A new lease of life – HostTalk gives you a low risk, low cost approach to exploiting your investments in proven, high-performance, reliable and resilient IT services. Building on these investments rather than ‘legacy replacement’ can direct scarce resources to developments that provide real business benefit.

A smarter way to consume energy – With energy costs soaring and the political landscape taking on a distinctly green hue, smart meters have been touted as an effective way to kill two birds with one stone.

Buying, selling or sitting it out – As major corporate shared services programmes become operational across UK central and local government, clear divisions will appear in the market.It’s our opinion that there will be two such divisions; one between buyers and sellers and the other between them and the smaller organisations left adrift after the first wave of implementations.

Can going green keep you out of the red? – Besides helping to halt climate change, the effective use of green IT can boost your  bottom line, enhance the brand – and ensure compliance with emerging legislation

Creating customer advocacy – Only a third of customers trust their banks to consider their interests ahead of profits. However, some retail banks are generating strong customer advocacy by concentrating on a small number of key elements that are critical to offering a superior customer experience. It’s our opinion that effectively managing the customer experience can differentiate you from the pack and help form the basis for long-term, profitable relationships.

Customer Experience - The next competitive battleground? – With customer experience receiving more attention than ever before, we explore the impact on the bottom line.

Driving Efficiency into your Business – It's a tough market out there. Uncovering innovative ways to improve your back office functions will make a huge difference to your bottom line, as well as enabling your service to stand out from the pack.

Embracing Shared Services – Embracing Shared Services can make businesses nervous. How do you experience the benefits of sharing without losing control?

Five mantras for Leaders of Lean – Every organisation is trying to get lean – but most are only borrowing practices from the lean pioneers, and failing to get the results they wanted. However, lean is not a solution, or a goal, but a way of seeing, thinking and doing. Grow your own organisation-specific adaption of the lean essence and you’ll be making the last change every business must make: into being a business that lives and breathes improvement.

Get ready for the next data centre revolution – Consolidation and virtualisation were just the first steps on the journey to the optimised data centre. Private cloud services will drive efficiency and agility even higher.

Getting to grips with the data centre – Faced with rising energy costs, growing complexity and limited capacity, data centre managers are clearly in need of new solutions. Can managed services come to the rescue?

How Knowledge Sharing is improving the Service Desk. – Everyone wants answers - and the quicker the better. Enhancing the management of knowledge at the Service Desk is helping to achieve this goal.

How Outsourcing can bring Innovation. – Outsourcing has been one of the most important business trends of the last decade. But there is still untapped potential in the innovation arena, with a lot of talk but not enough action.

How to make going Green good business sense – In a shrinking economy, it would be easy to believe that reducing the business' environmental impact will slip down the CIO's agenda. But being green still makes excellent business sense.

If Machines had a heart – It’s our opinion that self-service has an integral role to play for all customers, provided it is concentrated on web and branch channels. One of its key roles should be to create transparency for customers - effectively, making financial services credible again - and thereby renewing trust and loyalty in financial institutions.

Long live the mainframe – The mainframe has a vital and still growing role to play in those organisations that have invested in it and migration to other platforms will only be worthwhile when business changes dictate the need for wholesale application replacement.

Mapping the journey for multi-channel interactions – Getting multi-channel right is more than just having a website and call centre to go with it. Choice and continuity of service are vital elements which are often more difficult to get right than companies might realise.

Outcome-based agreements: from pain to mutual gain – In a fast-changing economic climate, organisations need a new style of supplier engagement targeted at successful outcomes and shared benefit.

Paying attention to the Citizen voice – Never before has the UK government been so committed to citizen-centric services. But what exactly do we expect from our interactions with the public sector, and what role do front-line staff play in ensuring a positive experience?

Payments Factories – The European payments market is experiencing a period of dramatic change. Competition from non-bank entities, increasingly demanding customers and new market regulations, principally the Payment Services Directive (PSD) and accompanying Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA), are forcing banks to rethink their operational model.

Proactive problem-solving in the global service desk – For many global organisations the service desk is the place to call when problems arise with IT.

Rail, retail and reality – The rail industry has seen a steep rise in demand is gearing up to absorb further changes: passenger and journey numbers will climb, while aggressive revenue growth targets will concentrate decision-makers’ minds.As it morphs into a modern, massmarket consumer proposition and leaves behind an era of undifferentiated utility service, what can rail learn from the retail sector?

Real outsourcing for retailers – Despite the continuing stream of signifi cant contract awards, IT outsourcing has not been able to shake off a reputation tarnished in the retail sector by some high-profile early terminations and moves to bring components back in-house. It’s our opinion that, provided four simple rules are followed, outsourcing will generate real value and strengthen the core of any retail business.

Re-inventing the desktop... in the data centre – Desktop virtualisation is the next wave of IT optimisation. While the centralised delivery of desktop services promises major gains, there are still plenty of pitfalls.

SaaS as a Solution – While Software as a Solution (SaaS) has so far been most successful as a model for delivering point solutions and serving the needs of SMB's, the advantages of the usage-based pricing model are now proving more and more appealing.

Satisfaction centre - not cost centre – As corporate shared services initiatives become operational across UK central and local government, customers are starting to raise questions about ‘lowest common denominator’ services that reduce performance. It’s our opinion that these are not inevitable, but you do need to give equal weighting in your thinking to the benefits you can deliver alongside the efficiencies you need to achieve.

Self-service Revolution – The evolution of retail is marked by increasing customer empowerment. But in a multi-channel world, retailers are in danger of losing their grip on what customers want – and how they want to get it. It’s our opinion that retailers must make self-service about customers rather than technology.

Shared Services in Local Government – Motivated by a need to drive efficiencies and reduce costs, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire County Councils in the UK have taken the lead when it comes to reaping the rewards of shared services.

Sharing best practice across sectors – Original thinking will always be a valuable asset. Increasingly organisations are also waking up to the art of 'borrowing' - often from seemingly unrelated sectors.

Software as a Service - a faster, cheaper way to fail? – A key selling point of software as a service (SaaS) applications is speed of deployment. But ultra-rapid implementations of five to 20 days need to be set against a uncomfortably high failure rate. What is required is a more iterative approach to SaaS roll outs that repeatedly matches the application capabilities and configuration to the business processes, work practices and information flows they are designed to support.

The mergers & acquisitions challenge – breaking up is not so hard to do – With economic upheaval triggering a flood of acquisitions, divestments and business break-ups, organisations are counting on their IT leaders and partners to ensure that underlying systems and services can be separated, migrated and re-combined – with minimal upheaval and to fixed deadlines. The application of lean IT principles and sound project governance can prove critical in the pursuit of such successful outcomes.

The new generation of vending machines – Chocolate bar…soft drink…mobile phone? A new generation of vending machines selling high-value items is hitting the market

The Rise of Self-Service – Gone are the days of self-service being a differentiator. Customer demands for convenience are on the rise and businesses need to respond if they are to enhance the end-to-end experience and free up resources for new revenue opportunities.

Three fallacies of shared services – Misheld beliefs about shared services in the public sector are often given as reasons for holding back on shared service adoption. It’s our opinion that not only are these beliefs fallacies, but that shared services actually enable the very things that people believe they inhibit.

Unburdening the CIO: Desktop Managed Services – Times are tricky for CIO's. Under pressure to deliver business-aligned IT, the demand from the business seems to be to produce ever more for less.

Understanding SOA – Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is being touted as a way of radically changing how IT performs, freeing businesses to develop new services rapidly. But what exactly is SOA, how do you implement it and can it really transform your organisation?

What's In Store? – With e-commerce growing at an annual rate of around 20%, you could perhaps be forgiven for assuming the physical store is on the wane. Think again. The in store experience is being rejuvenated with state-of-the-art technology.

What customers really want – With customers' expectations sky-high, the pressure is on retailers to deliver an innovative shopping experience.

When cloud computing is a step too far for your data… – With the arrival of Infrastructure as a Service capabilities, businesses will be able to reduce their data storage costs by up to 40%; scale their requirements to meet changing business demands; provide location-specific auditability that meets compliance requirements; and tier data delivery to fulfil service level agreements.

Wholesale Mobile – The conventional view of the mobile virtual network operator is out of date. Service providers that buy wholesale minutes at a discount price and sell no-frills telephony and text messaging to price-sensitive customers are finding it hard to survive. This old guard will soon be superseded by virtual operators whose business models come from the world of internet services.

Why are my customers so disloyal? – The empowered consumer, faced with a multitude of choices about where, when and how they shop, is leading to increasingly high expectations. A competitive retail sector, facing an uncertain economic future is being challenged by consumers to compete for their custom: in this environment, only the fi ttest and those really listening to what their customers really want are likely to survive.