Industry news

For many organisations, fear of change is the biggest hurdle in moving from their current electronic archiving format to PDF/A. Many believe the transition to PDF/A is difficult to implement and expensive, and that their current systems are “good enough.”

Throughout Europe and Asia, and increasingly at U.S. federal government and state government agencies, the PDF/A standard is being successfully adopted for long-term archival of scanned and electronic documents. The standard meets government requirements and gives organisations the flexibility to manage their own document archives, offering significant cost savings for storage and bandwidth over the long term. Just why, then, are both UK and USA businesses being so slow to adopt the PDF/A ?

Although it’s not law yet, in the UK there are serious fears that a change in policy on digital archiving would present a huge cost for the country’s already stretched business community. The same applies to the USA where proposed new laws for electronic document archival are already creating a furore. If implemented, not only would these laws fundamentally change the ways that government departments and businesses approach scanning and storing documents, but some believe that they will ultimately result in an unfunded mandate that could cost organisations thousands of pounds in order to comply with the law. However, if the right strategy is employed, then the transition to PDF/A needn’t be costly or complicated.

A quick look at the way archiving has developed over the years will reveal why PDF/A has become the standard of choice for archiving in many countries. Every governmental agency around the world has its own specific requirements when it comes to archiving records, some require documents to be retained for 10, 20 or 30 years plus. Most of this archived material was initially kept in hard copy, but the introduction of computer technology has enabled departments to create digital indexes that help users easily find paper documents or media.

Continued improvements in technology have resulted in the use of imaging systems and the evolution of enterprise content management (ECM) systems for managing records and documents. This has enabled these systems to become the index of record and the electronic repository for digital records, which were primarily scanned documents saved in TIFF format. Now, though, Adobe Corporation’s Portable Document Format (PDF) has become the predominant, accepted digital file format. PDF files can be generated either by scanning hard copy documents to create an image-only PDF or through the use of a centralised PDF rendition server for documents that originated in digital format.

However, despite the widespread use of PDF, not all PDFs are created equal. Depending on user-based settings, there is the potential for significant inconsistencies with the way PDF-based records are generated, which ultimately could have an impact on the way records are opened, and importantly, read in the future.

Realising that the use of PDF as a long-term archiving format had the potential to present problems, the International Standards Organization (ISO) approved a new standard - PDF/Archive in 2005. The PDF/A standard was developed with the archival requirements of companies, libraries and government departments in mind. To achieve compliance and meet long-term archiving requirements, PDF/A output had to offer a number of key features; namely to be device independent, self-contained, self-documenting and free of encryption. Importantly, PDF/A must also maintain static visual representation of documents and provide a consistent methodology for managing metadata, as well as be capable of maintaining structure and the semantic meaning of a PDF’s content. By achieving these key features, PDF/A provides the flexibility to serve as a file format of choice for archival documents.

There are many upsides to implementing PDF/A. Current archiving systems that are based on black-and-white TIFF or basic PDF file formats are not necessarily protected from inaccessibility over the long term. In addition, these formats can result in files that are very large, making it incredibly costly to store documents, particularly those that are scanned in full-colour, and increase bandwidth costs for sharing the files. However, with tools to implement PDF/A, organisations will be able to save scanned compressed documents in full colour in files smaller than black-and-white TIFF, resulting in the need for less storage and bandwidth, while preserving the look and feel of the original document.

Governments around the world often rely on ISO standards when defining their technology requirements, and the PDF/A standard is no exception. Founded in September 2006, the PDF/A Competence Centre is an initiative of the Association for Digital Document Standards (ADDS) and its aim is to promote the exchange of information and experience in the area of long-term archiving in accordance with ISO 19005. The association is geared towards developers of PDF solutions, companies that work with PDF/A in the area of DMS/ECM, and users who want to implement PDF/A in their organisations.

Throughout Europe and Asia, PDF/A has been adopted as the standard for long-term government archives. In 2008, the Swiss Federal Council began requiring PDF/A format for all communications between the government and citizens. In Austria, all land register deeds must comply with PDF/A, in order to prove the authenticity of its documents through a qualified digital signature. And in Germany the use of PDF/A has been recommended for e-government applications. The European Commission has also included PDF/A in the recommended data formats for scanned documents and long-term archiving in order to standardise the exchange of documents between the European Commission and the governments of its member states.

Nonetheless, in the UK and USA, adoption of PDF/A has lagged behind. Although, momentum has begun to grow in the US over the last year or so due to federal government agencies and more than a dozen states requiring the use of the PDF/A format or strongly advocating for users to adhere to recommendations from leading organisations such as the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) or AIIM, the enterprise content management association.

Of course, there are always some limitations and the use of PDF/A alone does not guarantee long-term preservation or exact replication of source material. And, the creation of PDF/A does not explicitly mean that PDF is the best choice for archiving documents. However, if archives are using PDF, then PDF/A is the superior choice for ensuring long-term accessibility. The legal requirements to migrate to PDF/A for long-term archiving should not be considered an unfunded mandate. Instead, governments and businesses should feel the fear and do it anyway and see the PDF/A standard as an opportunity to ensure the long-term accessibility of critical documents, with the bonus of being able to reduce costs associated with storage and bandwidth needed to support electronic archives over the long run.

Fujitsu and Oracle Strengthen Decades-Long Relationship

Fujitsu and Oracle today announced that they are strengthening a multi-decade partnership with the extension of their SPARC development relationship, an expansive, new product distribution agreement and a commitment to further joint engineering, marketing and sales promotion efforts.

Fujitsu and Oracle will advance joint engineering efforts, to help ensure Fujitsu and Oracle products are optimised and tested to best run Oracle software in mission critical environments.

The companies previously announced (December 2, 2010), a new unified enclosure design featuring logos of both companies for the Fujitsu and Oracle SPARC Enterprise M-series servers. Fujitsu and Oracle have also made available a roadmap of M-series servers that provides 15 times better performance in the next three years. These new developments will further ensure these milestones are met.

Moving forward, sales teams from both Fujitsu and Oracle are now aligned to jointly sell SPARC Enterprise servers. This will help to ensure ongoing continuity while continuing to improve customer satisfaction.

Additionally Fujitsu signed a new Oracle PartnerNetwork distribution agreement giving Fujitsu the ability to resell and distribute Oracle products across the full Oracle portfolio. This permits Fujitsu to act as a systems integrator and solution provider for the overall Oracle stack.

HH, leading print management and marketing services provider, has secured a €5 million global marketing communications contract with Sara Lee, the global consumer brand manufacturer. Following a three-year period of working as a procurement partner to Sara Lee in three European markets, the new contract with HH has been expanded to nine European countries, including the UK, France, Spain and the Netherlands.

The contract follows an initiative between IBM and Sara Lee which reviews global strategic partnerships for various categories of spend, including printed marketing communications.

The business model provides Sara Lee with a combination of online procurement and asset management systems and dedicated onsite HH support teams for the Sara Lee marketing departments. The HH account team consists of 18 people and will function as a hub between the marketers, creative agencies and the suppliers.

A joint HH / IBM implementation team is managing the phased roll-out to the new countries. The team are assessing the individual spend and workflow profile of each region to ensure savings can be maximised at the earliest opportunity. Sara Lee has an extensive requirement for Point of Sale (POS) printing, one of the key areas of strength in HH’s services portfolio. HH will be working closely with client brand owners to deliver the wide remit of in-store marketing communications required, flyers, brochures, POS, Digital POS and studio services.

"We are delighted to be delivering significant savings and support Sara Lee's marketing teams with our specialist knowledge, as well as working together with IBM as a strategic partner" says Robert MacMillan, CEO, HH Associates.

CA Technologies and Capgemini has announced a partnership to establish a global Energy, Carbon and Sustainability Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) service. The partnership will help customers better manage complex sustainability data collection and increasingly challenging reporting demands, enabling them to focus on sustainability strategy and carbon reduction activities.

“The global alliance between CA Technologies and Capgemini is among the first of its type for energy, carbon and sustainability management services,” said Stuart Neumann, senior manager at Verdantix. “Capgemini’s reputation for business process outsourcing is well-suited to complement CA ecoSoftware, which Verdantix recently identified as a leading solution in the carbon and energy management software market. This alliance between CA Technologies and Capgemini delivers a strong sustainability management capability to the market.”

The managed service will provide customers with ‘actionable insight’ into their level of sustainability, which will help support and accelerate achieving their environmental objectives. Internally, Capgemini UK already is benefitting from this new BPO service to manage its energy and sustainability data. Historically, spreadsheets were used to collect and manage data. But the increasing complexity of data requirements, multiple reporting and the need to provide different levels of user access meant that a new auditable software solution was required. The new managed service – powered by CA ecoSoftware – captures all energy and carbon data and provides web-based reports to the UK Sustainability Board and operational dashboards to the Environmental team. It is estimated that this service will reduce sustainability operating costs by 30 percent while providing improved data quality.

Tony Kelly, New Business Services Director at Capgemini BPO said, “Capgemini has always embraced innovation in its BPO services development and we are finding our clients’ back office needs increasingly include Sustainability Data Management and Reporting. So a new managed service is a logical extension of our strength in Finance and Accounting and Supply Chain Services BPO. Capgemini selected the CA ecoSoftware solution because it can meet the needs and scale of our global enterprise clients.”

CA ecoSoftware works by providing accurate, auditable sustainability data to meet the needs of global client operations. By providing insight into sustainability operations data, organizations are better equipped to comply with regional regulation and to increase operational efficiency. This helps enterprises reduce carbon emissions, manage natural resource consumption, cut energy costs and deliver on environmental goals. Through bundling the CA ecoSoftware solution with Capgemini’s managed BPO service, customers gain an informed position on their sustainability via a cost effective managed business process delivery model.

BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Green IT Promotion Council, GIPC, to promote the adoption of green IT.

The agreement will see the pair working more closely together to share information, systems and work on the promotion of energy efficiency and green technology. Both believe the partnership is "an element of their activities to address the issue of global warming", they said.

David Clarke, chief executive of the BCS, said: "I’m delighted that we are going to be working more closely with GIPC to help the IT industry understand the issue and improve its green credentials.”

Hiroshi Suzuki, director of GIPC, said: “It is becoming increasingly important to achieve more energy efficient products as well as energy efficient leading edge data centres. We are pleased that we will be able to discuss it internationally with BCS, share best practice and encourage more organisations to consider energy efficiency.”

The Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE) has allocated £12.5 million to a new cloud computing shared services initiative for universities and colleges.

The shared cloud services initiative will put £10 million towards building and supporting shared storage and data management services. This amount will be split between building the cloud infrastructure itself, developing a sustainable funding model for the future and building specific data management applications for HE providers.

A further £2.5 million will be spent on developing cloud-based services to support university administration.

JANET (UK), the organisation that runs the higher education sector shared network, will appoint a broker to manage the allocation of cloud services and the relationship with suppliers.

Peter Tinson, executive secretary of the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA), said that there is a degree of cultural resistance towards shared services among universities. “I think there’s a fear of loss of control,” he said.

The overall cloud services project will be operated by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).

Internet access in Egypt has returned after the shamed President and government cut all services affecting twitter and facebook.

Firms measuring the traffic have now said the four major internet service providers are back to business as usual.

While the services were disrupted, many Egyptians quickly found ways around the blocks. On 1 February Google introduced a "speak-to-tweet" service which allowed people to connect to Twitter via the telephone.

US President Barack Obama has said he believes that Egypt cannot go back to how it was before the uprising against President Hosni Mubarak , and that the time for change is now.

Nine in ten looking to share more front line services in the next two years

Nine out of ten local authorities in England are looking to share front line and back office functions within the next two years following the government’s decision to reduce local government spend, according to a survey of senior local authority managers by Browne Jacobson published today.

Almost two-thirds (65%) will target back office functions and 68% front line services in the next year.

Some 85% of local authorities might also consider outsourcing on a service by service basis whilst 78% would also consider setting up a joint venture with the private sector.

Environmental and social care services are the two most popular areas where senior managers would consider sharing.

Not surprisingly costs savings appear to be the key driver for those considering a move to more shared services, with 63% expecting to save up to 10% of their total budget savings by sharing services in the financial year ending April 2012.

But political and public opposition is seen by 28% of senior managers interviewed as the biggest barrier to delivering shared services in the local government sector. That said 84% of local authorities agreed that the long term rewards of shared services justified the short term pain.

The Ipsos MORI survey for Browne Jacobson interviewed 150 senior local authority managers in England including chief executives, deputy chief executives, chief finance officers and service heads.

It’s a far cry from nearly three years ago when a Browne Jacobson commissioned survey of 178 public sector managers revealed that less than half saw the potential to merge front line services and only 5% saw opportunities of working with the private sector.

Commenting on the results Browne Jacobson’s head of shared services, Dominic Swift, said: “The government’s austerity bombshell is clearly forcing authorities to look at innovative and radical ways in which to deliver their services.

“We can also see a noticeable sea change in attitudes towards merging front line services.

“Councils are starting to think outside the box and previous no-go areas such as the private sector and large scale outsourcing are also back on the agenda.

“With local authorities up and down the country already feeling the financial pinch the next step is to turn the shared services rhetoric into action.”

The best way to increase the number of IT entry-level jobs in the UK is to encourage highly skilled people from abroad to settle here, according to Mike Lynch, CEO and founder of Autonomy.

Attending an Intellect conference in London yesterday, Lynch was asked whether the best way to boost the IT jobs market was to have more IT companies headquartered in the UK.

ynch, whose company is based in Cambridge, agreed, but added that the best way to do this would be to encourage highly skilled people from overseas to work here.

"A large number of the entrepreneurs that start businesses in Silicon Valley are from other countries," he said. "We need to be looking to encourage very highly skilled people to come over here in the same way that they might go over to the US; we need to let them know that this is a good place to live. This would generate lots of entry-level jobs."

Lynch said the government's immigration cap is dissuading entrepreneurs from coming to this country and is therefore hindering job creation.

http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2024348/bigger-influx-gifted-techies-overseas-jobs-market-autonomy-ceo#ixzz1DGZot7pe

As the crisis in Egypt continues, Ovum lead analyst Peter Ryan asks what the effect on the country’s outsourcing market will be:

As the global community watches in horror at the scenes unfolding in Cairo, many in the outsourcing community are pondering the demise of what appeared to be the next big thing, in terms of location, in offshore services delivery. The virtual state of martial law imposed by the Mubarak government not only impacts the ability of outsourcers to service their clients, but also counters the pro-business message of openness that has been the watchword for foreign investment for the past several years. The largest question remains whether this once-waking outsourcing giant can recover regardless of a change in government, and what the broader implications are for offshoring.

Curfews, restricted movement, and no Internet impact service delivery

It is clear that the expression "business as usual" has no practical application for outsourcing work currently slated for Egypt. Communications within, to, and from the country have been minimal, and staff are under government curfews restricting movements to and from work. These constraints are giving outsourcers on the ground a significant amount of pain from the strain of fulfilling tactical processes and ensuring that adequate labor and technology backups are in place.

Many service providers, as well as their clients, are re-evaluating whether Egypt is still the right location for outsourcing deployments.

This is especially disturbing considering the large number of global players that have set up in Egypt in the past several years – among them most recently, Sutherland Global Services in Alexandria. Other IT vendors that have been investing in Egypt for longer periods, just as large, home-grown providers (including Xceed and Raya), could be impacted severely in the coming months as clients are anxious to minimize offshore risk. Microsoft has already begun to move some of its work out of Egypt.

Can Egypt's outsourcing sector recover?

Over the longer term, it will be crucial to see how Egypt's global reputation as a leading destination for outsourcing services can recover from this wave of violence and civil and political unrest. Effective damage control among prospective and existing investors will be difficult for any future administration, and convincing many outside investors of ongoing Egyptian stability will be a tough task to say the least. For nearly ten years, executives, consultants, and site selection specialists have been fed a steady diet of positive rhetoric from Egypt's government, quasi-government affiliates, and the Egyptian private sector touting the country's political and economic stability in order to secure BPO and IT service investment. It is unlikely that these same investors will be quick to take such declarations at face value in the future.

However, Ovum believes that Egypt's outsourcing space retains value in the form of a sizable talent pool with significant education and language skills. This, along with generous financial incentives, has been the backbone of the country's growth in services. That said, after recent events the extent to which educated, multilingual Egyptians will choose to emigrate to more stable shores (at least in the short term) is questionable. This could erode the country's competitiveness further.

What are the Egyptian crisis's broader implications for offshoring?

What has recently occurred in Egypt is certain to have ramifications for offshore outsourcing destinations the world over.

“Following recent border violence in Mexico and the 2009 terror attacks in Mumbai, the events in Egypt are certain to make outsourcers and their clients much more risk averse than any time in recent memory, and are likely to push many companies to choose the more secure , albeit costlier, option of keeping third-party work onshore,” added Ryan.

According to respondents to Ovum's 2010 CRM outsourcing Business Trends survey, this sentiment is already present among Western enterprises. Approximately two-thirds indicated no offshoring plans, and regardless of location, the Egyptian unrest will reduce the bar for enterprise risk tolerance for offshore delivery.