UK Large business & public sector
By Neil Rogers, President, Global Government, BT Global Services
In one sense, the Public Services Network or PSN is very much what it says it is – a network dedicated to public services. After all, it’s not a complicated concept, so why should it need a complicated name? And its intended purpose is also widely understood: to enable shared services and collaboration in order to reduce costs and improve services. That much is very clear. [Read more...]
In his foreword of the white paper ‘The great technology take-up’, Don Tapscott makes the case for collaboration, co-creation and a new set of business principles. Tapscott, among others known as the author of Wikinomics looks at the changing paradigms in increasingly connected times.
When we use the term ‘connected’, we often immediately think about technologies, the Internet and social media. However, the world is more connected than ever before in other ways too. In his foreword, Don writes ‘the challenges of sovereign debt, economic malaise, youth unemployment, social unrest, resource scarcity and other problems are all connected’. [Read more...]
Welcome to the first blog in my 4-part series where I talk through key themes from a recent whitepaper I wrote for BT Global Services called ‘Expect the Unexpected’.
The paper provides some long-range planning tools for leaders of Britain’s largest organisations, and in the video below I introduce [Read more...]
What began as a trickle of smartphones, tablets and other mobile consumer devices into the workplace has surged to a flood, with no end in sight. These devices seem to seep through every crack in IT protocols and controls.
But there’s no holding back the tide; employees continue to push, pull and smuggle their own choice of technology into work. Every large organisation must face the reality of the situation, accept what is happening and start to lead. Now is the time to stop worrying and start developing policies and practices that will allow you to enjoy the benefits of consumerisation while keeping your network and data secure.
Companies that have not yet addressed this trend may have [Read more...]
People have been talking about a new world of flexible working for a long time, and we have been covering the topic several times in the latest months. However, what is different about the issue today? Is agile working that new?
We asked customer experience futurologist Nicola Millard. Are we really undergoing a fundamental transformation toward a more flexible model of work? Millard argues that we are.
“It is true that there is nothing new about agile working. It has been around in various guises – such as teleworking and hotdesking – but only now have the possibilities become so significant that many organisations are fundamentally reassessing the role of the office and the nature of work”. [Read more...]
It’s clear that the explosive growth of smartphones is profoundly impacting both consumption and business. For IT managers, one of the focus areas is BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and the consequences of this phenomenon.
While security and network issues arise, it’s clear that BYOD will not go away anytime soon and offers many opportunities that should not be ignored. In the meantime, sales of ‘that other’ mobile device, media tablets, are boosting.
Gartner earlier this month forecasted worldwide media tablet sales to increase by 98% (!) from 2011 this year, to a total of 118.9 million units. [Read more...]
As Facebook slowly achieves world domination, every company is facing the same $64,000 question: How do we leverage the mind-boggling scale of the platform to get our brand noticed?
The good news is that Facebook users are generally very positive about brands they like. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, consumers are likely to identify with a brand that advertises alongside their own personal information on a Facebook page.
The same ad has less impact if viewed on a stranger’s page. [Read more...]
Our research on the social customer found some interesting differences between sectors in terms of the type and extent of customer engagement over social media.
Retail/fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) and travel were the two top sectors in terms of social activity and finance and local government were the bottom two. Here are some snippets of insight into what we found… [Read more...]
Having spent several years in the ICT industry, I can’t remember a time when there’s been more excitement, possibility and change than there is right now.
In the last year or so we’ve seen the exponential growth of smartphones and tablets forcing IT Directors to introduce Bring-Your-Own-Device policies into their companies (and conveniently saving themselves capital expenditure).
We witnessed the transition of “the cloud” from a niche way of delivering services to something that, according to Forbes (2012), almost three-quarters of companies are now using or trialling. [Read more...]
Financial institutions are gradually waking up to all that the “cloud” can be about. Not just the “public cloud” that is the public Internet, or the “private cloud” that they can build to share their internal services more effectively, but also “private managed clouds” that act like private internets and allow multiple banks to share resources, applications and services both domestically and internationally.
Financial institutions are faced with exponentially-growing volumes of data – “Big Data,” as the problem is now called. This data is not only from internal operations where it may serve millions of retail clients, but also from trading activities.
Today, a dealing room in a single bank in a single city has to be able to process more than 6 million messages per second. Multiply that by the number of dealing rooms and banks in the world, and you start to see why the “yottabyte” unit of measure becomes necessary. [Read more...]
