along the world to optimise their processes and continue operating in a more challenging and more interconnected economic world. The objective of this post is to focus how Microsoft Dynamics compares to SAP. The other big player on the ERP…

Nov122015 by adminNo Comments

Microsoft to open UK datacentre

CRM, Home Page, O365, SharePoint, Strategy

After a year of constant and often surprising announcements from Microsoft, the key news this time is that they are to open a UK data centre next year, hosting Azure and Office 365. The new UK-based datacentre is said to be opening from late 2016, though it sounds like the MoD will begin using it sooner than that. O365 and Azuze UK data centre coming 2016 At his keynote speech at the Future Decoded event in London yesterday, CEO Satya Nadella stated that customers in the UK would at last be able to store data within the country, allaying fears (even I not actual legal impediments) around governance and data protection. In addition to Microsoft Azure and Office 365, the UK datacentre will support Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online sometime afterwards. Microsoft…

Nov62015 by adminNo Comments

Microsoft empowers business transformation

CRM, Home Page, O365, SharePoint, Strategy

ATLANTA — March 16, 2015 — Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced the availability of new products and services designed to enable people and organizations to put data to work, driving better results for business of all sizes. The announcements were made at Convergence 2015, Microsoft’s annual conference for its business customers. “Businesses are hungry to seize new opportunities using technologies like machine learning and predictive analytics,” said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “Only when businesses create a culture that empowers everyone to have access to data and insight that drive action will they be positioned to truly transform.” Nadella demonstrated products and services built by Microsoft to empower industries, organizations and individuals to drive insight and action from their data. “Microsoft Azure IoT services combined with Windows 10…

Oct192015 by adminNo Comments

VMware hails hybrid cloud as answer to enterprise Safe Harbour

Home Page, Strategy

VMware chief claims the roll-out of its hybrid cloud network should help ease enterprise concerns about off-premise data protection VMware claims the outcome of the EU Safe Harbour ruling will cause minimal disruption to its operations and should serve to reinforce its hybrid cloud strategy. The virtualisation giant was among the first to predict that the hybrid cloud model would emerge as the enterprise’s preferred model of consuming IT some years ago, while others backed the public or private cloud. In keeping with this, VMware rolled out its vCloud Air platform in 2013, which is designed to make it easier for users to move workloads between their on-premise and off-premise environments, and the firm has opened numerous datacentres worldwide to support it. Users also have the alternative option to procure…

Oct162015 by adminNo Comments

4 Ways IT Can Drive Innovation

Home Page, Strategy

CIO Priorities In today’s rapidly changing business environment, every industry—healthcare, education, retail, transportation, agriculture, government services, and more—is transforming and experiencing disruption at some, if not all, levels. Now more than ever, business leaders are looking for the tools that will help them navigate these changes to drive innovation and competitive differentiation. And since you and your IT leadership team are closest to the technology, they’re looking to you for answers. Help us, FAST! Business leaders are calling on you and your IT organization to supercharge innovation by giving them IT solutions quickly. They want responsiveness from your organization, as a true partner and team. If you can’t partner with them on a solution, they’ll build it or buy it themselves, using shadow IT. In fact, according to a Harvey…

Oct162015 by adminNo Comments

CEOs want CIOs to stop using jargon and focus on business needs

Home Page, Projects, Strategy

Public sector CIOs shouldn’t underestimate the IT literacy of CEOs and need to focus on collaborative working, the organisation's use of data and solving business issues. At a recent workshop, around 20 local government CEOs called on CIOs to “reshape their teams” to suit the future needs of the organisation, said a report by not-for-profit organisation Eduserv. The report – based on the discussions at the workshop – said CEOs are knowledgeable about IT and how it benefits the organisation – but are frustrated with IT teams' use of jargon and business cases. “Sometimes dealing with IT feels like heavy lifting all the time, trying to get behind and beyond the ‘tech speak’,” the report said, quoting one chief executive officer. “Their frustration is with claims coming from IT – either…

Oct82015 by adminNo Comments

Why it’s time to STOP “Adding Value”

CRM, Projects, Strategy

It’s probably the most commonly proposed response to price pressures and commoditisation: if we’re not prepared to cut our prices, we had better add more value for the customer. It’s a reasonable objective, but the sad truth is that most so-called “value-added” strategies simply add cost and complexity without making the offering any more desirable to the customer. In fact, they often have the opposite effect. (more…)

Oct72015 by adminNo Comments

Safe Harbour invalidated by EU Court of Justice

Home Page, Strategy

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that the Safe Harbour framework is invalid, but what does that mean for business? According to the European Parliament, more than 3,000 companies currently use the framework for the transfer of data, including firms such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft. The Safe Harbour framework, administered by the US Department of Commerce, enabled US companies to self-certify that they have certain standards for the protection of personal data in place. However, the ECJ said the Safe Harbour framework is invalid as a mechanism to legitimise transfers of personal data from the EU to the US because it does not guarantee adequate data protection. Many agree that the ruling has far-reaching implications for all businesses, particularly social media networks and other technology businesses that…

Sep302015 by adminNo Comments

ExpressRoute for Office 365

CRM, Home Page, O365, Projects, Strategy

Announcing general availability of ExpressRoute for Office 365 Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365 enables organizations to establish a private, managed network connection to Office 365 as an alternative to connecting over the Internet. This direct connection offers customers more predictable network performance, an SLA for guaranteed availability and additional data privacy. As more organizations depend on Office 365 for document collaboration and communications, they will come to depend more and more on the network connectivity they have between their users and Office 365. Today we’re pleased to announce that Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365 is now generally available from these network operators: British Telecom Equinix Tata Communications TeleCity Group Verizon You can read about how Microsoft is using ExpressRoute for Office 365 in the Microsoft IT whitepaper, “Optimizing network performance…

Sep282015 by adminNo Comments

How SAML is used for Single Sign-On (SSO)

Home Page, O365, Strategy

Within SAML, there are profiles that define how assertions, protocols and bindings are combined to satisfy a particular use case. Think of a SAML profile as a template, each profile uses different combination of bindings, protocols and assertions. One of the most used SAML profiles is the Web Browser SSO Profile. The SAML Web SSO Profile provides the ability for users to access multiple applications with a single set of credentials entered once. This is the foundation of federation and also of single sign-on (SSO). Using SAML, users can seamlessly access multiple applications, allowing them to conduct business faster and more efficiently. You may not have realized this, but you use SAML SSO every day. Whether it’s logging into your bank online, using a mobile application, or pretty much anywhere…