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  • Managing relationships with vendors - Part 2

    According to Dr Tim O’Neill, co-founder and director of business intelligence specialists Avolution, probably the biggest mistake an organisation can make when dealing with suppliers is to outsource the systems architecture. “This is why there’s so many untold billions of dollars-worth of failed IT projects out there,” he says. “Outsourcing the architecture function is fraught with danger.” In order for projects to be successful organisations need to maintain a healthy degree of cynicism and effectively force vendors to earn trust.

    Written by David Binning • 05 May 11 13:07

  • Managing relationships with vendors

    The IT choices a company makes can mean the difference between business success and failure. Whether it’s access to information, communications between staff, partners and customers, HR, inventory management, operation and monitoring of equipment and other and assets as well as business security, IT has managed to make itself indispensible at virtually every organisational level. Yet it would seem that for many organisations, this awareness often fails to translate into properly thought out and well-executed strategies for managing the vendors that supply the technology.

    Written by David Binning • 04 May 11 16:03

  • Not-for-profit - Part 2

    Within any organisation, however — below the its culture and style of management — there are similarities between not-for-profit and commercial organisations.

    Written by Tim Mendham • 18 April 11 11:35

  • Legal issues in the Cloud - Part 4

    One of the remaining key issues Cloud users need to consider relates to the notion of being locked-in to certain applications or systems — and if a user wants to transfer data or applications from the Cloud, whether the data is portable between service providers. In these circumstances, a user will need to consider its requirements to access data some years into the future for a plethora of regulatory reasons.

    Written by Mark Vincent and Nick Hart • 11 April 11 06:00

  • Legal issues in the Cloud - Part 3

    Proper due diligence focuses on identifying the players in the Cloud relationship. That is, who is actually involved in providing the services and are they the same entity (or entities) that are processing or storing data? In the case of aggregators, for example, a Cloud user could be dealing with a single entity which itself is provided services by various third parties.

    Written by Mark Vincent and Nick Hart • 10 April 11 06:00

  • Legal issues in the Cloud - Part 2

    Unlike a fixed server in your office or at a data centre in Australia, data in the Cloud can potentially be located anywhere in the world — even in multiple data centres in multiple copies worldwide. A Cloud service provider may not even know where the data resides at any one time. The Cloud may not be tied to any particular location but this is clearly not the case with the laws of each country. Any ‘global’ technology solution will be impacted by the laws of a large number of nation states. As a result, sending and processing data around the globe could, in the process, fail to comply with data protection and privacy laws in various countries.

    Written by Mark Vincent and Nick Hart • 09 April 11 06:00

  • Starting IT afresh

    If your role involves managing IT within an organisation, starting a new job often means inheriting a hodgepodge of other people’s decisions strung together across generations of technology. The alternative is to join a start-up, but rarely does a start-up match the resources and budget that are afforded to IT in large existing organisations. So what if you could start from scratch without disrupting the business that you service?

    Written by Brad Howarth • 18 Oct. 10 12:00

  • Don't mess with Texas: Lessons from IT outsourcing disasters

    Two weeks ago, the CIO of Texas penned a seven-page letter outlining the chronic failures of the state's nearly four-year outsourcing relationship - a deal the Texas governor had briefly suspended in 2008 citing service delivery problems that he said put the state's agencies in danger.

    Written by Stephanie Overby • 05 Aug. 10 05:04

  • IT Outsourcing Activity Remains Sluggish in 2010

    The outlook for the IT outsourcing market is not unlike the outlook for the economy as a whole: It's "unusually uncertain," to use U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's words.

    Written by Stephanie Overby • 23 July 10 00:59
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    Cloud Computing Shakes Up Traditional IT Outsourcing

    For all the vagaries of IT services, traditional IT outsourcing has always been quite tangible--servers, data centers, networks, specifications, man-hours, lines of code. The rise of cloud computing, however, is changing all of that with flexible, asset-free IT services available on an as-needed basis for more aspects of enterprise technology.

    Written by Stephanie Overby • 12 April 10 05:44

  • Outsourcing: Prepare Now for Anti-Offshoring Laws

    Whether any future U.S. jobs bills will contain anti-offshoring measures remains up in the air. But outsourcing customers don't have to wait to protect themselves from potential protectionist legislation.

    Written by Stephanie Overby • 18 March 10 07:22
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    Outsourcing Prices Still Headed Down in 2010

    Two major trends led to lower prices for outsourced IT services last year--the global economic downturn and the uptick in remote infrastructure management (RIM) adoption.

    Written by Stephanie Overby • 10 March 10 07:39

  • How to manage outsourcers after the contract's ink is dry

    When the global trade association SEMI experienced a big revenue decline last year and had to cut staff, CIO Gil McInnes turned to outsourcing.

    Written by Mary Brandel • 09 March 10 07:29

  • IT Outsourcing Consultants: Same Great Advice, New Low Price

    The economic downturn has taken its toll on the IT services industry, and consequently, on the consultancies that swelled to support corporate outsourcing efforts in better days. Over the last two years, everyone--from the IT outsourcing arms of the biggest general business advisories (the KPMGs and Accentures, for instance) to the consulting divisions of IT service providers (the IBMs and HPs) to the leading outsourcing-specific consultancies (the TPIs and Alsbridges)--has been hit with layoffs, consolidation and upheaval.

    Written by Stephanie Overby • 01 March 10 05:23

  • Outsourcing Ruling Against EDS Gives Customers Power

    In what could be an important decision for the IT outsourcing industry and its customers, a London court recently ruled that EDS (now part of Hewlett-Packard) must pay damages to a former outsourcing customer for failing to live up to its sales pitch.

    Written by Stephanie Overby • 11 Feb. 10 07:03

  • IT Outsourcing: Why It Pays to Appraise Your Contract

    Everyone knows a good outsourcing relationship needs to be actively managed. So does a good IT outsourcing contract.

    Written by Stephanie Overby • 09 Feb. 10 06:30

  • Outsourcing Problems? Middle Management May Be to Blame

    Middle management just isn't what it used to be. The old definition of a middle manager--those senior staff in charge of overseeing the details of day-to-day management and reporting to top management--is too narrow, says Leslie Willcocks, Professor of Technology Work and Globalization at the London School of Economics (LSE) and head of its Outsourcing Unit.

    Written by Stephanie Overby • 04 Feb. 10 07:30

  • Outsourcing information security

    The need to keep information secure is not a recent development. To satisfy this need, most organisations construct a list of security requirements based on common sense. This has proven fairly effective with simple and well understood media such as pen and paper. As information management (and its security) has become more complex in nature, the likelihood of a gap in that common sense list of requirements has increased.

    Written by Simon Burson • 28 Jan. 10 07:24

  • Outsourcing: Crippling Mistakes IT Departments Make

    Researchers at the University of Tennessee have studied a variety of outsourcing deals-from IT and back-office work to manufacturing and logistics-and identified the most common mistakes organizations make when partnering with an external provider.

    Written by Stephanie Overby • 25 Jan. 10 06:15

  • Tech Support Hell: Ways to Avoid It

    Marylyn Tesconi, who manages a large office, takes graduate-level courses and volunteers at a local health clinic in San Francisco, has more than enough to do without spending hours on the phone trying to get her home router to work. And she certainly has no patience for techs who yell and supervisors who hang up without solving her problem.

    Written by Bill Snyder • 22 Jan. 10 05:38
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