While rising petrol prices caused by tensions in the Middle East and industrial strife are bad news for businesses in the UK, there are strategies which UK businesses can adopt to make themselves more efficient and actually lower costs in the medium to long-term.

The present astronomically high price of petrol is, in fact, a tax on going to work and a problem which UK businesses; faced with potential tanker-driver strikes and the continued squeeze on household budgets, have to come up with an answer to.

The days when staff have to sit in rows of desks being tightly supervised are over for all enlightened enterprises. Judging staff by the quality and output of their work rather than by the number of hours they are present at a common location ensures that the best can be made of home working.

With the average amount of time spent commuting to working in the UK now the highest in Europe, at 90 minutes for a round trip, if staff can work from home they benefit from saving themselves not only the cost of the journey to and from work but they also stand to free up almost an entire working day a week worth of time! Most staff will only need a laptop and broadband access to enable them to be productive.

Many staff are presently barred from the normal workforce because of problems with mobility or family circumstances restricting the distance they can travel from home and the number of hours per day they can commit. These often very highly skilled and motivated people could become part of a highly productive workforce if they were equipped with the ability to work from home in a structured, productive, accountable and supported way. Not only would this lower staff turnover (itself an enormous drain on HR resources) – it would also equip them with an additional part-time staff element which they do not have at the moment.

There are experienced staff out of the current workforce, such as mothers and fathers with child-care responsibilities, who could be brought back into the workforce. We could give staff a better deal and save them money, with businesses providing practical, financial and time-viable working from home opportunities. This would suit those workers who would otherwise conclude that the time commitment – together with the high cost of travel – rule out even bothering to make an application for a job. Such steps would not only stand to make businesses more efficient but engender greater loyalty within our workforce.

Many of the army of one million workers that occupy seats in our call centres up and down the country could easily take their experience back to their homes, where utilising new technology would give them access to all the necessary resources and support from the office and or other home workers in their team. Technology has now moved forward to such an extent that it is possible to ensure speedy, secure remote access to key business applications remotely, and also monitor productivity and service levels. This has always been a hurdle for businesses attempting to adopt a home working strategy – but not now.

It is fair to say that there is considerable potential for very noticeable inroads to be made towards the government’s targets to achieve not just flexible working conditions, but also to reduce traffic congestion as well as the resulting environmental damage caused by emissions from all the various modes of transport used to travel to an office.

As if this these considerable benefits weren’t enough, the efficiencies that can be gained by organisations in the reduction in office space required and lower costs of employment matched by the substantial work / life balance improvements gained by employees, the mutual benefits are staring all of us in the face. “Dare I say it, could this even be the basis of a contact centre employment model that is capable of financially competing with the off shore contact centres that are responsible for the loss of many hundreds of thousands of jobs from our economy and all the tax revenue that the exchequer is losing as a result? Perhaps it’s time for companies to partner with advanced managed service providers like Twin Systems in the UK to become expert in the deployment of home working technology and share the benefits of this with their clients and employees in an effort to bring jobs home and secure their own futures in the process? It’s an idea whose time has come.

I haven’t been to a wedding yet where the Bridegroom turns to the chauffeur of the Limo and says “ I thought you were supplying the bride!” To further the analogy every industry has a line of business application that you are uniquely placed to decide whether it will deliver real business advantage for you. Of course we can advise on platforms, help you with references and evaluation but the final choice is yours.

Don’t get me wrong. MSPs are great. We help save time and money. But don’t become so dependent on the services of your MSP that you completely lose control of your business. Let’s keep that dialogue going and ensure we all understand who is supplying what, how we can work together – Your bride is your choice not ours we of course can provide a perfect day once you have chosen your application partner.

1. Utilise Social Media

Begin networking first on Linkedin, Facebook, Myspace, or any web 2.0 destination that connects you to people with similar interests. Start building up your contacts/friends list, and build up your relationship with these people. Once you feel comfortable, invite them to join a networking event with you. This may help the lessen any intimidation you may feel of going it alone.

2 Use being shy to your advantage

People absolutely love carrying on about themselves, so provide an ear for them to let loose on, and you’ll make a friend in the process. Don’t be intimidated by louder, extroverted net workers. They need you, and they know it. Just be yourself, be polite, listen, and sacrifice your ears over to the extroverts.

3. Set networking goals

Make it your mission to talk to X amount of people and/or set a goal on how many events you’ll attend each month. If nothing else, just set your mind on having fun and enjoying each event. A positive mind set is critical.

4. Know when to speak up

Lay low until a question surrounding your area of expertise is brought up. Once you feel confident, speak loud and clear. Keep it short and to the point, and you will look like a star.

5.Smile – Simple right?

Not only does the upside down frown bring a look of confidence, but you’ll instantly become easier to approach as well. Heck, smiling may even force/trick you into having a good time. Not smiling can leave a negative impression that you’re intimidated, uncomfortable, uninterested (maybe the worst), tired, or just sociably awkward. I know this is weird, but just in case you honestly don’t know how to smile, click HERE TO LEARN.

• What is it?
• What are the Pitfalls and Benefits?
• Will it be right for you?

Where

154 – F160 Fleet Street, London EC4A 2DQ

When

Thurs 17th May 2012

Time

9.00 am Registration & Breakfast
(continental style)
9.30 – 10.30 am  Cloud Seminar

To Book

Traci Laverack
traci.laverack@twinsystems.com

In the past the CIO was the gatekeeper of all things tech – the master of of the IT universe. Today much has changed: public cloud services such as Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) make it easy for the tech-minded layman to understand the cost of technology. Tap the number of virtual machines you need into AWS’ online calculator and up pops a price – it’s IT made easy.

While this might sound like a positive step, the democratisation of IT, the fact remains that many organisations still lack the information needed to allow managers to judge whether a public cloud service is better than what they’re getting in-house.

A recent survey by analyst house Ovum found that almost half of CIOs questioned said their business had no chargeback policy for monitoring and billing internal departments for the computing resources they use. This lack of granular data on the IT resources consumed by internal departments gives rise to risk: managers who think they can get a better deal from a third party cloud provider than they can in-house may opt to switch to the external supplier. The problem is that, given the limited use of chargeback, the costs these managers are comparing may well be apples and oranges. The amount these departments “pay” for in-house IT is likely to cover all sorts of extras beyond the base storage or server costs – the likes of compliance management and security policies. While, chances are, these tangential but important services may not be included in the public cloud provider’s cost breakdown.

Without good data on in-house IT provision the move to the public cloud becomes tricky. On the flip side, perhaps a particular public cloud service really could be a better deal for an organisation but the ill-defined cost breakdown of in-house provision makes it difficult to tell.

And chargeback isn’t just useful for weighing up public cloud deals, the additional insights into patterns of IT use provided by chargeback will help an organisation building a private cloud infrastructure to create an efficient architecture that can cope with the peaks and troughs in demand. If internal departments are to be able to make informed decisions about where they get their IT from, then CIOs need to understand the true cost of in-house provision.

Of course, tracking IT use is easier said than done. But the additional challenge of monitoring spending shouldn’t be enough to deter implementation of a chargeback model, or at least a showback model – which charts resources consumption without levying charges.

Businesses that fail to measure the true cost of their estate run the risk of making costly mistakes when it comes to deciding on the right mix of public and private cloud.

Two vital areas are often overlooked or seems to be contentious when evaluating the operational/financial and delivery aspects of cloud services.

1. Do you already operate a chargeback or show back system?

The promise of the cloud is that costs are more transparent and more easily applied to individual users/departments/divisions. Call me old fashioned but this has been possible for years since the advent of the good old spreadsheet. The truth is it is a way of thinking and culture more than a technology. If you do not have a culture whereby individual department heads understand the true cost of their services and the impact of hiring decisions then the provision of cloud services which by definition are easy to procure could drastically impact your costs.

2. This isn’t about getting three quotes – This needs planning and consultancy

Current thinking tends to be when looking at the purchasing of managed services, I know what I need and therefore I will select three suppliers to provide some costings and heck why should I pay for consultancy? Personally I have never thought that an effective way to procure services but until now it has worked -sort of. However that’s not going to work going forward. When looking at a cloud solution you are fundamentally changing the style of service provision. This demands a more structured process including a discovery process and consultancy around the actual transition if appropriate.  Professional services business will almost certainly propose these. It is tempting to cut corners but the results can be disastrous resulting in service outages, downtime and a poor user experience.

It’s up to the CIO to make sure that doesn’t happen.

This is the interview.

Cloud computing is often sold as a way for companies to cut their tech bill by only paying for the IT they use.

Veteran IT chief Ian Cohen has other ideas – telling silicon.com that any company looking at moving to cloud computing purely as a way of saving money should “forget it”.

JLT CIO Ian Cohen says any company looking at cloud purely as a way of saving money should “forget it” Cohen is speaking from experience. As group CIO of Jardine Lloyd Thompson (JLT) he is helping the global risk management and insurance broker to make greater use of cloud-based services, such as Salesforce.com’s CRM platform.

When businesses shift to cloud services, the oft-talked-about savings won’t last, Cohen said, as any reduction in cost or overheads is quickly swallowed up by fresh demand for IT services.

“If you go into cloud thinking you will save money, forget it. What invariably happens is that you create more efficiency and headroom. However, demand that previously could not be met can now be enacted and thus your activities simply increase to fill the available resources – be that time, people or infrastructure,” he told silicon.com at Salesforce’s recent Cloudforce conference in London.

“People will be using your systems to do more. That’s the killer sell as to why people should be looking at cloud: the ability to flex your enterprise into a more extensible model at light speed.”

Cohen cautioned that shifting operations to the cloud is not straightforward for any business – there will always be resistance and challenges, particularly for a heavily regulated business such as JLT.

“It’s early days. We are working around some of the issues with some of the naysayers and a lot of it is around security and audit, all the usual cloud stuff,” Cohen said. “A lot of concerns are still around data location, traceability and auditability. It’s still a challenge if an auditor comes in and simply asks, ‘Where is the data? Let me see it’.

“We are a regulated business so we have to be more prudent than some other organisations but that doesn’t mean we can ignore cloud technologies and the opportunities they offer.”

One of JLT’s largest cloud computing projects involves the integration of Salesforce.com’s cloud-based CRM system with a contact centre operation. Contact centre systems will record information on each interaction that JLT has with its clients, irrespective of the channel they use, and this information will help JLT staff to determine what went right and wrong with each interaction.

“By capturing information about each interaction in a consistent fashion, JLT staff can better understand the complete client relationship – even those interactions that did not result in successful new or incremental business – and understand why,” Cohen said.

“In the past you were limited to what was in the broking or finance system – essentially just the closed business – but with Salesforce.com we have the potential to understand the entire lifecycle of all our engagements, and to offer an even better service to our clients as a result.”

For JLT, this granular insight into its dealings with customers will help the insurer to better understand its clients’ businesses and their needs, Cohen said.

“You enrich the relationship [with the client], by understanding what is of real value and delivering on the promise. It’s information that adds the real value to a relationship. An organisation needs to learn to behave like a publisher, assembling timely and client-specific and relevant content, and then delivering this in the form and format that is of most use to the client.”

The cloud is not only helping JLT to understand its clients, it’s also bringing additional clarity and accuracy to its everyday risk management operations. JLT teamed up with Xactium to develop a risk manager application on Salesforce’s Force.com cloud platform that standardises the way risk assessment information is collated across the entire group.

“One of the biggest problems for anyone working in risk assessment is that the type of data you get back is very variable, so creating a framework that was structured and template-driven, while still being flexible and open, was attractive to us,” Cohen said.

The march of the tablets

Like many other businesses, JLT is feeling the effects of the consumerisation of IT – the growing trend of staff using their own PCs and gadgets at work.

Cohen’s attitude is that CIOs who try to stop staff from using their own devices at work are fighting a losing battle, and would be better off investing their time in devising ways that staff can use their own devices safely at work.

“Consumerisation is going to happen, it’s an inevitable tide of change. You can’t be King Canute, you can’t stand there and wish it away,” he said. “I can either say, ‘That’s wrong and you’re in breach of policy’ or I can provide ways to do what’s required in a safe and secure fashion on whatever device is presented.

“You have to create environments where stuff just works, and currently we are adopting a sandbox approach that can apply to any device – iPad, Android, Windows mobile etc.”

JLT’s sandbox approach includes secure personal information management working practices, as well as virtual desktop tools to protect its data from the potential dangers of consumer devices.

In a reflection of how PC sales are being cannibalised by a rise in the popularity of tablets, Cohen said the make-up of computers used by JLT staff is slowly changing. “When I turned up, you had your HP laptop and your BlackBerry. Now everyone on the JLT board has a tablet – which happens to be an iPad,” he said.

JLT itself issues both laptops and iPads to staff, with Cohen estimating that more than one hundred iPads are used within JLT.

Jardine Lloyd Thompson is using Salesforce.com’s business-orientated social network Chatter

JLT’s attitude to social media has changed as of late. Although Twitter and Facebook remain banned within the office – something Cohen would like to change with time – the group has recently started to roll out Chatter, Salesforce.com’s business-focused social software, internally.

Its popularity among JLT staff had not necessarily been a given, particularly as many of its employees are not of the millennial generation that were brought up using social networks.

“The insurance industry has a population of a certain age. To be polite you would probably call them digital immigrants rather than digital natives,” he said.

However, getting staff to use Chatter has been a lot more pain-free than many other systems, according to Cohen, thanks to the fact that most employees have either used Facebook and are comfortable with how to use a social network or have learnt a lot from their kids.

“We didn’t need to educate people on Chatter because almost everybody knows Facebook and they love what Chatter can do,” Cohen said. “We simply turned it on and the collaborative behaviours we were after happened automatically

In recent weeks we have seen serious system failures within the Blackberry network, HSBC cash point failures and today Barclay’s are having problems with their network and leading to this comment.

“Engineers were working at its Gloucester site to repair a “failed disc array” said a bank spokeswoman

Of course there are tens of thousands of networks operating seamlessly including our web services publishing this blog. What the video does demonstrate is that business resillence is much more complex than just backing up your data. You could say the satchet of ketchup was a portable drive! you could…..

Sensible business resillence starts with taking a good look at your network and where the data is stored. For instance are all your mailboxes centralised on your server? or do you have business emails stored locally, does your My Documents address point to a central controlled and managed server? If you are responsible for a larger infrastructure have you met and reviewed with your telecommunications supplier every single point of failure within your network and made the appropriate plans? Spare routers or backup lines.

The backing up of data and business resillence isn’t the most exciting of subjects but it certainly becomes more interesting when it has to be invoked ….perhaps not quite in the way you had planned.

Twin Systems has operated managed service contracts for over 15 years and developed our industry leading Blueprint process which delivers best practice in every area to our clients as soon as we engage with them. We ask the questions and generate a plan that maximises your protection whilst ensuring you have a real world backup and business resillence strategy.

To find out more contact us on 0845 3131483 or help@twinsystems.com

But specifically what happened to the Blackberry network last week? In a nutshell it exposed the differences between the way Blackberry devices handle messaging and their competitors namely Apple or Android devices.

It would be technically impossible for all Android phones or iPhones to experience a global four-day outage like the one BlackBerry saw this week, according to mobile communications experts. Why? The answer is in the technical details of how Research in Motion the company that makes BlackBerry smartphones handles it’s messaging traffic.

The gist of it is RIM acts as a middleman for all e-mail and BlackBerry text messages. It picks up messages from the wireless carrier and passes them on to the recipient. It’s this BlackBerry baton-passing system that went down on Monday last week, killing or slowing e-mail and texting services for millions of people in Europe, North America, South America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The degradation lasted four days.

“It’s because of the way RIM has set up the (network) architecture that is the downfall when it comes to these types of outages,” said Sean Armstrong, who manages wireless communications at a large tech company. “When it’s working fine, it’s a great system. When it’s not working fine, it’s a failure.” On social media sites, some BlackBerry users said they were so upset about the outage — the largest in the company’s history — that they were switching to Apple iOS and Google Android devices. And customer satisfaction with BlackBerry already was low.
This is not to say that Androids and iPhones never experience network outages. But they wouldn’t be global. And they would be the responsibility of a particular wireless carrier Vodaphone, Orange 3 or O2 or a particular messaging system, like Gmail, Hotmail or iMessage, Apple’s new in-house messaging service. Not the maker of the phone.
That makes their problems inherently more localized. “All the stuff goes through them for some form or fashion,” Nan Palmero, a writer for the site BlackBerryCool.com, said of the way BlackBerry handles messages and e-mail. That makes it possible, he said, for the global BlackBerry network to crash, which wouldn’t be the case for iPhones or Androids.
However as with many technology strategy issues it is not clear cut.

RIM, however, takes issue with this analysis. “I would not characterize that as fair,” RIM’s co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said at a Thursday news conference. “We run a global, secure-push environment that provides the kind of instant messaging that’s made BlackBerry so compelling and so valuableRIM filters e-mails and BlackBerry messages through its own server farms (giant warehouses full of computers) for security reasons. The company scrambles messages, making them more difficult to intercept. That’s won BlackBerry big fans in the business world”
He went on to say “The process for checking your e-mail with a BlackBerry is done by the RIM servers so RIM is going to handle all the heavy lifting of going to your inbox and looking for new e-mail, and if it finds new e-mail, it’s going to push it back your devices.”
Taking a step back and looking at the outage and its impact perhaps raises bigger questions the number one of which is the plans millions of users had for minimising the impact that this would have on their ability to work. Certainly in the UK the Television news and Radio phone in’s were full of people saying they would be losing business as a result of the outage.

In reality if your business is that dependent on the receipt of messages 24×7 (I have to say here at Twin we are a little sceptical….) then you have to have a strategy that allows for systems to failover to another service. This could be as simple as ensuring you have a webmail address that your clients can send mail to and you can pick up from any web browser.

On a larger corporate level it would be worth reviewing the Smartphone strategy you deploy and ensure that you have a business resilience plan to take into account this type of outage.

In summary perhaps it’s a wakeup call to all users of technology that in spite of the hype, technology is complex and not a utility like electricity or water. It’s complexity demands respect and a thoughtful approach when considering strategies to ensure your business is competitive in today’s world.

1. Everyone thinks they’re an expert

Consumerisation of technology means most staff think they know what they’re talking about when it comes to IT – leaving the CIO facing greater expectations and potentially greater resistance from end users if they don’t agree with decisions made about IT infrastructure.
“People do understand technology more and they will have opinions, but a good CIO will welcome that and will have forums to allow people to share their thoughts and their perspectives,” said Vicky Maxwell Davies, co-head of the CIO practice and partner at executive headhunters Boyden.
CIOs should avoid pushing out technology without taking end users’ views into consideration – otherwise they risk seeing workers push back.

2. Everyone wants to be like Apple

Thanks to the likes of Apple and Google, technology seems easy. Brinley Platts, chairman of executive coaching organisation CIO Development, told us that because people can download apps direct to their phone in a matter of seconds, they don’t understand why enterprise IT appears so slow.
“They say, ‘I want this quick little fix here. You’re saying no you can’t do that, you have to wait six months, it’s got to have this and that and be a bit more robust but I just want something quickly’, and enterprise IT has traditionally not been able to respond to these types of requests,” he said.
End users have no idea what is required to make the Apple ecosystem work so smoothly, and this leads to unrealistic expectations.
In order to download an app in 59 seconds and pay 59p for it, and have it work straight away every time, an enormous amount of really solid, buttoned-down engineering is supporting that, which is completely invisible to the user and frankly beyond most IT budgets.

IT Executives either need to get better at… …explaining to the end user why enterprise IT cannot perform to the level of consumer IT, or facilitate a policy of bring-your-own IT for workers and support departments buying their own technology.
CIOs who are perceived as running an IT department that does nothing but break the bank will not be popular with the rest of the organisation!

3. IT perceived as a drain on budget

The most common reason given by organisations as to why they sacked their Head of IT is they do not believe the head of IT is adding value to the business, according to Boyden’s Maxwell Davies, who said IT is often considered just another cost.
To combat this, CIOs need to get better at explaining why certain costs are necessary on the one hand, and develop better commercial skills on the other.

4. Delivering IT projects behind schedule

Overrunning IT projects are a sore spot for everyone involved, but unfortunately for the IT Manager, they are likely to be the one bearing the brunt of dissatisfaction. Delayed IT projects could be avoided if IT Directors get better at saying no.
“It’s no good if CIOs listen to the clients and say yes to every single thing they want, and as a result the project is three years over the time they wanted it to be delivered in and way overbudget and overcomplicated because [the CIOs] were just order-takers,” said Maxwell Davies.
CIOs should be clear about what is possible and what can be delivered in the required time frame, and not be afraid to say that some things cannot be done. While the client may be dissatisfied, it’s better to manage expectations from the beginning of a project.

5. The easy scapegoat

While some IT Directors may think they can avoid the office politics by keeping out of business discussions, such a stance can make them an easy target if projects where IT has been involved subsequently run into problems.
It is very easy for the CIO to be scapegoated. If something goes wrong it’s very easy to blame it on one individual and say, It’s because the system is not working’, particularly if the individual has not built strong relationships and has not been politically clever and astute.
To avoid becoming the fall guy, CIOs need to……build strong relationships outside of the IT department. Not only will this give them a better knowledge of the real-world needs of the organisation, it will also equip them with a better understanding of how things might have gone wrong in other parts of the business – and what IT can do to help.

6. Enterprise technology seems slow and ugly

With economic pressures forcing companies to delay their refresh cycles, many staff will be faced with the prospect of using clunky, slow, ugly laptops issued by their organisation.
Of course, let employees bring in their own devices and such a move can lead to a whole host of data security issues and hidden costs. CIOs who do not want to go down that route must work to educate end users as to why it isn’t possible and examine potential compromises – investigating whether a switch to subscription-based software can free up budget for hardware purchases, or whether longstanding contracts can be negotiated down in price, for example.

7. Security measures seem unnecessary and restrictive

The proliferation of mobile working and social media use has brought with it new challenges to privacy and security, opening up new vectors for information to leak outside of an enterprise’s borders. People are breaking the law every day of the week and if it’s just me, nobody knows and nobody cares, but if it is an enterprise the ramifications both legally and fiscally are much greater.
For many organisations, the solution to this risk is to simply shut down such activities – prompting ire from users who rely on them – or to introduce security measures which seem unnecessary and restrictive to the end user. Again, to solve this tension, The Head of IT needs to better explain to end users why organisational security restrictions need to be put in place and work to strike a balance between the users’ needs and those of the enterprise.

8. Overcomplicated technology

End users can get frustrated with the IT department for providing them with technology considered too difficult to use and which complicates, rather than simplifies, working procedures. CIOs should bear in mind that workers who are not technologically minded don’t want the most advanced hardware or software, they want the simplest and most streamlined tech to help them do their job. When buying in new kit, sometimes the most advanced tech isn’t required.
In order for it to work well for them and make their lives easier rather than more complicated it needs to be pretty simple, straightforward and easy to use.