Industry news

Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire police forces plan to merge their HR systems into one shared service.

The HR back office system will be provided by Capita in a £2.3 million contract over a 5-year period. The service will compile data for HR, duty management, health and safety and training for the combined three forces.

The combined shared service is expected to save the three forces around £900,000 per year. The back office system provided by Capita will allow for the future integration of payroll and accounting services in the future.

Deputy chief constable Peter Goodman, said: “For the police, a shared system means reduced costs, enhanced processes and effective business transformation.”

The government has admitted that the Communications Green Paper which was due to be published last year, has no fixed deadline.

The delayed Communications Green Paper which is meant to set the future policy for UK digital infrastructure and broadband is according to Ed Vaizey, minister for culture, still on track for publication by 2015. The Communications Green Paper is designed to set the regulatory framework for both the communications and media sectors aimed at pushing innovation and growth within the UK.

Ed Vaizey , said: “The Communications Review remains on course and, subject to the legislative programme, the government hope to introduce new legislation before the end of this parliament.”

The Welsh Government has published a report setting a target of £400 million in investment for delivering super-fast broadband up until 2015, for business and residents.

The report details funding of around £57 million from the UK government and £70 million from European sources, with the remaining funding coming from within the Welsh Government.

The report stated that Wales hoped to deliver high-speed broadband throughout the country by 2015, however the document failed to distinguish between what was classed as ‘high-speed’ or ‘super-fast’.

The Home Affairs Committee has expressed worry surrounding privatisation of IT services within police forces.

The Committee raised concerns regarding the procurement process, with Keith Vaz MP, Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, commenting that: “greater private-sector involvement are being taken without clarity over their scope."

The Committee criticised outsourcing being carried between Surrey and the West Midlands Police for lacking in clarity, while highlighting the e-Borders programme as an example of wasted money due to the failure to establish clear goals.

A survey carried out by mobile and internet service provider Everything Everywhere recorded that 86 percent of UK businesses believed 4G would increase productivity.

The research also recorded that 93 percent of businesses wanted a 4G service across the UK as rapidly as possible.

The research comes as 4G faces delays from UK mobile operators. Martin Stiven, vice president of B2B at Everything Everywhere, said: “Half of the countries on the F20 list of the world’s biggest economies already have 4G, leaving British businesses at risk of falling behind rivals.”

Global business services and management company Aegis have announced today the launch of Aegis Proactive Intelligence (Pi), a new state-of-the-art-solution, designed to drive management services.

Aegis Pi is capable of utilising real time data as well as historic in order to deliver new insights into data streams, from providing insight into in-depth operations to a global perspective, while remaining a mobile and user-friendly.

Aparup Sengupta, MD and Global CEO, Aegis said, "Aegis Pi empowers organisations to predict business challenges before they arise and act pre-emptively to mitigate their impact.”

The government’s G-Cloud is growing, increasing in both size and scope after the success of the first framework rollout. The second framework of the G-Cloud, designed to provide the public sector with the benefits of cloud sourcing was announced last week, coming on the back of the release of the second iteration of the Cloudstore.

The G-Cloud was designed to reduce criticism of the public sector, which was widely seen to be failing in offering cost effective contracts for tenancy, combined with a view that big business won out against SMEs even in cases where they had not presented the best proposal.

Government Cloud Store Goes Live

The first framework, released in February, saw 257 suppliers sign to the service offering around 1,700 services to the public sector with over 50 percent of the suppliers being SMEs.

The G-Cloud model is one of constant re-releases in order to rapidly update the framework and ensure that the procurement service keeps up-to-date with changes in technology, while providing a rapidly updating service.

Whitehall has already released examples of where according to the government the G-Cloud has been successful. The NHS Central Southern Commissioning Support Services (CSS) employed the services of INOVEM Collaborate software in order to increase communications and collaboration. Natural England (NE)has also bought an e-tendering SaaS product from supplier Bravo Solutions and gave positive feedback regarding the simplicity of buying services via the cloud.

Michael Bateman, G-Cloud office support and ‘personal shopper’, said in regards to NE: “When we discussed using G-Cloud they were ‘very pleased with the experience’ and felt ‘it’s a fantastic framework, very easy to use’.”

IMGROUP, a member of the G-Cloud supplier community, have seen an increased demand on the services they provide via the G-Cloud. Jeremy Neal, Head of Online Services at IMGROUP, when interviewed by Sourcingfocus.com, commented that he expects the service “to become a central point for public sector procurement, augmenting and in some cases replacing legacy buying frameworks. The public sector now has the means to leverage the benefits of cloud computing, taking advantage of the greater agility and breadth of choice offered by the G-Cloud market”.

Jeremy Neal anticipated that the G-Cloud would become “the new normal” in IT services and that users have “yet to see the tipping point that delivers this market reality, but it will happen. The prevailing economic climate presents the same clear business case for the cloud in every sector”.

Business undertaken through the Cloud is increasing however users still want to see proof of purchase before contracts are undertaken through the service. The G-Cloud has faced challenges from both security concerns and in persuading departments from using the service efficiently.The G-Cloud represents a new service with issues still existing that require refinement.

Challenges of the G-Cloud

The G-Cloud is expected to cost £4.93 million including the CloudStore, with expected savings to amount to £340 according to Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude. The actual cost of the G-Cloud ranks as a very inexpensive project when compared to past public sector IT contracts. While still early days the G-Cloud seems to be experiencing success in offering multiple vendors in an open market through an intuitive service.

In my last blog, I examined how electronic data interchange (EDI) and digital signatures fare against one another when it comes to data processing and integration. In this blog, I will examine how effective EDI and digital signatures are for archiving e-Invoices and enabling human readability.

Buyers and suppliers within member states of the European Union are required by law to store electronic invoices for a set period of time and this timeframe varies from country to country. This VAT regulation applies for all forms of electronic invoices, regardless of their format, and so this includes both signed and unsigned EDI as well as digitally signed documents. While there are some country-to-country variations in the length of time for which invoices are stored and what information is required, the archival of e-Invoices must follow the overarching European law. As this regulation pertains to all electronic formats, neither EDI nor digital signatures have the advantage when it comes to archival.

However, the difference between the two lies in the fact that the documents have to be presented in a human readable format upon request of the tax auditor. Digitally signed PDF format documents are often already human readable by default, and when XML-based standards are used, human readability is easily achieved through style-sheets.

On the other hand, non-XML EDI must be converted through a rendering tool, typically in real-time, and historically, there was confusion in some countries as to whether EDI must be printed to paper for storage as a compliant invoice.

So, digital signatures are easier to present in a human readable format, but in order to remain compliant with European VAT regulations there are a number of other key considerations that cannot be ignored. It is important that your e-Invoicing solution can store data within a secure environment, provide, upon request, an audit trail of transactions in order to prove that the invoice was processed and delivered without any modification. Your e-Invoicing solution must be able to swiftly provide auditors with information relevant to demonstrate compliance with the necessary regulations, without consuming excessive time and resources.

The Relationship Manager (RM) will play a pivotal part in ensuring the smooth running and therefore, the performance of business-to-business relationships. The RM will be responsible for developing, implementing and then maintaining the collaborative business relationship management process throughout the organisation and becomes the repository for knowledge and experience in collaborative working.

Externally, the RM manages the relationships with networks of organisations, often involving dependencies. It is likely that this web of relationships is highly complicated. Where you find strong relationship management there is less friction and scattering of resources which allows the partner organisations to move forward and achieve their aims.

Central to the RMs role is synchronizing work with his/her opposite number(s) in partner companies. An appropriate level of authority is essential to enable this to happen. This good governance involves consistent management, cohesive policies, guidance, process oversight and leadership. Regular meetings will discuss past performance, current issues, forecasts and plans. Actions will be agreed, resourced and monitored and people assigned will be held to account for their area of responsibility. The overall aim is to maintain the relevance of the joint enterprise in line with objectives and against a background of changes in the external environment. When the relationship comes to an end, the RMs will work together to facilitate an orderly exit.

The BSi’s Collaboration Standard – BS 11000 offers a ready made framework for managing business-to-business relationships. It provides a motive for maintaining your processes at peak performance and is a mark of a quality organisation which can give you a competitive edge.

The guiding principles are as follows:

1. Business as usual – Relationship management is an integral part of your business and should not be seen as a ‘bolt on’.

2. Seek authoritative advice – Decide how the value of your collaborative relationships can be improved.

3. Review what you do – Identify the things you need to do to improve the way you work with your partners.

4. Talk to your partners – Discuss and agree an improved structure for working together.

5. Implement and document – Jointly start doing what you agreed and keep records.

6. Manage the on-going relationship – Stick to the principles.

7. Continuous improvement – Make performance improvement inevitable by frequently reviewing with your partners how you are working together.

Good relationship management has the capability to give you startling results. Do as little or as much as you need to do and the increase in business performance will repay your investment many times over.

Although relationship management is an iterative process that moves around the Relationship Management Cycle and can be entered at any point, in practice it does have three distinct operational phases. These are the Decision Phase (choosing a partner), the Operations Phase (working together) and the Exit Phase (a clean break) which we will cover in our next three blogs.

About the Authors

Andrew Humphries and Linda McComie are acknowledged experts in the field of business relationship management. Their company, SCCI Ltd, specialises in transforming business relationships and alliances around the world into more effective and efficient revenue generating operations.

Wipro has partnered with analytics software developer Quiterian in ordered to provided advanced customer analytics applications to its global client base.

Quiterian will provide self-service software, allowing Wipro customers to incorporate date from multiple sources including email data, social media, and web based information. The service is designed to be used by non-technical users in order to allow for analytic enhanced decision making.

Wipro Technologies Analytics and Information Management senior vice president, K.R Sanjiv, commented: "It will enable us to provide customer insight solutions leveraging capabilities of Quiterian Analytics,"