At the BCS CMSG conference in London earlier this year, Unisys CM manager Michel Delran spoke about how to design and implement a successful configuration management process and how a configuration management database can save you millions. He began with the real-life cautionary tale of a phone company which lost millions as a …

Companies may “miss out on gaining business advantage because of failure to optimise stored data”, according to a survey conducted on behalf of Computacenter in June 2013. About 60 per cent of companies find it hard to analyse the information stored on their systems. While they may be able to cope with the volume and velocity of …

The eighth BCS Configuration Management conference was billed as the premier UK event on Change, Release and Configuration Management for ITIL and Service Management. The BCS had lined up a range of speakers from a diverse spread of industries and expertise and the day didn’t disappoint. The conference kicked off in London last …

Kylie Fowler got controversial when she spoke last month to an audience of asset management and configuration management professionals at the BCS CMSG Conference in London about the five constants she always encounters in her 10-plus years of working as an IT asset management consultant. While these constants may always hold …

Among the benefits of cloud computing are lower infrastructure costs, reduced time to market and greater flexibility, with no need for enterprises to buy, install and maintain IT infrastructure and software. It can allow companies to become more agile and entrepreneurial, while the cloud computing vendor can deliver economies of …

According to Lucas Searle, head of private cloud at Microsoft UK, as the cloud brings increased automation and more efficient delivery, it also shifts the IT focus away from just keeping the infrastructure going. Traditionally, comments Searle, IT departments are silo-based, and as a result their focus is on technology, product …

Enterprises have a problem with data: its volume, velocity and variety is growing at an alarming rate. Analyst IDC says that there is already more data in the world than there is space to store it, and according to IBM every two days we create as much data as all the data that was created before 2003. According to The Economist …

In many organisations the costs of data warehousing are expressed on the balance sheet as the hardware, software and administration costs that support the operation. In practice, many hidden costs are associated with the data warehouse with the structure of an organisation. So says Mark Thomas, IBM’s Infosphere and data …

Business analytics is the latest IT takeover battleground, driving mergers and acquisitions among major corporate IT vendors as enterprises look to turn their data into valuable information that will give them a competitive edge. IBM, one of the vendors scrapping for supremacy in this space, expects the market for business …

It used to be that quality and price were the key differentiators but increasingly these days organisations are relying on business analytics – the methodical exploration of the organisation’s data to measure performance – to deliver competitive advantage. The original poster child for business analytics is the Tesco Clubcard …