In Depth

In Depth

Information management

• [email protected]: Spreadsheets and ERP – 50 years of software coding business

  Business software has been a rich field for IT professionals over the past five decades, and we are on the cusp of a new era of customers rolling their own for competitive advantage  Continue Reading

• From SQL to NoSQL – and back again

  We take a look at the suppliers behind the emergence of databases that organise web-scale datasets and the like – and the most recent set of upstarts dubbed NewSQL  Continue Reading

• NoSQL database technology finds use cases, but still minority sport

  From managing water meter data, through Bitcoin and video data, to web publishing, NoSQL database technology is finding real use cases. But it's likely to be stuck at 10% of the market for some time  Continue Reading

• NoSQL offerings from Microsoft and Oracle

  Cloud and big data applications have led to a new wave of NoSQL data stores. We look at what Microsoft and Oracle have to offer  Continue Reading

• For IBM, the answer is Watson. But what is the question?

  IBM is promoting its Watson natural language processing analytics technology as it tries to move its core business beyond technologies that it pioneered, but which have become commoditised. Will it fly?  Continue Reading

• My first IoT project: A guide for businesses

  We’ve all had a good giggle about having our fridges hacked – but now it’s time to get real. What are the first steps enterprises should take when implementing their first internet of things project?  Continue Reading

• Graph database technology starts to come of age beyond social media

  Graph databases, based on mathematics known for three centuries, are starting to yield value for businesses beyond Facebook and Twitter  Continue Reading

• Graph databases: Joining the dots

  We explore why the growth of graph databases could be pointing the database market in a new direction  Continue Reading

• Basel banking supervision edict stretches banks’ risk data governance

  What do banks require to meet BCBS 239: Principles for effective risk data aggregation and risk reporting?  Continue Reading

• How to tease out patterns in divergent data stacks

  Graph databases – the technology that links relations between datasets – will revolutionise the insights of data analytics  Continue Reading

• [email protected]: Data management – Five decades of prospecting for business value

  Data management and business intelligence have been at the heart of business value creation for decades. Read about how Computer Weekly has tracked their promise and tribulations  Continue Reading

• Combine data mining and simulation to maximise process improvement

  Data mining and computer simulation can be used together to better model and improve industrial processes, city development and other complex systems  Continue Reading

• Three steps towards a hierarchy of needs for smart cities

  Smart cities face challenges around network connectivity, standardisation and data governance, say IoT experts, and these needs must be met for them to flourish  Continue Reading

• IT to the rescue: How technology helps the UK deal with flooding

  Mobile technology, digital mapping and geographical information systems all played a part in ensuring public safety during this winter’s floods in the UK  Continue Reading

• Interview: How John Deere uses connectivity to make farms more efficient

  After pioneering the use of automated vehicle technology 15 years ago, farm equipment supplier John Deere is now going further, with its sights set on efficiency and sustainability, says sales VP Christoph Wigger  Continue Reading

• The rise of the robots in financial services

  Robo-advisers are crossing the Atlantic to find a space in UK financial services in the form of IT–dominated startups  Continue Reading

• HR analytics tools promise edge in war for talent

  HR data analytics is said to enhance hiring decisions, improve employee retention, and boost company performance. Fact or fiction?  Continue Reading

• Getting dirty with open source databases

  With many companies looking at more agile, open source alternatives to proprietary databases, how do you choose which is the best fit for your needs  Continue Reading

• How software drives safety in aerospace, healthcare, oil and gas

  Safety-focused industries have developed safety-critical software and services from which other sectors can learn  Continue Reading

• Digitisation connects customers to companies on a new level

  ‘Digital’ provides more ways for people and businesses to connect than ever before, and a transformed role for IT in businesses old and new  Continue Reading

• English Rugby Football League uses data analytics to boost performance

  Qlik data analytics and visualisation help coaches to hone players’ performance and protect their health and safety  Continue Reading

• Interview: James Bamford on surveillance, Snowden and technology companies

  Investigative journalist and documentary maker James Bamford was among the first to uncover the secrets of the US National Security Agency and its global surveillance  Continue Reading

• Natural language generation progresses from robo-journalism to finance

  While the robots are coming for journalists, might natural language generation also make inroads into financial, legal and medical analysis?  Continue Reading

• Are we seeing the death of search engine optimisation?

  As old-style SEO techniques head out to pasture, data analytics becomes a core capability for organisations’ web strategies  Continue Reading

• Van de Velde upgrades Infor ERP to boost e-commerce

  Lingerie manufacturer looks to upgrade ERP in the next 18 months to improve supply efficiency and reduce lead times  Continue Reading

• First steps taken on 'omni-channel' customer experience

  The future customer experience might be personalised, but there is a long road ahead yet  Continue Reading

• Does Cambridge University Hospital’s Epic project indicate NHS lacks capacity?

  Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust’s £200m eHospital project was seen as a model of how an NHS trust could revolutionise its IT, autonomously. A tale of over-ambition?  Continue Reading

• CW500: Tips for delivering success with DevOps

  To make DevOps work, organisations need to get rid of change request forms, make friends with change control management and get teams to communicate and share ideas  Continue Reading

• Is digital disruption a threat or an opportunity for banks?

  Banks have been relatively unaffected by the digital revolution that has transformed other industries – but that's about to change  Continue Reading

• Six CIO tips for business innovation with data

  First Utility CIO Bill Wilkins shares his advice for IT leaders about how to run data projects to deliver real business benefits  Continue Reading

• Ford reduces injuries with virtual assembly programme

  Ford is using computer-aided design to help reduce cases of productivity-sapping musculoskeletal disorders caused by the labour process  Continue Reading

• How technology is helping deliver aid to Syrian refugees in the Middle East

  The Syrian refugee crisis has engulfed the Middle East, but technology is proving to be an essential tool to help aid organisations support displaced people  Continue Reading

• Big data poses storage challenges in Australia and New Zealand

  Big data is like digging for gold, except you must keep every single rock. Computer Weekly unearths some of the main challenges facing those mining data  Continue Reading

• How Asean organisations are untangling big data storage challenge

  If organisations are to benefit from the promise of big data they must get on top of a legal and regulatory minefield when it comes to storing data. How are Asean IT departments navigating this?  Continue Reading

• Analytics helps Asean organisations read between the lines

  Asean organisations need to develop an enterprise-wide approach to analytics and draw on customer insight if they are to maximize the business value of data  Continue Reading

• Australian businesses running the numbers on analytics-driven customer service

  Australian businesses, such as the University of Adelaide, are gaining customer insights from large volumes of data through data analytics technology.  Continue Reading

• Why Pegasystems' CEO, Alan Trefler, has learned to think smaller

  Pegasystems has made its name supplying CRM, analytics and case management software to the world's largest companies. Now CEO Alan Trefler plans to use cloud computing to broaden Pega's appeal  Continue Reading

• Chief digital officer: The newcomer that’s here to stay

  If you’re waiting for the chief digital officer to disappear, you may have to wait a while  Continue Reading

• Appliances move well beyond the hype

  Simplicity and big data are driving appliance adoption while suppliers strive to integrate cloud services  Continue Reading

• Spark versus MapReduce: which way for enterprise IT?

  The younger, nimbler Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures. What is the pace, scope and scale of replacement?  Continue Reading

• Finding the right big data appliance for your business

  A big data appliance should be chosen carefully to ensure its value to the business warrants the expenditure  Continue Reading

• Councils explore options for online mapping tools

  Councils are drawing on Ordnance Survey, Google Maps and OpenStreet Map for online mapping. What’s the optimal mix?  Continue Reading

• Using SAP Hana as a data warehouse

  Enterprises are using SAP Hana for in-memory data marts and SAP Business Warehouse implementations that integrate with other data warehouses  Continue Reading

• Is the future of business predictive?

  Michael Feindt, CERN scientist and founder of a predictive analytics software house, sees a future of more automated business decision-making  Continue Reading

• EAT builds appetite for predictive analytics

  Food retailer EAT uses predictive analytics from Blue Yonder to cut food waste by predicting future demand better  Continue Reading

• Welsh Water billing replacement programme offers customers new tariffs

  Welsh Water (Dŵr Cymru) scooped a Computer Weekly award for a billing replacement programme for which it was its own systems integrator  Continue Reading

• British Gas Smart Metering consolidates data with Qlik on Hadoop

  British Gas Smart Metering has used QlikView dashboards on Hadoop data lake to gain single view of its business  Continue Reading

• Testing a four-million-user disaster recovery plan

  Preparing broadcaster MTG's websites for the Winter Olympics won Load Impact the 2015 Computer Weekly European Private Sector Award  Continue Reading

• Digital transformation needs business leaders to develop new skills

  A panel of experts discuss the capabilities business leaders and corporate IT need to develop for digital  Continue Reading

• CIO interview: CABI’s Andrea Powell on feeding the world

  CABI CIO Andrea Powell says the not-for-profit agri-science data provider aims to solve the world’s agricultural problems with data, structured and unstructured  Continue Reading

• How database virtualisation helped the European Bioinformatics Institute save datacentre space

  The European Bioinformatics Institute recently scooped the award for Best Datacentre Project at the CW European User Awards, and here's why  Continue Reading

• Oracle cloud makes headway in eastern Europe

  Oracle’s cloud services have been making headway in eastern Europe, including at Romania’s Banca Transilvania  Continue Reading

• Wearable tech proves business value hands-free and in field

  Wearable technology could make its mark in the enterprise in the near future, with hands-free police and military pilot projects already under way  Continue Reading

• Don't wait for EU regulation to practice good data ethics

  The EU is working hard to achieve a unified law on data ethics and privacy, but companies should look beyond just complying with the law to gain consumer trust  Continue Reading

• How Ordnance Survey will use 250 years of data to support startups

  Ordnance Survey is embarking on a project to foster startups, applying its vast repository of data to solving emerging challenges around urban spaces and smart cities  Continue Reading

• Business cases emerge from growing pains of Hadoop 1.0

  The hype around the early generation of Hadoop is giving way to the reality of business programmes based on Hadoop 2 and Apache Spark  Continue Reading

• Russian big data technologies evolve with one eye on US open source

  Russian data technicians have, until recently, shunned full-scale use of US-based open-source big data technology; but with one eye on it  Continue Reading

• Metropolis Studios runs music business expansion on FileMaker

  Metropolis Studios has turned to FileMaker 14 to run the functional and creative sides of its business, replacing SAP  Continue Reading

• Turning machine data into operational intelligence

  We look at how companies analyse server and security logs to tackle cybercrime and internal fraud, and optimise the user experience  Continue Reading

• Hotels.com turns to cloud and big data to drive up online holiday bookings

  Online hotel booking site explains how the use of public cloud and NoSQL database tech has benefited its business  Continue Reading

• Genomics England gears up IT for next phase of development

  Genomics England, the government-owned organisation aiming to map 100,000 genomes by 2017, has recruited its first patients. It is also assembling the building blocks of its long-term IT strategy  Continue Reading

• Using data analytics to deliver more personalised customer service

  Personalisation has been the goal for many retailers, but can the emergence of big data analytics be the solution they are looking for?  Continue Reading

• Email overload is killing the UK's economic productivity

  Mounting evidence suggests email is a blight on the UK’s economic productivity – but services outsourcing firm Atos has found a way to stem the tide  Continue Reading

• App development companies fight back against digital piracy

  How can digital companies protect their IP against a tidal wave of smartphone boosted piracy? Is digital rights management software effective enough, or is it better to adapt your business model?  Continue Reading

• Financial applications are on a journey to the cloud

  CFOs in Europe embrace cloud-based financial applications as a result of security and delivery model improvements  Continue Reading

• Death, taxes and data security audits

  According to Benjamin Franklin, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. In the business world, audits could easily be added to this list  Continue Reading

• NoSQL and NewSQL edge into Belgian railways and Austrian yellow pages

  NoSQL, NewSQL and graph databases are finding uses in mainstream European industry sectors from origins in US dotcoms  Continue Reading

• Local authorities band together to share enterprise software

  Local authorities in London and elsewhere in England are banding together to share enterprise software to cut costs, from the bottom up  Continue Reading

• Digital customer experience: Beyond the website

  Organisations are faced with the challenge of delivering their customers with an online experience that goes far beyond just a website  Continue Reading

• Augmented reality business applications start to get real

  Augmented reality applications have tended to be gimmicky marketing wheezes, but firms are starting to explore their business potential  Continue Reading

• Bill Binney, the ‘original’ NSA whistleblower, on Snowden, 9/11 and illegal surveillance

  Always a patriot: Computer Weekly talks to Bill Binney, the senior NSA official who blew the whistle before Edward Snowden  Continue Reading

• Apache Spark speeds up big data decision-making

  Spark, the open-source cluster computing framework from Apache, promises to complement Hadoop batch processing  Continue Reading

• DevOps spreads into mainstream corporate IT

  DevOps will shift from being a niche approach to application development and deployment, and move into the mainstream  Continue Reading

• European data protection efforts won’t make corporate life easier

  The European Union’s proposed General Data Protection Regulation will not make life easier for companies  Continue Reading

• Open Data Platform: the answer to a question no one asked?

  What should enterprise customers make of the Open Data Platform, an initiative by IT suppliers to establish common technologies for Hadoop?  Continue Reading

• Business intelligence gains ground in Italy’s manufacturing industry

  How Italian manufacturers Bticino and Raccorderie Metalliche are using BI to be more efficient and agile  Continue Reading

• Waste and traffic management apps come from internet of things

  For years, the fridge has been the poster boy for the internet of things, but lack of commercial availability raises questions about the future  Continue Reading

• NHS 111 shows how medical diagnosis can be computerised

  Can the logistical and financial pressures on the NHS be eased by software algorithms?  Continue Reading

• How building information modelling is changing the construction industry

  The Cabinet Office says that by 2016, “collaborative 3D building information modelling will be required on all government projects”  Continue Reading

• Five tech trends that will change the mobile world in the next 10 years

  Computer scientist Kevin Curran discusses some of the trends that will shape the future of mobile at Mobile World Congress 2015  Continue Reading

• Internet of things could make ERP flexible, intelligent and real-time

  To profit from all the data collected from the internet of things, future ERP has to be flexible, intelligent and give real-time information  Continue Reading

• Single inventory accuracy: the holy grail of retail

  The ability to accurately pinpoint where stock is at every point in the supply chain is one of the biggest challenges facing retailers today  Continue Reading

• Mobile apps bring benefits and problems for enterprises in Poland

  Mobile business applications are gaining importance in Poland as broadband coverage expands and smartphone and tablet use increases  Continue Reading

• Customer experience is big differentiator for organisations

  It has become hard for firms to stand out from the crowd in pricing, products or services. Now customer experience is the big differentiator  Continue Reading

• Travel Corporation finds data fast track with Informatica Cloud MDM

  The Travel Corporation has chosen Informatica Cloud to migrate on-premise systems and data into Salesforce.com  Continue Reading

• Polish companies face challenges with big data storage infrastructure

  As Polish enterprises embrace data analytics they face the challenge of big data storage that can handle rapidly growing and varied datasets  Continue Reading

• What are the options for electronic patient records in the NHS after NPfIT?

  Many hospitals lack comprehensive electronic patient record (EPR) systems. What are the options now, in the wake of the NPfIT disaster?  Continue Reading

• Chief data and digital officers rise to threaten the CIO

  Just as the most senior IT executive finally proves their worth, a new evangelist tries to take credit for all-things-digital: the CDO  Continue Reading

• SAP bets future on cloud in central and eastern Europe

  SAP’s turn to cloud services for the delivery of its business applications seems especially energetic in central and eastern Europe  Continue Reading

• Businesses dig for treasure in open data

  Open data, a movement that promises access to vast swaths of information held by public bodies, has begun getting its hands dirty, or rather its feet  Continue Reading

• Data analysts deploy Monte Carlo modelling gambit to fight West African Ebola virus epidemic

  Mathematicians are using data analytics to predict how the Ebola epidemic will spread so aid can be deployed effectively  Continue Reading

• Top 10 information management stories of 2014

  How SAP’s technology helped Germany win the football World Cup was 2014’s top information management story  Continue Reading

• Review 2014: Top 10 business applications stories of 2014

  This year’s top 10 business applications stories show an increasing corporate IT appetite for better collaboration between organisations  Continue Reading

• Dutch organisations gradually take up cloud HCM software

  While organisations in the Netherlands tend to use the traditional HR modules of the large software packages, some diversity is beginning to emerge  Continue Reading

• Inside the Digital Catapult, six startups at the forefront of data innovation

  The recently opened Digital Catapult in London’s Kings Cross is home to ambitious technology startups innovating around big data  Continue Reading

• Digital ad delivery firm Adstream uses Pentaho to add analytics edge

  Global digital asset management company Adstream turns to Pentaho’s data integration technology to mount its Adbank platform  Continue Reading

• Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust completes £200m Epic and HP IT project

  Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust completes its eHospital programme based on Epic software and HP hardware  Continue Reading

• Interview: Fujitsu CTO Joseph Reger on human-centric innovation

  Joseph Reger, Fujitsu's EMEIA CTO, discusses human-centric innovation and the need for responsible attitudes to technology  Continue Reading

• Unlock the business benefits of digitisation

  Analytics technology can help to transform the customer experience, but to achieve its full potential, IT and marketing must work together  Continue Reading

• Lyndsay Wise: Make self-service business intelligence part of your business

  Organisations must be more diligent in buying self-service business intelligence (BI) technology, says Lyndsay Wise, BI industry analyst  Continue Reading