Podcast interviews

According to Gartner, an estimated 30 percent of an application’s costs over its lifetime are due to maintenance. How certain are you that the business applications your company is paying to maintain are really supporting your business? Surprisingly, many companies do not understand the full extent and intricacy of their existing application portfolio. These applications are often complex, highly integrated and inflexible and consume significant levels of resource that could be better used developing new applications or supporting the genuinely business critical elements of the portfolio. At IBM we know from experience that rationalising the application portfolio can lead to significant cost savings. Applying the same Application Portfolio Management processes that we deploy for our clients, over a six year period IBM reduced its own application portfolio by 73 percent. At the same time we reduced our application maintenance costs from 40 percent of the company’s IT budget to only 22 percent, while delivering significant improvements in business process efficiencies throughout the company. Savings of this magnitude are not unique to IBM. We regularly achieve similar cost savings for clients through Application Portfolio Management.

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Hosted by: Gavin Lyall, UK Application Portfolio Leader, IBM Global Services Length: 7 minutes, 29 sec

IBM's Procurement Capability Accelerator is a unique offering that addresses the current top CPO challenge (as presented by Aberdeen Group and ELP recently), that of the development and retention of procurement talent. Procurement Capability Accelerator is a coaching programme that delivers the need to, and the most appropriate, method of, developing the skills of Procurement people. Measurement of the benefits of tailored coaching can be made in the areas of cost reduction, strategy development and strategy enablement. Our Procurement Capability Accelerator can be delivered in four stages, with entry and exit points at each stage. The stages are: Baseline Assessment, Methodology Development, Experiential Learning and One to One Coaching. All of our consultants have deep experience from senior Procurement roles in industry, and we have the added advantage of being able to leverage the best practices and economies of scale of IBM's own award-winning internal Procurement function in support of our clients.

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Hosted by: Neil Turner, Business Transformation Consultant, IBM Global Business Services Length: 7 minutes, 46 sec

According to IBM's own research, CIOs in the UK recognise three primary business challenges; (a) Meeting and responding quickly to the demands of the business, (b) Aligning IT with business goals and objectives and (c) Controlling IT costs by becoming more cost effective / efficient. But, how do you demonstrate that you are meeting business needs, that your IT organisation is responsive, or that you are controlling costs effectively? Many IT organisations have little hard data to show how well they are performing and no knowledge of how that performance compares with their industry peers and competitors. Such knowledge would give any organisation an invaluable edge. IBM’s Application Development and Maintenance Benchmark service is a low cost entry service which enables CIO's to better understand how they compare with 'best practice' and hence how they can move to achieve their most effective service levels in Application Development and Maintenance.

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Hosted by: Steve Smith, Application Services Consulting Lead Partner, IBM Global Services. Length: 6 minutes, 49 sec

Do you think you could get more out of your Microsoft licences? Do you have issues with upgrading, synchronising or integrating software versions? Could you improve the value your investment in Microsoft technologies delivers to your business? In this interview, Mike Richards talks about how IBM's Microsoft practice can help you gain maximum business value from your Microsoft investment, and introduces a new IBM service offering, ‘Making Applications Smaller’. This offering helps to make applications more flexible and easier to develop and deploy, helps users have more say in the applications they use, and supports the development of applications that best meet business requirements.

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Hosted by: Mike Richards, Microsoft Services practice, IBM Global Business Services Length: 9min 58sec

Business functions want HR to support them with the rights skills, in the right place at the right time, to enable them to achieve their business goals. Yet IBM's experience at transforming HR services has confirmed that many do not have the organisation and systems to be able to provide the critical support their business needs. In short, HR must be able to deliver strategic insights, enabling the organisation to more effectively source, evaluate and motivate employees in an increasingly turbulent business environment.

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Hosted by: Ian Lyttle, Associate Partner , IBM Global Business Services Length: 6min 00sec

IBM's skilled Workforce Transformation consultants work together with our clients senior Human Resources and 'Line of Business' leaders to help them address the challenges of:

- How to differentiate and sustain critical skill needs from core and contingency needs
- How to identify, attract, develop and retain top talent
- How to shape recruitment and retention policies to strengthen the capabilities you most value
- How to get the most workforce value from contract staff and global partners
- How to use performance management, development and rewards to meet your real business needs
- How to connect people and knowledge to avoid duplication and enhance innovation
- How to control and improve time and attendance, scheduling and deployment, while enhancing the management of work

We work to achieve a sustainable workforce transformation, while maintaining focus on business as usual – what we often call ‘rewiring with the lights on’. Resultant benefits include:

- Improved utilisation & productivity
- Increased quality, timeliness & customer satisfaction
- Greater behavioural compliance & employee engagement
- Cost containment
- A more innovative, adaptive & agile work force

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Hosted by: Dr Stephen Haywood - Workforce Transformation Consultant - IBM Global Services - Human Capital Management Practice Length: 5min 18sec

Spend on third party goods and services represents a substantial cost to most organisations.  The associated processing of high volumes of transactions and increasing complexity in systems and purchasing arrangements can often result in payment errors.  Even in well controlled organisations errors occur.  IBM can help.  Our Spend Recovery services will enhance your cash flow and profitability by recovering cash that would simply be lost and will provide recommendations to prevent future errors.    Spend Recovery comprises a suit of procedures and analytical tests designed to identify payment errors arising from contract none compliance, taxation miscoding, miss-applied discounts and rebates, outstanding supplier credits, duplicate invoices, and pricing errors.  As a part of this consulting service, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of financial data to identify and recover erroneous payments.  We review transactional data for the previous four financial years using specialised analysis tools and proven recovery techniques.  Our Spend Recovery services is conducted within a structured, phased, methodology.  Each phase incorporates appropriate check points, risk management procedures and progress reporting.  The service will enhance your cash flow and profitability.  We recover cash that simply would be LOST.  Our consultants will conduct root cause analysis of each area of leakage and provide recommendations to prevent future errors.

Most importantly, our Spend Recovery service is conducted at entirely NO COST or financial risk by expert global recovery auditors.  We take our fee from the actual recovery made.  Typically we accomplish the initial analysis within a few weeks of obtaining the raw data.  The entire programme may be completed within three months.

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Hosted by: Neil Turner, Business Transformation Consultant, IBM Global Business Services Length: 4min 57sec

In July 2007, an independent research firm interviewed CIO’s around the world to gain a better understanding of their wants and needs. A common source of frustration and concern in all industries and regions was the need for more efficient and better quality testing to find and fix defects and performance issues before applications went into production. When you consider that fixing a defect in the production phase of a project can cost up to 95 times more than fixing it in the initial requirements phase it is easy to see why testing is attracting so much interest. Get it right and you can deliver all the benefits of new applications to the business. Get it wrong and the cost in terms of time, money and the impact on customer satisfaction amongst your business users can be astronomical.   But how do you know if your current test capability is up to scratch? Can you be certain that your testing practices are balancing efficiency with effectiveness to allow the delivery of robust, secure applications to timescales that meet business requirements?    Such questions might seem difficult to answer. Just how can you go about testing your test organisation?   One way, is to take the advice of an organisation with an impeccable track record in application testing; an organisation such as IBM. In addition to over 25 years’ experience of working with clients to help them implement testing solutions, as a global software supplier we also have our own requirements for a rigorous testing capability. We know the issues involved and the importance of getting it right and we would like to share some of that knowledge with you. This podcast will help you begin to understand the issues and help you move towards a solution.

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Hosted by: Ann Stuart, Senior Consultant, IBM Test Services Practice Length: 7 minutes, 49 seconds