Report Management Summaries

Linking social, mobile, and cloud July 2011 Catalyst Driven by changing business needs and global economic factors, organizations are starting to do things differently. Speed, agility, mobility, reuse, and innovation are the transformative factors forcing organizations to push aside old technologies and communication models to make way ... read more..

Managing application development, from Agile and cloud to embedded systems and mobile apps June 2011 Catalyst Application lifecycle management (ALM) is a process and philosophy as well as a software solution to support the process. After a period of relative stability, several factors are beginning to reshape ... read more..

Growth and change in the BI market March 2011 Catalyst The business intelligence (BI) software market continues to see rapid growth, driven by enterprises desire to maximize cost savings and identify revenue opportunities across all major industries. Key findings: BI is a growth industry that ... read more..

Delivering essential business protection and compliance January 2011 Catalyst Identity and access management (IAM) has become an essential part of the IT infrastructure for medium- to large-scale organizations. Its benefits of productivity and policy enforcement have been understood for some time, but it was widely regarded as a technology that ... read more..

Exploiting all of the organizations information assets January 2011 Catalyst As organizations address the requirements of faster and better decision making, they need enterprise search and retrieval (ESR) solutions, and tools that can deal with the rapidly increasing volumes of available information both within, and around the enterprise. To be ... read more..

Optimizing resources in a changing environment December 2010 Catalyst IT management needs to ensure that it is in a position to help the organization benefit from the opportunities that present themselves in an ever-changing environment, creating a flexible IT function that can exploit existing and emerging technologies to best advantage. Key Findings: ... read more..

Understanding the organizational, governance, and cost implications November 2010 Catalyst Cloud computing promises to tackles two hitherto irreconcilable IT challenges: the need to lower costs and the need to boost innovation. However, it will take a lot of effort from enterprises to actually make it work. Instead of moving their ... read more..

Driving value from next generation CRM October 2010 Catalyst As the main conduit between a business and its customers, customer relationship management (CRM) solutions continue to be an area of strategic importance both technically and strategically, and often are the first enterprise application area where new business practices and technologies ... read more..

Demolishing governance silos to reduce costs and improve alignment August 2010 Impact Todays typical IT organization has scant resources for supporting enterprise innovation. With 75% or more of the IT budget consumed by maintenance, there is little left over for IT to develop the software that helps enterprises ... read more..

Although Business Process Management (BPM) solutions were already beginning to gain a great deal of traction in the market, the global economic climate of the past year has created an even greater interest as organisations look to the products to help streamline their processes. Although this has mainly been by ... read more..

With the deployment of integrated communication services there is an opportunity for organisations to significantly improve employee productivity, augment business processes, and foster innovation. Key Findings A flexible service-centric approach to communications, to enable the exploitation of cloud computing and shared services, is becoming crucial. ... read more..

The demand for increased flexibility from an organisations IT capability is creating new challenges for IT infrastructure management. Much of this new demand is coming from the changing nature of operating in an increasingly interconnected global market, where an organisations performance is influenced by events that are mostly outside its direct control. The ... read more..

Corporate Performance Management (CPM) has been born out of the need to proactively manage performance for business optimisation. CPM can play an important role in controlling costs, optimising resources, and ensuring that business units are adding value. Business Intelligence (BI) has a crucial part to play in performance management, by ... read more..

The increasing financial and economic pressures that many organisations have found themselves facing recently have led to an intense pressure for IT cost savings. Organisations are no longer willing to make speculative investments in information systems without a clear understanding of the costs and measurement of the benefits. Today, a ... read more..

Organisations vary in the immediacy of their vulnerability to IT failures. Some start losing money the moment that a critical system becomes unavailable while others may be able to carry on with a near-normal operation for a considerable time. However, ultimately any substantial business is dependent on IT services. This ... read more..

Identity and Access Management (IAM) provides an indispensable set of tools that are essential in the continuing battle to maintain control over who and what can gain access to our systems and applications and the important information that they hold. To keep pace with changing business and operational circumstances the ... read more..

IT organisations are under pressure to develop an effective strategy and to deliver services that can support changing requirements. An architectural approach can offer a useful framework within which organisations can plan and execute IT strategy. (Summary extracted from Butler Group's Technology Management and Strategy Report published September 2008) IT ... read more..

The term 'Enterprise 2.0' has become the catch-all phrase that describes the wholesale change in enterprise IT thinking. Driven by changing business needs and social factors, organisations are starting to do things differently. Speed, agility, mobility, reuse, and innovation are the transformative drivers that are forcing organisations to push aside ... read more..

The purpose of SOA governance is to ensure that the investments in SOA deployments made by the organisation deliver the anticipated benefits both in the short-term and throughout their entire lifetime. SOA is intended to be a long-term architecture, so it is reasonable to expect that some of the resources ... read more..

According to research from Datamonitor, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has a market penetration of over 80%, with more than 40% of organisations planning to invest in new ECM systems or expand their solutions in the next two years. This means that many organisations that have already implemented Document Records Management ... read more..

These are challenging times, with organisations facing continuous change, including the shift to a more agile, virtual organisation, increasingly mobile workers, and the unremitting demands to increase productivity and lower costs. The requirement for a multi-channel IP network and unified communications to support all of an organisation's interaction and collaboration ... read more..

The market in systems management has evolved over recent years, the leading vendors have all integrated the ability to monitor and manage a variety of infrastructure components, from virtual servers to network switches, in to their solutions. The other major transformation has been the acceptance that IT departments need standardised ... read more..

Corporate, Social, and Environmental Responsibility (CSER) is now a core competence, which IT management must incorporate into their strategy and operations. CSER has become a significant issue for every enterprise, and is particularly pertinent for IT management which must focus on supporting the requirements of the organisation in this area. ... read more..

While most technology systems continue to be viewed by the business community as inhibitors of progress, rather than as innovative solutions capable of delivering agile operations, Business Process Management is being actively positioned as the exception to this rule. Business professionals continue to struggle with business and technology alignment issues, ... read more..

As organisations in both the Public and Private sector struggle to make their IT infrastructures less of an inhibitor of change and more of a vehicle capable of adapting to constantly-changing demand, so the concept of virtualisation has gained significant interest and momentum. In effect, IT infrastructure Virtualisation creates the ... read more..

The importance of providing key applications to remote workers and of extending business processes to distributed locations either through fixed or wireless communication technologies cannot be overstated. Enterprise mobility allows enterprises to improve processes, from removing the paper trail to getting invoices out faster. The availability of mobile devices and ... read more..

The need for IT to respond more rapidly to business change, the need for businesses to adapt more rapidly to changing market pressures, and the impracticality of replacing all current IT investments, have combined to require a fundamental rethink of IT architectures as expressed by Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). (Published ... read more..

The Internet is transforming society and business. The current wave of this technology revolution, called Web 2.0, followed the initial wave (Web 1.0) that collpased with the dot.com boom and bust. Today 'always-on', pervasive broadband is making access to the Internet easy enough for it to be no longer considered ... read more..

Whether an organisation views IT as a strategic capability involving significant investment, or purely as a support service to be delivered at minimal cost, the reality is that all are dependent on information systems as an integral part of many business processes. Effective IT Governance is therefore essential to ensure ... read more..

Some organisations look towards outsourcing to assist them in achieving their business objectives, and some prefer to retain the delivery of IT services in-house. However, Butler Group is seeing an increasing number of organisations not only using outsourcing to complement the services they are delivering in-house, but also implementing a ... read more..