The levels of inefficiency that many IT infrastructures are operating at today have become completely unsustainable. The constraints on IT spending, as well as the desire to reduce the environmental footprint of IT have increased the pressure on IT departments to become more prudent in the allocation of resources to technology requirements. Furthermore, many IT departments are approaching the physical limits of their legacy infrastructure. Enterprises need to become more efficient in order to scale up their services and satisfy business requirements.
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A significant proportion of today’s security solutions are not equipped to deal with the fraud based attack approaches that threaten the security of our core information systems. Managing the needs of a mobile workforce, sharing business and customer information between business partners, collaborative business projects, and the use of Web and Web 2.0 communications, all contribute to an open trading environment where traditional protection regimes are no longer capable of keeping business systems safe.
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The purpose of SOA is to provide a long-lived catalogue of services that deliver functionality of recognised value to the business. The services must be capable of being used (or 'consumed') in any valid context irrespective of differences in technology, and they must be capable of evolving as requirements change with the minimum possible impact on consumers or other services. The services thus provided form the foundation for adaptable systems that can support the organisation's need to stay agile in the face of changing market conditions, evolving business models, and ongoing technology innovation.
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When it comes to Enterprise Collaboration, many organisations remain 'land-locked'; restricted by the architectures, deployment models, and functionality of solutions that were conceived in another age - an age when there was no Web 2.0, no mobile Internet, no impending pandemic, and no economic crisis. Of those organisations that are trying to move ahead in the 'new world of work', many IT departments are struggling to keep pace with the rapidly-changing world of information worker solutions and with the consumerisation of collaboration technologies in particular. Web-native collaboration solutions are continuing to grow in popularity amongst the twenty-something 'net-generation', and these Internet-born offerings are now starting to cross over into the world of enterprise IT. The challenge for IT managers is to reap the benefit of the best aspects of these new tools, whilst avoiding the pitfalls that can arise from ignoring these possibilities altogether. Moreover, this must be achieved against a backdrop of shrinking IT budgets and increased expectancy.
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Modern businesses rely on enterprise applications like ERP and CRM to enable them to carry out the business of business, which makes those applications highly strategic and highly critical. Implemented over several years, modified and extended, tuned and customised, they represent substantial financial and intellectual property investments. They are valuable business assets that need to be managed as such. In challenging economic times it becomes even more important to nurture these evolving assets in order to increase their business value.
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The options available for building software applications have never been so wide ranging as they are today. This is largely to do with the impact of the Web, with different solution models available depending on user needs, from infrastructure to end device considerations. The most recent trend of cloud computing is also opening new possibilities that are lowering the cost barrier, increasing access to high performance computing, and also lowering the skill barrier for non-programmer information workers, whether in SMEs or departments in large organisations, to build business applications.
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In many markets and vertical sectors, the requirements for some kind of Business Intelligence solution are very real and pressing. Holding off for another year is not really an option, especially when the drivers are diverse, ranging from strategic to operational to legal.
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Whilst economic pressures have put the spotlight on short-term IT cost savings, of even greater significance is the longer-term emphasis on the strategic management of IT costs, as well as getting value from existing and new IT investments.
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Businesses must take complete responsibility for the full and proper protection of the information that they hold, but at the same time that information has little value unless it is openly available to users who have the correct access rights. To keep up with todays ever-evolving information-access landscape, Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions must provide the unchallengeable ability to control, define, and prove the access credentials of all groups and individual systems users, irrespective of their source or location.
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In any organisation large enough to deploy IT solutions, IT systems deliver substantial value through the automation of repetitive tasks; the synchronisation of interactions with customers, suppliers, and partners; the management of high-value and sensitive information and the delivery and analysis of this information on behalf of users; and increasingly the automation and optimisation of end-to-end processes and the enforcement of business and statutory policies. For each of these benefits, IT professionals have to be ready to answer the inevitable question: What happens when it goes wrong?
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In some circles, the terms ‘Enterprise Web 2.0’ and ‘Enterprise 2.0’ are used interchangeably to describe the application of Web 2.0 ideas and technologies in the enterprise; however, Butler Group believes that a clear distinction exists between the use of these two terms, and that this differentiation is important to maintain, as it enables a more meaningful discussion to be had when examining the future role of IT within the business.
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The IT strategy of many organisations has evolved over a period of time rather than been purposely defined, and in many cases is not actually documented. However, businesses and customers expect IT systems and services to meet the requirements of the organisation with the consequent need for translating the organisation’s objectives into IT strategy and capabilities, in order that together they can respond to the rapidly-changing environment. The adoption of an end-to-end architectural approach can help with IT strategy planning and execution.
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The number of SOA projects has accelerated to the point where SOA should be considered to be in early mainstream deployment rather than a ’bleeding edge’ approach to delivering IT systems. However, alongside the success stories there is also a significant set of organisations for which SOA doesn’t seem to be delivering the expected benefits. Typical problems reported are that services are not being reused and the business is not seeing the new level of IT agility that was promised. These symptoms, disappointing as they are, should not be taken as an indication that SOA does not deliver; rather they should be taken as a strong indication that the governance of the SOA initiative has not received the attention it deserves.
 
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We are now in the second wave of Document and Records Management, with many organisations that implemented DRM systems a few years ago now looking to replace or roll out their systems to a wider audience. The provision of solutions built on top of DRM systems has greatly extended the capabilities of DRM so that organisations are now able to bring together information from multiple sources –structured data as well as unstructured information – to complete tasks initiated by the DRM system.

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Traditionally data centres have been managed in silo’ed teams dictated by the historic differences between the technologies such as network, storage, UNIX servers, Windows systems, and mainframes; these silos have generated highly specialist resources and management tools, which do not easily integrate to provide an end-to-end perspective of the service IT is delivering to the business.

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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 needs has never been more evident.

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Corporate, Social, and Environmental Responsibility (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. The challenges of meeting these responsibilities have brought into sharp focus the need for IT to be more proactive, along with including the required capabilities into IT strategy and governance procedures. A more responsible agenda requires longer-term planning, and also brings new disciplines which potentially conflict with existing IT management goals.

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Within the average organisation working patterns and associated operational practises change on a regular basis. Modern business systems must be capable of responding to change as and when it occurs. Today’s leading Business Process Management (BPM) systems are capable of delivering information and service in a form and at a time that supports the everyday needs of the business and its users.

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The effect of changing social patterns on business models cannot be ignored, with more and more of the workforce now based away from head office. A growing proportion of the workforce is also becoming more mobile, meaning that organisations must cater for them in corporate and IT strategies. The expectation is that it will be possible to work remotely, roam freely, and be able to use any type of device. However, there is an increased business risk to this freedom, with the main issues being the security of information outside the confines of the office and the ability to effectively manage the wider environment.

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The convergence of three significant factors in the global economy have created the conditions that make IT virtualisation a technology that will become the dominant technology in data centres within the next two to three years: The need for organisations to reduce its energy consumption, which enables it to also reduce its carbon footprint; the increased importance of the ability to respond to market opportunities faster; and the increased shift towards automation as a means of reducing operational costs.

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SOA products are experiencing high growth, but the market is still focused on a low volume of high-value sales to large enterprises. A very large number of vendors are competing for market share by aiming to offer the broadest possible set of SOA infrastructure, targeting not just the runtime environment but also the analytics, governance, development and modelling. Driven by competitive pressure and the eventual saturation of the high-end market, SOA technologies will start to become commoditised. The tendency for user organisations to deploy SOA to underlie tactical projects as an alternative to making a long-term strategic commitment to SOA will also have a commoditising effect, and will provide a viable market for some of the smaller vendors that focus on a particular niche. This will also influence the types of features that users will look for in evaluating products.

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Rich Web Applications (RWA) are browser based Rich Internet Applications (RIA). They exploit new Application Programming Interfaces (API) in browsers that allow users to interact with a page on the Web as they would a desktop application. The conjunction of RWA, Web 2.0 for business (or Enterprise Web 2.0), and evolutionary changes in IT infrastructure like Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), are creating new opportunities for business. Butler Group believes building RIAs will become the default mode of application development in the future.

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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 multi-sourced model – that is, having a number of different providers deliver various aspects of IT requirements.

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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 that the delivery of IT services meets the requirements of the business, and policies and procedures must be in place to guide investment decisions, provide visibility into project progress, assess and mitigate risk, and measure the return against strategic objectives.

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Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is destined to be one of the defining IT paradigms of the next decade. It promises the delivery of IT services in a loosely-coupled way that is more flexible and better aligned with business needs than previous architectures. SOA is an architectural style, not a technology, which allows the creation and maintenance of an IT architecture that supports business services and business processes, and also rapidly adapts to the changes within them.
The adoption of SOA has significant potential to improve the value organisations derive from their IT investments, in terms of increased flexibility, improved use of assets, alignment with business objectives, and reduced integration costs. However, there is still a considerable degree of hype and misunderstanding around the topic, with consequent confusion as to the exact definition of a SOA, and more importantly, how to begin to realise these benefits.

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Documents, in whatever format they may exist, are an integral part of every business and institution. Indeed, organisations that cannot manage the production of documents effectively, efficiently, and diligently risk a great deal more than poor business performance.
To date, Electronic Document Management Systems have helped organisations improve internal efficiency; however, extending these systems to partners and stakeholders has proved much more difficult.
Internet connectivity now provides the information worker with incredible reach, but productivity is still constrained by the collaborative range of office productivity tools and ingrained working practices. The time has come for Document Collaboration to now move on from simple collaborative exchanges to sophisticated collaborative experiences.

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Enterprise Search and Retrieval (ESR) tools enable users to discover the most appropriate information from multiple information sources and repositories. The ability to aggregate information from across all of the corporate repositories through a single search, enables users to deliver a comprehensive view of all interactions with a customer, citizen, or business partner about a product or piece of news, or about all the activity related to a business process. This means that not only can better decisions be taken, but also that they can be taken faster, with less risk. This has a real impact for organisations across a range of industry sectors that have to be able to discover information speedily to address the requirements of compliance with a growing number of regulations and legislation.

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In a constantly changing business and social environment, organisations in both commercial and public sectors must continuously adjust priorities and react to internal and external demands. In the majority of cases, the IT function has been seen as an inhibitor of change, burdened by isolated systems, a lack of interoperability, and a poor track record of delivery. However, if organisations are to become truly agile, they must develop an approach to IT that incorporates flexibility in all aspects; from architectural design through to models of delivery.

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IT Service Management (ITSM) is evolving from the discipline of managing the infrastructure based purely on perceived technical requirements (for example, simply ensuring bandwidth is available), to managing the same infrastructure based upon organisational requirements (for example, ensuring bandwidth is available for those applications that are mission critical, and where necessary throttling bandwidth for non-essential applications or usage).

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Security and information protection are currently major concerns for organisations, and they are issues that consistently come out at the top of most lists when organisations are questioned on what their greatest technology concerns are, or what technologies they intend to implement over the coming months. In fact, in today’s multifunctional operating environments, where a variety of disconnected systems are deployed using various technology platforms, no organisation that is serious about information and user protection can expect to get away without having a good-quality, integrated, Identity and Access Management (I&AM;) strategy in place.

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Business Intelligence is a widely used and reasonably mature type of technology, and is based around the capture and use of the data that every organisation generates on a day to day basis. Other Reports, such as DQI, have shown how important it is to make certain that data is clean and accurate if it is to be depended upon as part of important business processes. However, this is only the beginning of using data in a more valuable way - the organisation also has to be able to delve into its data in order to capture and use intelligence.

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Enterprise Applications, typically represented by solution types such as Customer Relationship Management and Enterprise Resource Planning, can be described as being bundles of different functionality that are designed to interoperate in support of the organisation's activities. ERP is a good example, as it is intended to more effectively manage the flow of raw materials and stock that an organisation requires in order to operate cost-effectively, for example a manufacturer of shoes would need to keep track of the materials needed to make shoes and packaging, manage production costs, like payment of wages and paying for utilities and equipment maintenance, then need to keep track of deliveries to a point of sale, such as a store.

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Many businesses find that commercial software fails to meet their exact needs, and that they have to either develop their own software in-house, or pay experts to do this task for them - and in either case, software development has to be done. However, software development projects have a very poor track record, and tend to be delivered late and/or fail to meet the expectations of the business and its management. The larger the project, the greater the difficulties that are reported after it fails - good examples of this include most Government software projects, which tend to run millions over budget and then underperform spectacularly.

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Although every business invests money in its IT resources, it is often the case that these same businesses have very little idea if the investments have paid for themselves. Many companies tend to think of IT as being something that they have to spend money on to keep pace with their competitors, and can even resent the fact - the result being that IT is looked on as being a cost centre, something that has to be maintained, instead of a resource that could improve the company's ability to compete in the market place.

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E-mail has become a business critical application without which the organisation cannot function thanks to its integration with many enterprise applications, and its use as a form of communication. Despite the fact that e-mail is now the most commonly used form of business communication, is used in many contracts, and is widely accepted as evidence in litigation, control over the way in which it is used has not, in most organisations, reflected this growth in importance. It is the belief of Butler Group that the majority of organisations do not have an effective e-mail management strategy in place, and are therefore putting themselves at risk from litigation, non-compliance, and the theft of information from their own employees.

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The purchase and support of security technology is still viewed by many organisations as a necessary evil. It is often considered to be a non-productive drain on the IT budget, but can, if not correctly deployed, actually hurt the operational efficiency of the business. This is a sad state of affairs that Butler Group firmly believes has to change, and change very quickly. The existing scattergun approach to IT security that involves organisations deploying and utilising a range of point-based protection solutions is not good enough. It is inefficient, and often leaves security holes that are ripe for exploitation. For organisations that are really serious about protecting their corporate assets - which all organisations should be - whilst ensuring that their systems and networks remain open to authorised users, it is time to demand a better future from the suppliers of mainstream security solutions.

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The typical organisation is now extremely complex, with dozens of different applications, databases, and processes all trying to interoperate at once. Although the ideal scenario would be that all these different pieces would come together and act as a single, well-oiled machine, in reality the picture is very different - the pieces of the puzzle are more likely to interfere with each other, causing system failures and crashes, than they are to mesh together. This is a serious business problem, and various approaches have tried to solve it - some of the most recent involve the use of advanced technologies and business models, such as Service-Oriented Architectures and the Enterprise Service Bus.

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Document and Records Management (DRM) is now essential for all organisations in the Public Sector, to meet both the requirements of improving service delivery, and to address the compliance demands for transparency. Whilst the technologies that can support DRM in the Public Sector are identical to those used in other verticals, the multiple agendas faced by Public Sector organisations, and the issue of changing the cultural attitude to the value of information contained in documents or records, presents significant challenges for those charged with implementing DRM solutions. However, the Public Sector in general will have a much better developed Records Management (RM) function than the private sector for its existing large volumes of paper records, and it is much more likely that a piece of information will be considered a record from the time of its creation, ranging from a speeding ticket, to the Project Initiation Document for the construction of a national arena. Consequently Public Sector organisations are more likely to have Records Managers in place, to support the processes of RM, and these skills are needed in DRM deployment.

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Butler Group does not believe that organisations in general have a clear understanding of their obligations, under current and pending regulations, to keep electronic copies of information, such as e-mails, as well as hard copy, such as letters and faxes. This is leading to confusion as to whether information should be kept at all, and if so for how long it needs to be retained. In our opinion, the only effective way to safely retain information, in a format where it cannot be altered, is to implement a Document and Records Management (DRM) solution. Unfortunately few organisations outside of the public sector have even a basic understanding of Records Management (RM), and how this differs from Document Management (DM) - the Report explains the important differences between these apparently similar disciplines.

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The typical business generates huge amounts of data on a daily basis, and until recently the way to deal with this rising amount of stored data seemed to be simple - keep adding hardware, so that the storage limit could be increased. However, this approach has not worked - all that has happened is that organisations have dug deeper and deeper holes into which their data can fall and be lost. Simply adding storage in this manner does not ensure that the data being stored can be searched or retrieved when needed, and it has become obvious that the missing piece of the puzzle is management.

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There can be many advantages to Exploiting Corporate Information Assets (ECIA), as the concept of information usage touches every operational aspect of the organisation. In theory, therefore, it is possible to feed captured information back into processes at almost any point in order to make them more informed and intelligent. Obvious examples of benefits include the ability to learn more rapidly from mistakes, react more dynamically to shifts in the market, and increase productivity in areas such as collaborative development of new products and services. The value proposition for an ECIA information strategy will certainly vary from organisation to organisation, and one of the intentions of this Report is to provoke thought on which operational areas would benefit the most from such an initiative.

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IT Performance Optimisation (ITPO) is concerned with extracting optimum performance from IT in the broadest sense, from software applications, to the hardware they run on, through to basic IT infrastructure such as the network and servers, and services provided in support of IT. However, optimisation is only one aspect of management, which also includes administering and maintaining control over IT in order to deliver services. In this report we will use the term IT Performance Management (ITPM) where we wish to describe IT performance in the broadest sense, and use the term ITPO when we wish to emphasise the extraction of maximum performance and value from IT.

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Businesses have failed, and will continue to do so, because they fail to make the management and control of data quality and integrity issues a top priority. Whilst outright business failure may seem extreme, the billions of Euros squandered by large organisations on resolving problems that can be blamed on the quality (or lack thereof) of their data is an undisputable fact. Associated costs present themselves in many ways, such as lost revenue stemming from customer discontent and a failure to recognise new opportunities, wasted resources including poor stock control, inventory management, shipping wrong goods, and the knock-on costs associated with having to correct such mistakes. This is not to mention the costs of data quality on decision-making, planning, and strategy formulation, which although difficult to measure, could clearly dwarf the operational impact.

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E-mail has become a business critical application without which the organisation cannot function thanks to its integration with many enterprise applications, and its use as a form of communication.Despite the fact that e-mail is now the most commonly used form of business communication, is used in many contracts, and is widely accepted as evidence in litigation, control over the way in which it is used has not, in most organisations, reflected this growth in importance. It is the belief of Butler Group that the majority of organisations do not have an effective e-mail management strategy in place, and are therefore putting themselves at risk from litigation, non-compliance, and the theft of information from their own employees.

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Although many organisations make use of operating systems (OS) such as Microsoft Windows, in its various flavours, or the enterprise-level variations of UNIX, in recent years a new OS has appeared to challenge the market domination of these systems – the open source platform, Linux. Linux has a mixture of advantages and disadvantages in comparison to its more well established competitors, for example whilst it is lower in cost to run and more adaptable in terms of being modified to respond to changing conditions (such as being modified to prevent a hacker attack), it can also be more difficult to operate, requiring a higher level of knowledge from administrators.

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Enterprise Applications, typically represented by solution types such as Customer Relationship Management and Enterprise Resource Planning, can be described as being bundles of different functionality that are designed to interoperate in support of the organisation's activities. ERP is a good example, as it is intended to more effectively manage the flow of raw materials and stock that an organisation requires in order to operate cost-effectively, for example a manufacturer of shoes would need to keep track of the materials needed to make shoes and packaging, manage production costs, like payment of wages and paying for utilities and equipment maintenance, then need to keep track of deliveries to a point of sale, such as a store.

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Most organisations will have elements of BI in place to help them analyse and understand historic performance and identify and track key trends. These organisations will also make varying use of budgeting and planning tools in order to project the future direction of the business in an attempt to predict or steer future performance. What is therefore needed is something to sit between these two elements, to have one eye on the past and another on the future, in order that performance against objectives can be clearly managed. In short, CPM brings these two areas together, giving the organisation a window onto performance - the ability to compare predictions, goals, and plan to operational execution.

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The compliance agenda - meeting the demands on business of legislation, regulation and adoptions of standards, is a bigger challenge now than ever. Corporate failures and fraud, from Enron to Shell, from WorldCom to Nortel, have demonstrated the requirement for legislation and regulation and governments worldwide will be placing companies under increasing scrutiny. There is no single IT solution that can meet this demand. A combination of technologies will be required, including the use of existing systems. They do however need to be brought together in a framework, which aligns the Information/IT strategy to that of the organisation itself and looks to the long term goal of reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of systems and services.

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Corporate and accounting scandals at Enron, WorldCom, Parmalat and others, have contributed to (if not accelerated) enhanced legislation and regulations on both sides of the Atlantic, placing both public and private sector organisations under increasing scrutiny. It is imperative to the success of an organisation that it is in a position to comprehend and assimilate regulatory change in a manner that ensures both compliance and the future of the business or delivery of public services.

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This is a time of major change in software licensing. Buyers have the opportunity to obtain the flexibility and choice that they want from vendors. However, in order to be able to negotiate from a position of strength, organisations need up-to-date information and metrics about their software products and their usage. Software Asset Management (SAM) solutions are key in providing such data, and in ensuring that organisations are compliant with their software licences. Software piracy is painful for both organisations and individuals that are found guilty of non-compliance, and it is a significant drain on the well-being of the whole IT industry. If enterprises do not have a SAM or similar solution, they need to undertake an immediate review of their software licensing.

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These are challenging times, with organisations facing continuous change, including the shift to an agile e-business, increasingly mobile workers, and the unremitting demands to increase productivity and lower costs. The requirement for a multi-service IP network to support all an organisation's communication needs has never been more evident. Forget the hapless attempts by the telecommunication industry to persuade you of the merits of technologies such as Voice Over IP (VOIP), or Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). Convergence is not about the deployment of these or other technologies in isolation, but involves integrating communication services with existing applications to exploit both cost savings and, equally as important, enable new revenue generating opportunities.

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For how much longer can the IT tail wag the enterprise dog? To remain competitive organisations must urgently address the growing dislocation between the business requirements and IT deliverables. This issue is directly impacting the enterprise’s ability to make quick, accurate decisions and causing the slow implementation of the determined course of action. The gap between IT capability and business needs cannot be allowed to continue. Adoption of an end-to-end Enterprise Architecture approach will help to re-align IT developments with business objectives.

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The increasing financial and economic pressures many organisations in both the public and private sectors alike have found themselves facing over the past two years have lead to an intense pressure for IT cost savings. Although the public sector is familiar with these pressures, it has come as a shock to many private sector companies, and quite frankly it is yet another initiative the already overworked IT manager has to face.
Even as IT budget constraints are eased, the heady days of the late 90s cannot be expected to return. It is Butler Group’s belief that IT has matured as an industry, and that the demand for closer alignment between IT and business strategies will see much closer scrutiny of future IT projects. Organisations are no longer willing to make speculative investments in information systems without a clear understanding of the costs and measurement of the benefits.

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BPM concerns the software and tools required to model and execute an organisation’s business processes, through the orchestration and integration of the necessary people, systems, applications, and application components.
Business processes are the defining characteristics of a particular organisation – they control and describe precisely how business is conducted internally and externally, in terms of data and information flow, and the interactions between individuals and the organisation. This can relate to customers placing an order, goods requisition from partners and suppliers, or employees updating internal systems. It is the responsibility of the organisation to deploy applications and solutions that support or facilitate these complex business processes.

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IT Governance is not a state; it is a process, an ongoing undertaking that will constantly be redefined. IT Governance is inherently tied into corporate or enterprise governance, and will both reflect and help shape the changes that organisations undergo over a period of time. IT Governance cannot be implemented per se, but it can become part of the organisational culture, and there are numerous tools, technologies, and methodologies available to assist in the cultural changes that IT Governance process brings.

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As the use of IT within organisations matures, for many non-technical executives, application development still seems a very hit-and-miss affair. There is a frustratingly high incidence of IT project failures, where projects are either abandoned or delivered way over budget and without the required functionality. Technology itself is rarely to blame for this failure, with a few notable exceptions, and IT managers are often at a loss as to how to improve things. There is great pressure to buy new tools to help developers become more productive, and yet coding only takes up 20% of the entire application development lifecycle. Improvements in productivity may have little effect other than getting to failure faster if they are not combined with improvements in the process of development. Butler Group believes that a formal, documented, application development strategy is an essential part of the overall process of IT governance.

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Collaboration tools have failed to address the fundamental requirements of the organisation. Part of the problem is that the term itself has been misused and this Report describes what companies need to do to achieve efficient Workgroup and Enterprise Collaboration. Workgroup and Enterprise Collaboration refers explicitly to the use of collaboration-facilitating tools and processes within the organisation.
The remit for such solutions has clearly changed – organisations no longer want or need a series of disparate and standalone products for, messaging, file and document exchange, virtual workspaces, conferencing, and presence detection and awareness. Solutions have to be delivered that directly address the problems facing the organisation. This requires flexibility, customisation, and adaptability both from a technical point of view, and from that of the business culture.

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In a constantly changing business and social environment, organisations in both commercial and public sectors must continuously adjust priorities and react to internal and external demands. In the majority of cases, the IT function has been seen as an inhibitor of change, burdened by isolated systems, a lack of interoperability, and a poor track record of delivery. However, if organisations are to become truly agile, they must develop an approach to IT that incorporates flexibility in all aspects; from architectural design through to models of delivery.

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With so much emphasis given by the press and industry commentators on the new and the exciting, the possible and the future, it is sometimes easy to forget that the way forward will be built on the tried and tested, the here and now, Although over the last 25-30 years there has been much that has been considered revolutionary within IT infrastructures, there is far more that has been evolutionary. Evolution is the natural way forward, and when revolutionary comes under close scrutiny there is, in nearly every instance, a strong evolutionary element. Asked to name the greatest change within IT in the last three years, most respondents would highlight the growth of XML and Web services. Yet both these ‘radical’ changes that will impact the world of IT and business for many years to come have been built on proven technologies and models. XML evolved from SGML with HTML forming an important mid-point between the two. Web services are a natural evolution of Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) technology, XML, component-based development (itself reliant on the understanding of the development and behaviour of objects), et al.

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Integrated Business Intelligence (IBI) is Butler Group’s term to encapsulate a more advanced and strategic view on the deployment and use of BI technologies. IBI is the subject of this new Butler Group report that looks at how the technology should be applied across organisations, in order to support the strategy and goals of the organisation. It considers the benefits of enmeshing BI into the fabric of the business, and of delivering a culture of collaborative decision-making and information exchange, as dictated by business processes and organisational structures.

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Butler Group regards content to be the greatest asset of an organisation, yet it is something that in the past has been taken for granted. With data volumes doubling year on year, Butler Group believes that the lack of content management is already damaging the profitability of many organisations. Intense competitive pressures mean that any delay in publishing content can provide a competitor with an advantage.

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Network security is not the complex issue it has often been made out to be. It is, however, crucial for the well-being of any organisation with its network connected to the outside world. Companies need to protect themselves from external (and internal) attacks, whilst simultaneously running the business efficiently and effectively. In order to achieve this protection a roadmap is required, derived from a study of current security compared to the network security necessary, in order to comply with the all-important corporate security policy. This Report examines the importance of the security policy, and the parts that the three technology areas of Anti-Virus, firewalls, and Intrusion Detection Systems can play in ensuring the network is as protected as possible from attack.

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The IT infrastructure is becoming more and more complex. The demands being put on the infrastructure by new advanced applications and technologies dictate that the complexities of today will soon be even greater.
The need for near 100 per cent up time is growing as global organisations find that this level of service is vital to the conduct of their business, as they respond to the requirements of their customers, business partners, and their own staff.

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Butler Group believes that the rapidly growing use of XML as a mainstream source and carrier of business information represents the greatest challenge that the database market has faced in the last 25 years. The vendors urgently need to face up to the fact that developing solutions that deal with XML as an addition to their core technologies is going to be insufficient to address an issue that is already starting to outgrow the technology that has been put in place to support it. The amount of content that is being delivered in XML form is growing rapidly, and systems need to be put in place that can handle the delivery, storage, management, and access at a higher level of granularity than is provided for in traditional relational database systems.

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Butler Group believes that the success of the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) standard has led to Application Servers becoming a commodity product. This in no way undermines the importance of the Application Server itself, which remains one of the key elements of any IT infrastructure, underpinning the quality of service that an organisation can deliver to its employees, customers, and business partners. It an is essential technology for both internal operations and external commerce, and whilst this will not change, the market for these products has evolved.
Application Server vendors are now seeking to differentiate their products on the basis of extended features, such as integration technology, application development capabilities, Web services support, content management, and wireless application delivery. Butler Group believes that organisations run the risk of adopting the wrong product or platform, without a clear understanding of what is on offer, and careful evaluation of the competing products.

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Butler Group believes that integration has become the number one priority for organisations as they strive to create a flexible IT architecture. However, despite the arrival of new technologies, and the assertions of vendors that their products can meet this challenge, research indicates that integration projects are substantially failing. To compound the problem, new initiatives such as CRM and Enterprise Portals, have imposed an additional burden, and organisations are struggling to move beyond an unmanageable jumble of quick-fix solutions. Integration has to be viewed as a business problem that has both a technical and a business solution. One of the major problems with current integration practice is that it tends to deal with the technical to the exclusion of the business. Only by aligning these two aspects can an organisation build an extensible integration framework, and central to this imperative is an in-depth understanding of the processes that drive the business.

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