Internet

Flexible working for efficiency and effectiveness Following the May 2010 general election and resulting budget cuts, the UK public sector faces the toughest challenges in decades. Adoption of leaner, more agile work styles, implementation of mobile and flexible working solutions and some strong executive leadership will be called for if the sector is to continue delivering the required levels of public services while producing the many billions of efficiency savings that will be expected of it.

Many companies are enduring a recovery from recession that can best be described as tentative. They may not regard it as the best time to be investing money and management time in privacy protection. In fact, the opposite is the case. The business imperatives for building and maintaining the walls that will prevent data breaches have never been so urgent. Not only are the legal requirements to maintain data security – and sanctions in the event of failure – higher than ever, customers increasingly regard the protection of their data as a differentiator between businesses with whom they choose to work with and those they don’t. All this must be done at a time when the amount of work being done by employees outside the traditional confines of the office is growing rapidly. This development makes the task of preserving data confidentiality exponentially more difficult.

Specsavers wanted to capture customer feedback at the point of experience in its retail stores. The survey needed to be automatic, engage with a representative sample of both customers and shop browsers, and deliver incisive analyses and rapid reports. Specsavers contracted IBM Business Partner, Customer Research Technology (CRT) to provide IBM AnyPlace™ Kiosks equipped with CRT’s ViewPoint software. CRT tailored survey screens to capture instant in-store feedback fed over the Internet to CRT headquarters for analysis and reporting.

Ageing servers and an IT environment that had grown organically over time, meant Specialised Travel’s systems were becoming unstable. Regular server reboots and downtime were impacting staff productivity and, ultimately the bottom line. IBM Business Partner, Unilink Systems worked closely with Specialised Travel to design and implement a resilient, consolidated server environment based around IBM BladeCenter® S. Unilink continues to support the solution, which includes high-performing Storage Area Networks (SAN).

HIT decided to adopt a global outsourced solution for data centre managed services, migrating elements of its server infrastructure from Dallas, Texas, to the UK. That meant relocating and upgrading hardware while maintaining 100% performance levels throughout, and calling for the dependable expertise that only IBM could provide. Drawing on IBM’s unique experience and skill sets around the iSeries™ (AS/400™) platform, and aided by close collaboration between IBM and Business Partner Attenda, HIT successfully re-created its Dallas environment in a new UK secure data centre. The project was successfully completed on time and budget, with no disruption to normal business operations.