Tags:
Innovation,
Entrepreneur,
Strategy,
Growth,
Data management
Ask the right question
Taken literally, "thinking outside the box" could mean saving serious money. Or at least, it can if you ask the right questions of the right people. Take all those hundreds – if not thousands – of separate bits of information that your business...
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Tags:
Innovation,
Data management,
Strategy,
Change
The little shop that could
Time for full disclosure: when asked to write about The White Company, I jumped at the chance. Our household is filled with the company’s stuff. We like what it sells, how it markets itself and, living in the wilds of Wales, its mail-order...
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Tags:
Strategy,
Growth,
Data management,
Security
Data basics
1. What is a data policy?It sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare, but a data policy is fundamentally a company-wide agreement on how and where data is stored, and who has access to which parts and for what purpose. By setting clear limits on how...
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Tags:
Change,
Growth,
Strategy,
Data management,
Innovation
Charity begins at home
Here’s something you may not have realised: charities are in one of the most competitive industries in the world. They have to fight tooth and nail for every bit of money that enters their books. Here’s another: they are among the most regulated and...
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Tags:
Data management,
Change,
Growth,
Strategy
What makes your IT special?
It was a nice problem to have. Three years after introducing CitySpace in 2003, a virtual learning environment for students, London’s City University found itself deluged by demand. Logins were running at more than 100,000 every month, courtesy of...
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Tags:
Data management,
Risk Compliance Governance (GRC),
Bottom Line,
Collaboration
Pieces of a puzzle
Imagine trying to solve a puzzle without being certain what the end result should look like, much less how the pieces fit together. Now imagine trying to build the puzzle pieces themselves. Bit of a challenge? To say the least.But this is the...
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Tags:
Growth,
Collaboration,
Know-how,
Data management
Something to watch over you
Quick question for anyone whose organisation is growing: how many times have you, your customers or stakeholders heard the following: “Sorry about this, the system’s been slow all day”; “There’s a problem with the system – I think the IT people are...
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Tags:
Change,
Collaboration,
Data management
Inspiring change
The word interoperability crops up a lot these days. Inspired by the need to navigate across different IT architectures, getting your multiple systems to exchange and use information offers real benefits to your business.Making your systems talk to...
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Tags:
Innovation,
Strategy,
Data management,
Risk Compliance Governance (GRC)
Looking for answers in all the right places
We’re all familiar with the pain involved in hunting through piles of bank statements and phone bills, searching for a particular transaction. Multiply that task by several million, and you have some idea of the difficulties many businesses face in...
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Tags:
Strategy,
Data management,
Know-how,
Collaboration
Share and share again
What does your organisation actually know? Answer: rather more than you think it does. And there’s the rub, because that knowledge isn’t being put to the most effective use. Sure, you know what’s happening. Your business has grown. It now employs sco...
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Tags:
Entrepreneur,
Data management,
Innovation
Turn data into gold
How much have you invested in gathering and storing data about your customers, products and employees? Probably a lot more money and manpower than you care to think about. And what’s your return on investment from all those pieces of data, which are...
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Tags:
Security,
Risk Compliance Governance (GRC),
Data management,
Communication,
Growth
The email that roared
As small and medium businesses grow, they uncover a misnomer about their computer systems – file sharing does not always actually mean sharing. Instead, storage capacity can all too easily become clogged up with the same material being stored many...
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Tags:
Change,
Data management,
Bottom Line
Help is at hand
“Globalisation” conjures up images of an undifferentiated world where international companies move resources and products around in a virtually frictionless environment. The real world, of course, is very different. If a manager has responsibilities...
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Tags:
Data management,
Change
The ex-files
Whatever happened to the "paperless office", that holy grail of business IT? We were all promised that, one day, we would carry everything we needed in a digital format on some light, powerful, mobile device. And while much of that promise has been f...
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Tags:
Data management
Miller’s crossing
Scotland's Miller Group might just be one of the biggest companies you've never heard of. It's the UK's largest privately owned house building, property development and construction business, with the bulk of its operations in England and...
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