Glyn Heath, Founder of Centiq Ltd, speaks to IT Advisor.

The benefits of IT monitoring and the early warning of system issues.

monitoring, managing and mitigating risk

The Budget has demonstrated that the Chancellor has had little scope for giving incentives for business growth.  The extension of the Enterprise Investment Scheme and the doubling of Entrepreneurs Relief to £10 million will certainly help boost entrepreneurship in the UK.  However, even though a 200 per cent rise in SME R&D Tax Credit has been announced, there was no mention of how small businesses’ corporation tax rate of 21 per cent would be affected.

So once again private enterprises are left to take their destiny into their own hands rather than relying on any incentives from the government. To me, it's all the more important that businesses look again at their IT assets and determine ways of optimising their performance to meet business goals and reduce operational costs. Despite two years or more of downturn, there is still considerable scope for UK organisations to automate many of their business or administrative processes and free staff time for major tasks, supporting customers and wider business development.

Opinions vary about whether new staff recruitment is on the rise, but the latest statistics on UK IT employment really struck a chord with me following our intake of six new starters on our graduate training programme in August last year.  According to e-Skills UK, the IT sector skills council, the proportion of the UK IT workforce below 30 has dropped from 33% in 2001 to just 19% in 2010.  To me, this seems like such a wasted opportunity for IT companies to benefit from the qualities that newly qualified recruits can bring to the workplace.  For us, it has been noticeable that our graduates have such ambition, drive and determination to give to the sales operation specifically and the wider business generally.

The new graduates have helped energise our existing activities and brought some fresh ideas to areas such as sales prospecting, making the investment doubly worthwhile.

Do companies monitor their IT to check its health and provide early warning of potential system issues?

I’ve spent many years investigating organisations’ IT systems and improving system performance but I’m regularly struck by how few CIOs seem to plan time and resources to do it systematically. Certainly many will use vendors’ monitoring tools, where they are available, for some systems but rarely consistently across the entire landscape.  There was further evidence of the lack of system monitoring with Progress Software’s survey of early warning systems used by IT departments in safety-conscious environments, covered in last week’s Computer Weekly http://tinyurl.com/4sczw4u.

Centiq’s enterprise consultancy and system support services transform the performance and economics of organisations’ technology infrastructures and related business systems. The company consolidates, virtualises and optimises computing environments, delivering smarter IT, business analytics, cloud deployments and helpdesk capabilities at reduced cost. Headquartered in Nottingham, the company has a 12-year track record of success with blue chip and mid-range customers in the technology, retail and wholesale, manufacturing, business services, local and central government, finance and healthcare sectors. We spoke to Glyn Heath, Managing Director, to find out more about the IT services industry....

Following on from my last blog, I thought it would be apt to share some thoughts on the Government’s Spending Review now that the headlines have had time to sink in. 

The Government has taken a gamble in endeavoring to cut back the deficit within the life of this Parliament. One of George Osborne’s key assumptions seems to be that the private sector will be able to fill the potentially heavy job losses in pubic sector by private businesses creating new employment opportunities. He received an unexpected boost following the review with the announcement of the UK’s quarterly growth figure of 0.8 percent, which was well above expectations.  http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=192

Despite the gloom during the run-up to next week’s government Spending Review, I’m going to offer a more positive suggestion on this topic.  

This week the Guardian (http://tiny.cc/mnn3b) reported how three million doctors have already downloaded a 59p stethoscope app for their iPhone. No more recoiling from that cold metal stethoscope now the doctor can press their warm iPhone to your chest.  This just the latest example of how consumer technology innovation can drive non-consumer use of technology such as enterprise IT.

More than that, this story shows why everyone in the corporate world – including senior management who may not really ‘get’ IT – expects so much from their IT systems, since they can do so much, so quickly with devices and software themselves.  That is all the more justification for companies making efforts to understand what their IT infrastructure and the business processes they are there to support actually do.

So the World Cup came and went.  England’s underwhelming campaign was greeted by loud media recriminations. These centred on an ambivalent showing by overpaid and lazy stars or key players jaded after a long domestic season. Worse, wrong formations were blamed for stifling the team’s creativity. It was also being suggested that the team were not being consulted on tactics by a well-resourced but seemingly autocratic team coach. The disciplinarian regime ignored the building of team spirit and failed to deliver the goods in unique and trying tournament conditions. For his part, the manager failed. There is some truth in these criticisms, but perhaps we also need to see the team’s difficulties as part of a wider picture of gradual English football decline with the squeezing out of home-grown players in the top teams and failure to absorb new coaching skills and ideas in the way that more successful countries seem to do.

Is the position of CIO ever the stepping-stone to greater things?

The appointment of Philip Clarke, Tesco’s CIO and head of international development, to the CEO’s job at our most successful retailer last week seems to be the highest profile CIO step up to the top job that anyone in our industry can remember.  So, is this the start of a new age of IT directors truly changing board-level thinking and starting to lead companies?  Or are CIOs forever destined to be the Cinderella of UK business?