In August 2010, we recruited six new graduates - all from non-IT degrees. We received hundreds of applications, interviewed 46 candidates and eventually put their chosen six recruits on a structured 26-week training programme. The most effective route has been the creation and implementation of this rigorous training plan which has had the support and input of the whole company’s staff. We consciously took the decision not to set targets for the first nine months of the programme because we didn’t want to create unreasonable expectations on what the graduates could deliver.

Spurred on by the success of the graduate recruitment programme, we decided to supplement the maturing graduate team with apprenticeships. The CBI has for a long time been calling for apprenticeships to be ‘promoted as a positive choice for young people and a route to a successful and rewarding future’. With fierce competition for university places and even tougher job seeking circumstances for degree achieving students, there is certainly an argument for some school leavers to consider taking the apprenticeship route to securing a rewarding career. Many apprenticeships provide practical, business-focused training that helps individuals develop the required skills they need to kick start their careers.

The government’s extended support in February 2011 of employer-led apprenticeship programmes has encouraged some organisations to consider taking this route. Many businesses can still be dismissive of apprenticeships - unless they are from the traditional apprenticeship-strong sectors of construction or engineering. But a large proportion of apprentices are now working in business administration, customer services, sales and telesales.

We set up a sales professional apprenticeship in May 2011 for two new recruits with the backing of the government’s National Apprenticeship Service (NAS). After a successful ten months of its graduate programme, it has been an eye-opening experience for the company.

The skills we were looking for in graduates were equally present in 18-20-year-olds, mostly ambition and determination. We are only eight weeks into the apprenticeship programme and I can’t see any real difference in terms of progress compared to the identical graduate training we started last year. The apprentices may have a little less in the way of ‘life skills’ than the graduates but, surprisingly, the raw material is pretty much the same in both cases.

Would we do it again?

Too often, company boards have little idea...

It is often assumed in business that any IT investment risks taken can be broadly measured in terms of critical outcomes such as sales growth, cheaper transactions or improved productivity. However, despite the scale or cost of these investments, many IT directors — consumed by workloads or perhaps overly trusting of technology vendors’ promises — seem reluctant (or even unaware) of the need to provide effective and regular insight into their IT infrastructure’s performance and how it will meet the changing needs of the business as it evolves.

Too often, company boards have little idea of how their IT assets contribute to the organisation’s bottom line. However, because they have to deploy ever more complex computing environments, IT directors are actually increasing the overall risk to their business by failing to look ahead to potential system issues. Repeated server crashes, creaking databases and slow network performance could be the first signs of serious infrastructure stress and poorly managed resources. This type of incident is an early warning of potentially serious risk to the business and not simply a one-off incident to be quickly patched up and forgotten about.

But, it is also unlikely that a business can accurately specify its requirements for any new hardware without accurate data on historical usage trends. Ultimately, this will affect the bottom-line and translate into rising and excessive infrastructure maintenance costs and poor system performance.

We regularly find that CIOs are being forced to take on considerable risk to keep their operations competitive. Many IT directors will no doubt play hard-ball during negotiations for implementation and testing or carve out additional support from a particular vendor beyond the immediate demands of the implementation. But with even small business running technology infrastructures based on a blend of vendors’operating system and applications, what happens in the years afterwards?

Many CIOs lack the hard evidence to show how their technology systems are performing or the health of their investments going forward. How can CIOs and IT managers check that their technology systems are in a healthy state and find a way to pick up the warning signs and escalate matters without impeding their daily operations?

Ultimately, monitoring the IT infrastructure and application performance will provide the insight necessary to keep business systems running in an optimal state. Many businesses rely on their users notifying them of a problem, but monitoring allows the identification and resolution of issues before business services are adversely affected.

On a performance level, monitoring ensures that IT systems are in good working order and helps to identify states that could undermine service levels provided to the end user But, the ability to analyse historical trends and enhance the understanding of how the system is really being utilised over time gives businesses the invaluable evidence on which they can base forward-planning - using factual data and avoiding the ‘finger-in-the-air’ guesswork that sometimes accompanies new IT investments.

IT departments need to ask themselves the following key questions to minimise risk from ongoing technology investments:

Does your business have documented customer service expectations and minimum service levels that support them?

Do you have regular meetings to review customer satisfaction levels, processes and technology assets?

Can your outsourced IT provider or other solution provider deliver performance metrics that show the contribution of their systems to your business?

Do you have cross-platform monitoring tools in place that can provide externally-oriented, business-focused multiple-level metrics that help the board assess the health of technology assets and provide early warnings such as ‘traffic lights’ of potential issues associated with them?

If the answer to any of these but especially the last question, is no, then your business could be struggling to detect early warnings of system capacity issues or plan the way your IT infrastructure supports the board’s vision for core business operations. Monitoring your technology investments is the way to start managing risk and providing the much-hyped agile IT operation.

Visit our monitiQ page for more ifomation, or call our consultants on 0115 951 9666