Central Government

Date: Tuesday 17th January 2012Time: 09:00 - 13:30 (GMT)Location: LondonCost: Free of ChargeEnrol: Click hereOverview: Sapphire's Master-class in Selecting Implementing a new Financial Management Solution - specifically for the Not for Profit sector, is aimed at anyone who has at any point considered changing their financial solution but does ... read more..

public sector procurement IT procurement specialist and Probrand MD, Peter Robbins, explores the barriers restraining the public sector from doing more business with SMEs. The current process design and management results in duplicated requests for information, suppliers being engaged for an unnecessarily long time and SMEs being excluded as distinct requirements ... read more..

NCC Media ReleaseFrom the National Computing Centre, Manchester UK. 12th September 2011.A new survey from the National Computing Centre, The Benchmark of IT Spending and Strategy 2011 shows that UK organisational Information Technology (IT) spending remains in decline. A significant divide in IT spending between public and private sectors ... read more..

i2 buy deepens IBM's Big Data war chest IBM's Big Data arsenal got a bit bigger in September 2011 after it acquired Cambridge, UK-based i2 for its analysis and fraud prevention software. i2 brings advanced analytics technology to the table that is consistent with IBM's strategy to strengthen and expand ... read more..

Michael Dean talks to Paul Day, Head of IS and Business Support at British Transport Police about their accreditation to the National Computing Centre Standard for IT Departments For the British Transport Police (BTP) 2012 will be a defining year. Policing the London Olympic and Paralympic Games will be a ... read more..

NCC Members can ask relevant questions to the wider NCC membership, moderated by NCC. We collate the responses, where appropriate anonymise them, then publish the results on the website for the benefit of the wider Membership. Can you help? A public sector organisation is commissioning a project to enable services ... read more..

Amazon Web Service outage: keep it in perspective In April Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an outage that was its longest to date and exposed serious flaws in the design of components of its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering. The I told you so anti-cloud brigade went into a frenzy of smugness. ... read more..

IT Department Accreditation - case study Michael Dean finds out how and why the Department of Justice, Northern Ireland became accredited to the NCC Standard for IT Departments. The criminal justice system in Northern Ireland never sleeps, incidents and crimes can occur at any time of the day and often ... read more..

Is there a market for another enterprise search product? US/German company Q-Sensei is starting to actively promote its enterprise search platform. This product, like many others, is aiming to give organizations a single combined interface for all of their information and social media feeds. However, in Q-Sensei's case, it aims ... read more..

CMS is the hot topic for 2011Ovum participated in Danish-headquartered J Boye's inaugural European CMS Expert Group in London in February 2011. This non-competitive community of practice intends to draw together the lessons and best practices around content management systems (CMSs), particularly their deployment, to enable organizations to get the ... read more..

The UK government has recently made pronouncements on reductions of the civil service, with options extending to a 40% cut. These have resulted in discussion around the potential of change to redundancy terms, and also the restriction of strike action which could hamper government plans. However, we believe that the ... read more..

In this issue: BPM for the Agile organization Moving from recession to recovery with business intelligence Turning data into intelligence in the public sector Glued on security doesnt work Business agility ... read more..

green IT As part of our look at Greener and more sustainable IT Jason Meers takes a look at repurposing IT Save time and money by converting your old PCs and laptops into thin clients. IT seems that every 10 years or so the computer industry re-invents itself and gives us new ... read more..

John Lovelock, Chief Executive of FAST IiS (the Federation Against Software Theft and Investors in Software), discusses possible threats to the digital economy. The digital economy has received much publicity over the last year, and especially the last few weeks. The Governments Digital Britain Report has led to the Digital ... read more..

IT Assist, the ICT shared services provider for the Northern Ireland Civil Service have become the latest organisation to achieve accreditation to the new NCC national standard. Consolidating IT services and reducing costs in the public sector through Shared Services has been a government objective since the Gershon Review ... read more..

With unemployment, hiring freezes and redundancy dominating the headlines, its not surprising that many business professionals will happily say goodbye to a recession-dominated 2009 and look forward to a more positive 2010. The IT sector, like many others, was unable to sidestep the impact of a global recession, experiencing a ... read more..

How do CFOs and FDs gain greater competitive advantage whilst minimising their companys costs? The National Computing Centre and ICAEW brought together senior finance executives and industry experts to debate this key issue. In most organisations the economic decision maker for large-scale IT purchases is the FD, CFO or board ... read more..

As the age of austerity descends upon the UK public sector, attention is turning to shared services as a means of generating efficiency savings. Many organisations in the sector are considering joining forces to deliver services in order to reduce costs and benefit from economies of scale. Major change could ... read more..

Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) to set the standardTop technology leaders have come together to develop a Code of Conduct to help provide understanding and manage users expectations of cloud suppliers.A newly formed self-regulatory body called the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), a sub-group of FAST and Investors in Software (FAST IiS), ... read more..

A decade into a new millennium, much of our IT infrastructure is fit for digital landfill and we are continuing to pour money into it at an alarming rate. The current approach to IT is to custom-build systems and incrementally change them as required. As the degree of change ... read more..

One of the most difficult challenges facing IT directors today is maintaining and upgrading legacy systems. Legacy is becoming a hot topic: research by the Gartner group show that the main concern amongst IT managers in mid-sized IT companies is integration with legacy systems.The Burden of Legacy ... read more..

The problems and issues around requirements capture and management are well documented within the IT industry. It is the defects in the requirements definition process that very often lead to failure in the successful implementation of major IT projects. We would all contend that truly successful development can only take ... read more..

Programmes and projects are significant investments and key mechanisms by which business change is achieved. Yet many otherwise successful organisations fail to reap full value from this investment by not learning the lessons from this experience.Profiting from Experience ... read more..

Information lies at the heart of effective management. Not only are business executives accountable for the information published to the market, but effective strategic and operational decisions rely on intelligence derived from available data. Organisations need to have access to the 'right' data to improve competitiveness, grow market share, meet ... read more..

Given the significant costs and strategic value of IT, measuring its performance is at least as important as measuring the performance of any other key business function. Yet many organisations find IT performance measurement challenging, so they settle for measuring what they can - rather than what they want or ... read more..

Achieving successful alignment of IT with the business starts with reaching an understanding and agreement between business and IT about IT's role and business contribution. This will get senior management in both IT and the business, involved and accountable for IT governance, and support the board in setting direction. True ... read more..

Organisations recognise the need for risk management, and many purport to have it in place. Further investigation often reveals inconsistent and superficial processes for risk identification and management, and even inconsistent approaches to risk categorisation. Management is reassured by the belief that risk management is in place, as evidenced by ... read more..

For some companies, IT budgeting can seem like a mystical art fit only for specialist accountants; for others, it's a money pit that yields few measurable benefits. The complex issues at play include visible and invisible spend, varying views on approaches such as total cost of ownership (TCO), expected lifespan ... read more..

Increasingly, organisations are handing responsibility for significant parts of their business, including IT, to third parties, often offshore. Attracted by the potential for a known cost base and greater efficiencies, working with third party vendors also carries substantial risks. The appetite for outsourcing to third parties has not decreased, despite ... read more..

Standards for many aspects of business - IT included - have been available for many years. Fully embraced by some, ignored by others on the grounds that attaining and maintaining compliance is too onerous, while others choose a middle path of following the principles without certification or independent verification. Standards ... read more..