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CCH Sword is a risk management solution that records risks, controls, and responsibilities throughout an organisation. It provides users with repositories of information about activities and processes within the organisation, the risks associated with them, and the steps that can be taken to mitigate these risks. Many risks are associated with compliance, and organisations often do not understand which regulations they need to comply with or what their duties are in order to comply. Organisations often u…
Technology Audits - published 28/01/2010 - Sue Clarke
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Enterprise IT Management (EITM) is a Web-based Programme Management solution from Sterling Key for the management of IT activities and resources where project-based management is needed for increased visibility and control. This fills the gap that exists between day-to-day IT operations activities and enterprise-level projects, which are often handled by corporate portfolio management tools. EITM integrates with an organisation’s Service or Help Desk tool to provide a joined-up approach to managing IT pr…
Technology Audits - published 27/01/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Stephen Mann
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In November, seven members of Hewlett-Packard’s call centre in Liverpool jointly won the jackpot of over UK£45 million in the EuroMillions lottery draw, and have each decided that their future plans no longer include working at the call centre. A jackpot win is unlikely, but it might be appropriate to consider a similar exodus of staff and its impact on business continuity, and on IT planning in particular.
OpinionWire Articles - published 08/12/2009 - Rob Hailstone
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Operational risk has been defined as the risk of loss resulting from inadequate or failed internal processes, people, and systems, or from external events. The entire range of processes and activities of an enterprise and its IT organisation, from strategic to operational management, face risks. While it is impractical to think of completely eliminating risks faced by the organisation, however carefully planned or managed, it is certainly possible to reduce risk to a level that can be borne by the organi
OpinionWire Articles - published 16/11/2009 - Sue Clarke
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Open Source Software (OSS) for data integration has been slow to get established but a rise in the number of vendors and increasing venture capital investment in the sector shows that OSS data integration is becoming a serious alternative to commercial software.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 30/10/2009 - Sarah Burnett
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Online commerce presents both the supplier and the consumer with many time, cost, and efficiency advantages, but when times are tough the Web is an easy target for fraud. One of the immediate problems that we all face when transacting business online is that of trust. Is the offer that we are responding to genuine, can we trust the Website concerned, are we prepared to pass on personal, business, or financial details? After all, anyone can copy a logo and put it on a Web page; abuse of Web sites is known…
OpinionWire Articles - published 12/10/2009 - Andy Kellett
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Energy efficiency and the need for effective carbon accounting have become, or are becoming, significant issues for most enterprises, with the challenges in meeting Corporate, Social, and Environmental Responsibility (CSER) requirements pushing the need for a more proactive IT response centre stage in the support of organisation-wide activity. Senior business managers are realising that there is a significant gap between corporate Green (or sustainability) goals and the organisation’s ability to attain t…
Technology Audits - published 22/09/2009 - Stephen Mann
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Deploying measurement capability within the organisation enables the IT manager to gain a better understanding of relevant sustainability issues. There are many practical actions that organisations can take to reduce waste and promote environmentally-friendly computer usage, but the first thing an IT organisation should do is benchmark resource usage. From then on, management can make a point of monitoring ongoing consumption levels once initiatives have been instigated.
OpinionWire Articles - published 18/09/2009 - Mark Blowers
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It is a fact of life that whenever there is a major shift in the way that we use IT, the way that we buy IT capabilities also needs to change. We have gone through this process several times as the mainstream market has shifted from batch processing to Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), then on to Client/Server, and again to Web-based applications. Corresponding to these patterns of use, software licensing schemes have progressed from bundled to licensed for a specific machine, changed again to licens…
OpinionWire Articles - published 18/09/2009 - Rob Hailstone
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Unlicensed software continues to be a significant problem across the globe, amply demonstrated by the recent news of four UK-based companies paying out an overall settlement exceeding UK£50,000 to “reflect unlicensed use” of various software products and to purchase appropriate licences for use going forwards. The Business Software Alliance (BSA) took action against these four manufacturing companies where it was found that there was a shortfall between the software on the company’s computers and the lic…
OpinionWire Articles - published 27/08/2009 - Maxine Holt
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The first pandemic of the Information Age is upon us – swine flu is spreading rapidly and Government organizations are at the forefront of dealing with this disruptive and potentially deadly disease.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 24/08/2009 - Sarah Burnett
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IT Business Continuity Planning (BCP) remains a difficulty for many organisations, despite awareness of the issue and the fact that it is high on the list of concerns of many an IT manager.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 24/08/2009 - Maxine Holt
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The Archer SmartSuite Framework is an Enterprise Governance, Risk, and Compliance (E-GRC) solution that can help an organisation to reduce enterprise risks, manage and demonstrate compliance, automate business processes, and gain visibility into corporate risk and security controls. E-GRC solutions are required by organisations needing to manage their corporate risk profile in rapidly changing and increasingly complex business and regulatory environments, where the cost of non-compliance can be considera…
Technology Audits - published 12/08/2009 - Stephen Mann
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According to WMUR.com, the US news and TV site, last week a US man’s debit card was charged US$23 quadrillion. His bank statement suggested that he had recently spent US$23,148,855,308,184,500 at a petrol station. The man had been left wondering if he had inadvertently bought the whole of Europe at the same time as filling his tank! Although this utterly ridiculous mistake was swiftly cleared by the bank and the card company, a string of other data management issues have left prominent organisations with…
OpinionWire Articles - published 24/07/2009 - Sarah Burnett
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System Architect is an Enterprise Architecture, Business Process Analysis, and system modelling tool that helps organisations to define and maintain Enterprise Architecture models, governance, and transition initiatives to plan and manage business change and transformation. The foundation of the product is a multi-user, common repository that enables the maintenance of a single knowledgebase of operations and users to visualise the relationships between various business and technology objects from many d…
Technology Audits - published 21/07/2009 - Mark Blowers
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The UK Government has created the Greening Government ICT Strategy, developed by the UK Government Green ICT Delivery Unit of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) Council. In a report produced by Global Action Plan and commissioned by Cisco, the research identified that 60% of public sector IT managers were unaware of the Government’s greening ICT strategy, with 41% of national government respondents ignorant of the strategy even though it encompasses their area of responsibility.
OpinionWire Articles - published 16/07/2009 - Mark Blowers
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Open Source Software (OSS) is see by Butler Group as one of a number of viable software business and licensing models. As such, we cover OSS in most of our research streams, rather than researching it as a standalone topic.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 24/06/2009 - Maxine Holt
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Enterprise Service Management (ESM) has been used in a very targeted and focused manner by those organisations that have implemented it. ESM lacks the hype that other technologies have achieved over recent years, but Butler Group believes that ESM provides a potential paradigm shift for organisations; especially if it is used to deliver maximum organisational value, and as such could create significant changes in how IT is used and perceived in the organisation.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 24/06/2009 - Roy Illsley
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Under the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3 Best Practice Framework, the service desk function and incident management process are closely intertwined within the service operations environment, with the efficient and effective operation of both the function and the process vital to the delivery of highly-available IT services.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 24/06/2009 - Stephen Mann
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In April 2009, UK government legislation was introduced allowing an extra 4.5 million employees the right to request flexible working if they have children under 16 (legislation previously only covered parents with children under the age of six).
Butler Group Review Articles - published 24/06/2009 - Maxine Holt
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Corporate, Social, and Environmental Responsibility (CSER) has become, or is becoming, a significant issue for most medium- to large-sized organisations. The business drivers for ‘acting more responsibly’ are increasing every day – energy prices are rising, regulatory pressures are multiplying, stakeholders are demanding that enterprises are more socially aware, and the popularity of ethical brands is growing.
OpinionWire Articles - published 18/06/2009 - Stephen Mann
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With reduced IT budgets being a common challenge this year, and perhaps for several to come, there are unwelcome pressures to make cutbacks in areas where good progress has been made in the past. After decades of largely uninterrupted growth and sustained investment in IT, managing this conflict will be a key challenge, affecting fundamentally which organisations come out of the current downturn strongly, and which look back on a period of decline and setback. One such area of capability is the perceived…
OpinionWire Articles - published 11/06/2009 - Alan Rodger
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The acquisition of Sun Microsystems (subject to regulatory approval) could cause some concerns in the Open Source (OS) database market due to part of that acquisition being MySQL (the apparent ‘darling’ of the OS database world). Although MySQL was acquired by Sun Microsystems some time ago, this in itself did not raise too many concerns as Sun was seen as a strong supporter of OS and it didn’t have a collection of databases. Oracle, on the other hand, has yet to determine (or at least communicate) which…
OpinionWire Articles - published 28/05/2009 - Mike Thompson
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When the basic concepts behind SOA were first put forward there was an unrealistic emphasis on simplicity. All that was required, so the story went, was to service-enable the applications that were already being used, and then re-combine the services into new and interesting sequences that would deliver untold flexibility and business value.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 27/05/2009 - Rob Hailstone
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The IT Governance Institute (ITGI) and ISACA, formally known as the Information Systems Audit and Control Association, recently delivered a new publication – ‘COBIT User Guide for Service Managers’.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 27/05/2009 - Stephen Mann
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