Central Government

From Computerworld UK George Osborne's 2013 Budget has left the technology industry disappointed after the Chancellor failed to make any substantial sector specific announcements, but rather focused his efforts on unveiling a raft of investments to support the growth of SMEs. His plans include cutting companies' National Insurance bill by 2,000, increased ... read more..

From CIO The Government Digital Service (GDS) is embarking on a recruitment drive to hire 14 technical advisers, which it hopes will address a skills gap identified by the National Audit Office (NAO) and support the department's drive for IT reform in the public sector. Although the roles aren't new positions ... read more..

From UKAuthority.com The 26th edition of IT Trends, published by Socitm Insight, says that familiarity with easy-to-use home ICTs and smartphones 'is developing a much greater understanding of the potential of information and technology among ICT service users'. Chris Head, the report's author, said that the overall 'consumerisation' of IT would be ... read more..

Smart City Market Movers Stimulate ProgressSmartness is coming soon to a city near you. Truly, it is: the smart city chimera seems to have been with us forever, but there is something happening in the UK that is finally moving the market from the envisioning stage to the deployment stage ... read more..

Splunk Aims to Climb the Value ChainSplunk, which specialises in delivering a data platform for machine data, is approaching a turning point. The explosion of sensory data part of the big data phenomenon is pulling the company in different directions. With a base as the data platform for ... read more..

Meeting Business Objectives with an Enterprise-Wide Application Integration StrategyApplication integration is an enabler of many strategic initiatives and business-critical functionality, including application modernisation, B2B e-commerce, data synchronisation and reduction in the cost of IT. Given the strategic role that integration plays in the realisation of desired business results, it is ... read more..

The Landscape Around Open Data and Gov 2.0 Starts to Take Shapeidea of Gov 2.0 re-envisioning whats possible in government/citizen interaction and problem solving through the application of collaboration technologies has been around since 2004. Only very recently, however, has it reached the common lexicon, with local, state ... read more..

InfoSec Needs Greater Business RelevanceInfoSec must change. Vendors currently spend three days selling themselves at the show, but the needs of business organisations and their users must become the top priority. Rather than delivering a sprawl of disconnected technologies, the show needs to have more of a business and industry ... read more..

Big Data Creates Demand for Analytics SkillsThe emergence of big data promises to create IT jobs, with business intelligence (BI) and analytics expertise the key drivers. As big data increasingly becomes part of corporate IT strategies and infrastructure, organisations will be on the lookout for specialist analytics skills to unlock ... read more..

The Increasing Complexity of Application Integration Calls for New ApproachesOrgansations are deploying a wider range of applications in different deployment models, and often finding that seamless integration is the key for realisation of the true business value of these investments. The traditional approaches to application integration have failed to deliver ... read more..

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..