Industry news

Standard Life is set to acquire IT supplier Focus Solutions Group for approximately £42 million.

The savings and investment firm said the transaction will help to improve its systems and capitalise on opportunities arising within its key corporate and retail markets.

Standard Life will combine Focus Solutions' technology with its own Wrap platform and the Focus Solutions brand will be retained.

David Nish, chief executive at the company, said: "Standard Life continues to focus on the delivery of solutions and services for intermediaries and other distribution channels. Consistent with our previous acquisitions of [benefits technology firm] Vebnet and [independent financial adviser services firm] threesixty, the acquisition of Focus provides further capability in providing support, technology and innovation to our core markets and customers."

Cloud computing could give the top five EU economies a 763bn-euro (£645bn; $1tn) boost over five years, a report has said.

The report, by the Centre for Economics and Business Research has said that the widespread adoption of cloud computing could also create 2.4m jobs.

The CEBR report, commissioned by EMC - a data storage and IT storage firm, suggests that the rapid uptake of cloud computing service offerings will make them progressively cheaper as economies of scale take hold and service offerings increasingly mature.

The company is just one of many pushing into the sector, all saying that 2011 will be the year of the cloud, when the technology will find mainstream adoption.

The authors of the CEBR study acknowledge that their findings are based on assumptions and as of now no-one really knows the full impact that cloud will have on businesses.

With local authorities set to be handed reduced budgets, now could be the time for them to share back-office functions.

Nottinghamshire County Council's recent deal with Logica, to create internal shared services, is an example of the benefits to be gained from shared services as well as the challenges getting there.

Nottinghamshire County Council is spending £7.4m over five years on an internal shared service to cut costs by £47m in ten years. The authority's different departments will be able to share HR, payroll, finance and procurement using services from Logica. SAP ERP software underpins the service.

The project has been in the council's thinking for years but only now, when costs have to be cut savagely, has the will to implement it been strong enough.

Tim Gregory, corporate director at Nottingham County Council, said the local authority tried to implement an internal shared service in 2001, 2004 and 2007, but the need for the level of change was not so great.

"Now the appetite for change is much bigger," he said. The council has to find £170m in cost savings over the next four years, 30% of its running costs budgets.

Mike Harounoff, business development manager local government at Logica, said despite the clear benefits, shared services have not been taken up widely in local government.

"Over the last few years we have had local authorities that want to offer shared services but local authorities not wanting to buy from each other."

But following the comprehensive spending review and with the details of local government budget cuts expected soon, this could change.

Internal shared services are a good first step to sharing services with external organisations, adds Harounoff. "What we are finding in a lot of local authorities is they need to get their own house in order before they go for external shared services." Logica has created internal shared services for 15 local authorities.

He says local authorities have a large number of departments which have their own back-office systems. A shared service within local government will not only cut costs dramatically, but it will also set the authority up for sharing services externally.

This could even include sharing services across the public sector, with for example, local authorities sharing with police forces.

Head of IT at the London Boroughs of Newham and Havering, Geoff Connell, has first hand experience of shared services in local government.

A project known as East London Solutions has seen East London Borough share services. "The provision of shared services has been hyped and talked about for a long time but now we are making real savings," Connell told a Socitm conference recently. He said the council had cut 20% to 30% of expenditure using shared services.

He says now is the time for local government to take shared services on. "Clearly with the current financial climate we have to do things differently. Incremental changes to efficiency can't carry on being the way we operate and we have to go for more radical solutions."

Local government offers huge potential to spread the use of shared services in the public sector because of it is broken up into regional operations which basically carry out the same services.

Ruth Ormsby, who was head of the NHS Shared Business Service (SBS), before recently joining Capgemini, describes this type of public sector organisation as being families.

She believes that, although there is a shared service opportunity across government, it is these families that are likely to see the most momentum.

The NHS SBS is a joint venture between the Department for Health and supplier Steria. Ormsby believes public and private sector partnerships will help take away the capital costs for public bodies. "There are huge opportunities to make savings from business process outsourcing, particularly where there are large numbers of similar organisations each with their own back office, carrying out the same tasks. In the current economic climate, local authorities [could turn] to the private sector to work with them to bring back office processes together and transform the way that services are provided."

The government is keen to introduce competition between IT suppliers to the public sector. Shared services are attractive to suppliers if there is an opportunity for them to grow their business.

With the likes of Capgemini, Steria, Logica in the running for public sector shared services contracts competition is guaranteed. Indian IT supplier Mahindra Satyam has also stated that it sees a big opportunity in local government for shared services.

Vikram Nair, head of Europe at Mahindra Satyam, says, "local government stares you in the face when it comes to shared services."

"The local authorities are all almost the same across the company. But almost everyone has its own IT departments and systems."

Nair says that if Mahindra Satyam was to enter local government shared services it would initially have to acquire assets from one authority. "We would take over a councils staff and platform and rationalise IT and make it state of the art." He said it will then offer the services to other councils.

Local government could be the place where shared services really take-off. Barriers to take-up of the past could soon pale into insignificance as reduced budgets land on the desks of CFOs over the next few weeks.

Source: http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2010/12/07/244375/Shared-services-throw-lifeline-to-budget-stripped-councils.htm

Operating Model Strategy Webinar Series.

We held our second interactive webinar in November and the insights gained were fascinating. Although the webinar targeted the asset management sector, the issues raised were sector agnostic.

Outsourced service provision is central to the operation of almost all asset management firms. The basic rationale for outsourcing across all industries is that the benefits of scale outweigh the additional management costs of acquiring services from suppliers. Firms outsource all manner of services that would previously have been undertaken in-house from facilities services like office cleaning, through logistics, to call centres.

The task of managing outsource service providers is made easier through automated process management information and remote access to tracking systems. This makes the monitoring tasks far simpler, lessening the need for frequent site visits. At the same time, the ubiquitous use of email and mobile technology has further streamlined the process.

Thus, the outsourcer gains access to economies of scale. Significant sums can be invested in automation, with the cost recovered across an enlarged business. Global convergence of operating practices allows this scale to be leveraged even further. The enlarged global teams can then be rationalised to global centres of excellence, located in low cost areas delivering a 24 hour follow-the-sun capability.

The asset management industry is one of an increasing number of industries where the number of product providers continues to remain high. Distribution is increasingly concentrated through a small number of platforms. Operations are delivered by a small number of suppliers with global scale and reach. Consequently the industry’s structure makes it impossible to compete by building your own operations infrastructure. Outsourcing all major operations is therefore essential.

For example, most asset managers grudgingly admit that they get a good basic service from their suppliers. Nevertheless they feel there is an inability to implement change, and that the needs of the customer and business are disconnected from the operations. This causes a problem for firms. There are compelling reasons for using outsource providers, but in practice, firms are experiencing real problems accessing those benefits.

Hence, it is important to identify the reasons behind this and find a proven approach to ensure operations deliver brand and business objectives.

Firstly, it is important to clarify what we mean by Managing Outsource Operations. In this context, managing refers to establishing a control system. At the heart of this control system is a set of objectives, a sensing system to monitor if these objectives are being achieved, and a mechanism for taking action when objectives are not being achieved. Overlaid on this should be a mechanism for sensing changes in the environment which require the objectives to be recalibrated.

Managing operations is defined as "ensuring that operations are delivering to their stated objectives, and that these objectives are relevant to the brand and business strategy." This can be difficult because because of their complexity and multiple potential points of failure. Without active management each area will operate to its own priorities and the overall objectives will not be met. This can occurs on multiple dimensions, personal agendas may undermine firm objectives and long term strategic objectives may be ignored in the face of short-term pressures.

If an outsource provider has conflicting objects to the asset management firm, this can pose specific challenges to managing outsource operations. An example of this is when the outsourcer wants a predictable and stable operation whilst the product provider wants complete flexibility to react to market requirements. The product provider requires the ability to easily change supplier, whilst the supplier wants to lock in the product provider. The product provider wishes to pay less and the outsource provider wishes to charge more.

A structured approach is required for significant conflicts to be managed appropriately and all aspects of this problem to be addressed. This approach involves specific key management processes and characteristics that will ensure that they deliver as expected.

The management process can be broken into four process areas:

• service specification

• service monitoring

• issue management and resolution

• change control.

The capability maturity model will guarantee processes deliver as expected by defining a series of generic practices that must be considered; establish policy, produce a plan, provide resources, assign responsibility, train people, manage documents, identify and involve stakeholders, monitor and control the process, objectively evaluate adherence, and review status with higher management. These generic practices are often overlooked in the four process areas mentioned above.

Most contracts contain some kind of Service Level Agreement (SLE), but very few organisations articulate a policy to justify one. A key objective of the Service Specification is to maintain a current understanding of the services being delivered. This is essential to ensure the service delivery is in line with evolving market requirements, to understand the impact of change, and to enable migration to an alternative supplier. If this objective is not even explicitly stated, it is not unsurprising that resources are not committed to ensuring it is achieved. As a direct result, change becomes hard to effect, and a gulf of understanding opens up between the business and the operations.

When considering the steps in the change control process these are usually well defined and understood. However, there is rarely an explicit statement of the objectives of the change control process or a clearly defined responsibility for ensuring these objectives are met. Consequently adherence to these objectives is not monitored. Frequently, when the product provider is unhappy with the performance of this process, they find they have no adequate means of rectifying the situation. By contrast, if an objective is clearly stated (e.g. the launch of a new product within 30 days) then controls can be built into the contract to ensure conformity.

Finally, issue management and resolution is often a poorly documented process, and is only as good as the manager operating it. There is rarely an explicit plan, and documents are not filed centrally. As a result the operation can be compromised in the event of staff changes.

This clearly shows how this simple framework is very powerful. Benchmarking your processes against the model can help in easily identify and address areas of weakness.

The CMMI for services framework provides for a staged approach. The steps described thus far can secure processes to perform as expected for an organisation operating at maturity level 2. Once at this level, firms can opt to further leverage their processes, by moving to level 3, 4 or 5.

Key to this is a structured implementation. For a defined process scope, we can make an initial assessment against the level 2 requirements of the CMMI for services model. This will highlight weaknesses in the important processes. These weaknesses can be assessed for importance against your business goals, and improvement plans agreed. Following implementation of these improvement plans, the operation can be certified at level 2. The process can then be repeated for level 3 of the model. An alternative approach is to identify those process areas that are of concern. Targeted assessments can be made, and improvements made to these areas.

In practice, these two approaches are not contradictory. It is reasonable to pilot this approach to address key areas of concern to demonstrate the benefits. This can then extended to make sure the process area is operating at maturity level 2.This can then be extended out to cover the whole of the selected business scope, in this case the oversight processes. Below are a couple of examples of how this approach deployed in practice.

FusionExperience recently helped a leading asset manager to consolidate its back office operations to a single supplier. As part of this process we benchmarked their oversight processes against the CMMI framework. We ensured that CMMI compliant processes were enshrined in the contract, verifying the appropriate monitoring and controls were available. The transparent oversight processes have built scalability into their processes; this will enable the client to grow further. A much improved change control process will deliver this client the agility it needs to compete in the market.

FusionExperience also helped an outsource provider with a problem of reliably delivering change. This was a key issue that was beginning to threaten an important relationship. We pinpointed the key process weaknesses by undertaking a very brief and focussed review. An improvement plan was agreed that delivered a predictable change process that was responsive to the client. This achieved the desired aim of improving customer satisfaction. A helpful side-effect was that it reduced costs by reducing project overruns. Importantly, the experience provided a baseline for further improvements.

To sum up, Operations are important because it is through them that one delivers a business strategy today and in the future.

There are compelling reasons for product providers to outsource many of their function, but many firms have difficulty fully realising the promised benefits. Furthermore, mature oversight processes are required to access these benefits, and a structured approach is needed to ensure these are in place. This approach can yield significant benefits if adopted by an asset management firm in its oversight processes, or by an outsource service provider in its delivery processes. However, the greatest benefit of this approach is achieved when both product provider and outsource supplier work together.

The results of the discussion in this webinar were fascinating. And we hope you can join us for the next one: ‘Managing operations’ on Tuesday 14th of December.

In a series of two articles, Simon Tennant, finance transformation specialist at PA Consulting Group, discusses how, while sourcing strategies are typically seen as ways of reducing costs over the long term, substantial short term cost savings can be realised through small amendments to the current arrangements.

It is widely recognised that sourcing services can provide ways of fine-tuning the running of an organisation. However, developing and implementing a full strategic sourcing plan will not secure significant cost benefits rapidly, these savings are typically only realised in the medium term.

Even though it may be counter-intuitive, for organisations looking to deliver short-term cost savings, the most effective course of action is simply to make the best of the sourcing structure already in place. However, this should go far beyond squeezing the best value out of the various suppliers, and instead focus on reviewing what is included in the existing sourcing structure and how to deliver the best out of existing relationships.

Through this kind of good housekeeping, organisations can identify areas where they can reduce the costs of sourcing arrangements. The first three areas are set out below, and a further four will follow in next week’s article:

• Reduce or eliminate demand – organisations need to address the issue of false demand, created by a lack of knowledge, rework or customer error. They may find that they are paying for services they are not using. This is particularly common in multi-national arrangements where, despite the good intentions of the original team, in individual country operations there is a reluctance to adopt the specified service. In some cases, this means organisations are effectively paying for the same service twice.

• Revisit all changes – organisations need to review all changes made since starting the service and where the price has increased as a result of the change, understand whether it is possible to revert to the original approach. However, this may not always be feasible given the likely interplay between changes.

At the same time, it is important to assess the current service levels and identify whether the agreed targets are still needed. If possible, current service levels should be reduced and a price reduction sought from the provider. This may prove more challenging in a front office trading environment than in a middle or back office function, but all avenues should be explored. Finally, organisations should review the business case for each proposed change and ensure that it meets their immediate demands, and be prepared to fast track changes which have an immediate cash impact and stop or delay those which do not.

• Expand scope – organisations need to look for simple opportunities to develop the scope of their sourced services and take further cost out of the wider organisation. This could include, considering moving higher knowledge-based processes and tasks, such as market research, analytics and data management, into the sourcing arrangement,. For example, PA helped a transport and engineering organisation extend the services provided by its finance service centre so it now includes further financial accounting and management reporting activities, as well as real estate management services. The payback for these improvements can be secured in months rather than years.

In his second article next week, Simon Tennant will discuss further methods to fine- tune sourcing arrangements to deliver both immediate benefits and long term advantages.

As communications become evermore sophisticated, managing the related design, print and mail processes requires both expert knowledge and access to the latest technology.

The importance of document production and delivery

A recent survey conducted by Pitney Bowes reveals that only 33% of organisations benchmark their print jobs to ensure they get the most competitive quote. Fully 67% of businesses admit to having little or no idea as to how competitive their current print and design processes are. In addition, approximately 5% of all letters shipped daily have hand written addresses. Many organisations will be unaware that by typing addresses they can be eligible for mail consolidation discounts.

And yet, what could be more important than customer communications? For large organisations the mailroom is an important business function – a central contact point for customers, shareholders, partners, suppliers and employees. It is therefore vital that such a valuable resource is run effectively to support core business processes. Similarly, the outgoing documents that the mailroom processes reflect the organisation which they represent. Badly designed, incorrectly addressed mail suggests a poorly functioning company, prone to mistakes.

Presenting your company as a trustworthy, efficient organisation is more important than ever. The marketing landscape has changed from a push to a pull model, with the buyer dictating the frequency of receiving information and how that information is delivered. Analysts estimate that every consumer is exposed to around 3,000 advertising messages each day. Consumers are time-pressured, increasingly bombarded with messaging and, crucially, more in control over what gets through and what ends up ignored, deleted, or in the bin. Blogging tools and social networking sites mean that we’re no longer simply media recipients, we’re media creators, too. If we can set our own agendas, why should we tolerate those companies that get their own messaging hopelessly wrong? And for those that do get it wrong, new alternatives are simply a mouse-click or a text message away. It’s never been so easy to defect – loyalty is hard-earned and hard-maintained.

Too often, time-pressured marketing managers turn to print and design suppliers with whom they have a historical relationship rather than investing the time and effort to seek better quality-for-cost alternatives. As a result, our own evidence shows that businesses are typically spending an average of 15% more than necessary on print and design.

Similarly, mail spend is often not accurately monitored with few organisations knowing exactly how many mail pieces they send and what their budget for this process is. And yet when the time and labour taken to print, fold, insert and post documents are combined, it becomes clear that the cost of the mailing function may have been significantly overlooked.

At a time when businesses are under immense pressure to prove return on investment against every activity, such imprecise practices have no place in the environment of the cost-efficient, time-pressured business world.

Accurate

Outsourcing suppliers effectively operate as an expert document production and mailing department, exercising buying power and production expertise to deliver the necessary combination of quality and cost-efficiency.

By channeling these processes through a centrally managed resource, outsourcing can also safeguard the customers’ brand integrity. If materials are printed on an ad-hoc, departmental level there can be no control over the quality of the resulting output. Perhaps the wrong paper stock might be used or colours may be reproduced inaccurately because toner hasn’t been replaced. The presence of a specialist unit, whose sole purpose is to concentrate on the quality of design, print and distribution, can ensure that all documents are created according to a uniform standard.

Similarly, data quality and accurate processing can be ensured for sensitive documents such as statements and bills. There is nothing more irksome for a customer than to receive a document that is incorrectly addressed or misdirected. As an extra reassurance, outsourced services can include the tracking of important and sensitive documents, ensuring that they reach their intended recipient safely and on time.

Cost effective

As our opening statistics show, businesses are failing to effectively benchmark print and design jobs. It is not uncommon for larger organisations to have hundreds of print and design suppliers, often with no centralised process for controlling and measuring spend. This tangle of suppliers can lead to costs being apportioned to incorrect cost-centres or coded in such a way that makes identifying the purchase trail impossible.

The mailroom, in addition, is an area where many organisations can make cost savings through outsourcing. A company appointed specifically to be responsible for document management should employ the latest automation innovations to reduce time and expenditure. Regular monitoring of the mail process allows for better information management and the real cost of the mail centre to be closely audited and savings opportunities to be easily identified. Once identified, these opportunities can then be capitalised upon through the implementation of solutions made possible through specialist expertise and knowledge of the mail market options on offer. In this way, organisations are able to achieve exclusive mailing discounts on processes such as sortation, consolidation and postage metering.

As well as being able to reduce costs on these processes, further savings can be made by using those outsourced services which operate offsite. These services offer the added benefit of making valuable office space vacant, re-locating functions like print and mail to more suitable, purpose built environments.

Transparent

Outsourcing specialists working to strict service level agreements will introduce comprehensive management reporting that reveals a precise and transparent view of total document production and distribution across an entire organisation. Only with this essential reporting in hand can businesses begin to identify areas of inefficiency and develop internal processes that drive down costs, generate best quality and give marketing budget holders a compelling return on investment.

Even as Europe emerges slowly from recession, there is no relaxation of the budgetary squeeze. Arguably, only access to the latest skills and technology through an outsourcing partnership will ensure that businesses stay ahead of the quality curve whilst keeping a cap on costs.

Through highly-skilled outsourced support businesses can firstly work to unravel current practices and identify areas of wastage and inefficiency. The best outsourcing partners will open the door to a broader range of proven suppliers and will introduce the latest technology – whether on-site, or remotely managed – without the need for businesses to make upfront technology investment.

The outsourcing model delivers both the expertise to maximise current processes and the flexibility to adapt quickly as business needs dictate. Businesses adopting this model are beginning to set the benchmark.

Sally Hewitt, International Marketing Director, Pitney Bowes

www.pitneybowes.co.uk

Fuelled by increased desires for greater efficiencies, supportability, extensibility and cost effectiveness in IT infrastructures, Cloud computing has acquired an almost mythical status as a powerful consolidated architecture for delivery of enterprise IT services. Despite its close association with long-established technologies like virtualisation, grid computing and clustering, the concepts behind Cloud implementations are still fairly young. Notwithstanding this newness, businesses are subscribing to the model in increasing numbers.

According to EMA research, Cloud computing services are already a $40 to $95 billion dollar industry. Industry observers expect this to quadruple to $160 billion by 2015 and yet it is clear that Cloud computing is still in its early-adopter phase. EMA survey results reveal just 16 percent of organisations have as yet considered Cloud solutions for their IT services, indicating a wide potential for future growth as the value proposition becomes more widely accepted. Building a responsible Cloud infrastructure - either from existing computing resources or from the ground up – requires three important steps at the design stage.

Step 1. Effectively Size the Infrastructure

The first objective must be to support the maximum amount of computing services with the minimum number of computing resources. Capital expenditure on brand new environments can be reduced greatly by investing in a smaller number of more powerful resources. Meanwhile established environments can utilise existing systems more efficiently through consolidation efforts or by maximising system utilisation with grid computing. The fewer physical components there are in an infrastructure, the fewer systems there are that must be deployed, configured and maintained.

The second aim must be to reduce the number of potential security and failure points and improve overall reliability. Consolidated servers are also more easily pooled and can better accommodate the use of shared services, such as with commonly accessible storage and clustering. This allows new resources to be more rapidly provisioned to meet service demands. For example, as requirements for Cloud services grow, new disk drives can easily be added to an existing storage pool and new servers can be easily introduced to a cluster without affecting service availability.

Capacity planning is critical to effective infrastructure sizing. Systems that consolidate a large number of resources, such as blade servers and mainframes, are physically larger and more powerful than standard servers. Organisations must ensure data centres do not exceed environmental conditions – such as weight restrictions, power availability, and network bandwidth – and that sufficient environmental resource are always available to support rapid expansion. Automated tools can help track system and environmental resources availability so that quick and informed decisions can be made on the most effective ways to size and expand Cloud services to meet an expected growth in service requirements.

Step 2. Ensure high Availability

Since Cloud services are expected to be continuously accessible, high availability is another critical infrastructure requirement that needs to be addressed. The virtues of clustered servers have already been mentioned for their ability to be expanded rapidly, but their chief value comes from their ability to load balance system resources across cluster members and to provide uninterrupted fail-over services in the event of a single server being subject to catastrophic failure or maintenance downtime.

Clustered environments are typically contained within a single physical location so that they can share storage systems and do not have any performance latency due to WAN traffic. Large Cloud implementations typically have multiple clustered environments at multiple facilities. This allows failover of a Cloud service in the event of a site disaster. Individual Cloud deployments can be expanded to operate across multiple clustered environments, both local and remote, to create a “hub and spoke” architecture that ensures highly available and highly reliable compute services. Even by eliminating the possibility of a single point of failure, however, catastrophic system or site failure can impact performance of Cloud services, so automated tools should be employed to monitor the health of these systems as well as the availability of support services, such as power and network connectivity.

Step 3. Minimise Operating Expenses

A core expected value from Cloud adoption is the reduction of IT operating expenses. In fact, EMA research has confirmed that roughly 76 percent of Cloud implementations have resulted in significant and measurable cost reductions. Consolidation efforts can certainly help to reduce capital expenditures, but with a little extra planning and consideration operational cost reductions can also be achieved. Administrative staff, for instance, can be reduced and yet still sufficiently sized to meet support requirements by simplifying the environment to be managed.

Unlike traditional data centre models, Cloud infrastructures provide the opportunity to standardise on only one or a few system architectures. The fewer server, configuration, and application types there are to support, the less specialised knowledge is needed to support staff pool. Similarly, standardising management practices and automating procedures reduce the amount of administrative tasks and effort that must be performed. Monitoring and asset discovery tools can also reduce the administrative burden by making it easier and faster to identify root causes of problems and to proactively prevent potential problems.

Cost efficiencies can also be achieved by reducing data centre energy consumption. EMA research indicates that, on average, more than 20 percent of data centre electricity costs can be eliminated with basic power management practices, and more than 80 percent reduction in consumption has been achieved by the most energy-efficient data centre reconfigurations. The most effective server level power management practices involve monitoring the environment to look for opportunities to reduce consumption during low use periods. Significant cost saving can also be achieved by reducing data centre cooling requirements. By identifying “hot spots,” data centres can be reconfigured to ensure proper airflow and heat dissipation so that chillers do not need to be run more often than necessary.

Conclusion

The foundation for end-to-end Cloud infrastructure intelligence is being established today. Visual modelling tools have the potential to revolutionise the concepts of IT management. By transitioning from a passive monitoring solution to an active management interface, the solution can be transformed into a centralised console for unified service management. In time such tools will be integrated with more extensible automated systems management processes for things like provisioning, configuration, security, patching, and remediation services. The combination will result in a very intuitive virtual data centre representation where individual services can be modelled at the process level as well as at the physical hardware level.

Nottinghamshire County Council has signed a five year contract worth £7.4m with Logica to transform their business support processes.

Mike Harounoff, business development manager at Logica, explained that the contract aims to implement an internal shared service within the council, bringing together the functions of HR, payroll, procurement and finance.

"We're implementing SAP ERP to replace existing systems, such as Cyborg, which the council uses currently for HR functions," said Harounoff. "Systems will go live for all functions in October 2011, that's the first phase."

The second phase of the project will be the rollout of payroll to schools across the county. There will also be added functionality aroundbusiness reporting, which will go organisation-wide.

The two phases will be delivered over 18 months, and then there will be support for the remainder of the five year period.

Once it gets the internal shared service in place the council will be looking to see how it can extend that service to the wider public sector within the county, for example the emergency services. After that it will consider sharing with other larger authorities.

Savings will come from job cuts, increased efficiency and a reduction of duplication.

"Technology is the enabler to make the savings. But if you don't have the right processes in place, you won't make those savings. The return on investment will come from the way in which the service is delivered," Harounoff said.

Source: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/1930310/logica-wins-gbp74m-shared-services-contract

Fears over data security, downtime and loss of control has meant CFOs at mid-sized UK firms are unwilling to place their IT infrastructure in the cloud, with many unaware of the benefits cloud computing offers.

Research commissioned by SunGard Availability Services, the business continuity specialist, questioned chief financial officers at mid-sized UK headquartered organisations about their attitudes to the cloud.

The research found that 56 percent of respondents cited fears around the security of sensitive customer or commercial data. The research also showed that high-profile media stories around IT outages or data losses are heightening these fears, with nearly half (45 percent) of the respondents admitting that such cases make them more inclined to keep their data in-house, despite the cost implications.

And many CFOs say they do not have a clear picture of the cloud, despite cloud computing being frequently cited as a key technology to reduce IT spend.

Only one third (34 percent) of UK CFOs said they understood fully the benefits of moving their IT into the cloud, and less than a third (28 percent) say they know the difference between private and public clouds. "These are two very different approaches to cloud computing, with very different data security and integrity attributes," said SunGard.

Worries around control of data are also holding back investment. Loss of control concerns nearly 60% of CFOs when handing data over to a third party, and only 15% of CFOs surveyed said they would be happy to have all of their data in the hands of a third party.

Keith Tilley, executive vice president of Europe at SunGard Availability Services, said, "IT vendors and senior in-house IT employees need to do much more to educate financial decision makers about the benefits of moving to an appropriate outsourced IT environment and the related use of outsourcing partners."

The research was carried out by Vanson Bourne among 100 CFOs organisations employing between 250 and 1,000 staff.

Source: http://www.cio.co.uk/news/3252037/cfos-unwilling-to-place-it-infrastructure-in-cloud-over-data-security-fears/?olo=rss

Through synchronising product development roadmaps and technology architectures Cisco and BMC Software are aiming to a offer an Integrated Cloud Delivery Platform.

"As cloud computing evolves from a strategic idea to a business reality, companies are quickly discovering the complexities of deploying and managing cloud solutions in a hybrid data centre," said Bob Beauchamp, chairman of BMC Software.

"BMC's alliance with Cisco will enable our customers with large-scale cloud computing environments to make mission-critical cloud services a practical reality for their demanding businesses and customers. IT organisations can be more nimble, cost-efficient, scalable and, most importantly, better aligned to the business."

The Integrated Cloud Delivery Platform will initially be aimed at telecoms companies but will also be rolled out to enterprises looking to develop private cloud systems.

The offering combines Cisco's Unified Service Delivery platform with BMC's Cloud LifeCycle Management software.

"The Integrated Cloud Delivery Platform enables our customers to deploy end-to-endIT services running on a cloud infrastructure that spans networks, systems, storage and applications," said Padmasree Warrior, senior vice president of Cisco's enterprise, commercial and small business group.

Source: http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2273714/cisco-bmc-cloud-computing