In Depth

In Depth

Information management

• CIO Interview: Gary Steen, CTO, TalkTalk

  Gary Steen, CTO at ISP TalkTalk, says transforming internal IT will help him meet growing demands for superfast data connectivity  Continue Reading

• Cloud applications spread across IT in Italy

  The cloud computing market is growing in Italy. Research from the Politecnico of Milan shows cloud investment in 2013 is at €1.18bn  Continue Reading

• UCAS uses Splunk to get real-time data on A-level results day

  The day when A-level results come out is a dramatic occasion for UCAS’s IT team, which uses Splunk to troubleshoot the network  Continue Reading

• Data analytics adds science to the valuation of footballers

  How do you decide the value of a footballer? The problem has been given added torque by the vogue for applying data science to sports  Continue Reading

• IT governance in the era of shadow IT

  The latest CW500 Club invited IT leaders to discuss the challenges of governance with the rise of 'shadow IT' outside the IT team  Continue Reading

• Wearable technology will up the game for sports data analytics

  Wearable technology is a big industry thanks to the ‘quantified self’ movement. It’s now giving a boost to professional sports data analytics professionals  Continue Reading

• BlackLine promises to end financial closing spreadsheet nightmare

  Financial closing is a monthly headache for many, the “last mile of finance”. BlackLine Systems’ SaaS promises agility beyond spreadsheets, and is a part of SAP’s ecosystem  Continue Reading

• In-memory database technology puts Mitie and Wooga in the fast lane

  Mitie uses IBM Cognos running on a DB2 Blu in-memory database taking data from Oracle. And gaming firm Wooga is using Exasol to speed up design  Continue Reading

• Channel 4 Grand National app lets punters track horses

  When Channel 4 won the rights to screen the Grand National it decided to use mobile to take the mystery out of the magnificent chaos of the event  Continue Reading

• Big data storage: Analytics takes small first steps in Turkey

  Etiya’s Somemto social media management project makes pioneering steps in big data with a Hadoop cluster on an Oracle Big Data Appliance.  Continue Reading

• Morrison Utility Services fills in holes faster with ETAdirect

  Morrison Utility Services is digging and filling in holes in the road more efficiently by using cloud-based mobile workforce management tool ETAdirect from TOA Technologies  Continue Reading

• Data mining evolves in the era of new data science

  As more and more firms look to analyse ever larger datasets, so data mining technology is becoming increasingly critical to data scientists  Continue Reading

• Analytics scours World Cups for greatest footballer of all time

  Sports data company Opta’s analytics of every World Cup finals match ever played since 1966 adds to the debate on who is football’s greatest of all time  Continue Reading

• HP Autonomy executive: big data transcends analytics

  Robert Youngjohns, executive vice-president at HP, speaks to Computer Weekly about why big data does not reduce to analytics  Continue Reading

• Soundwave tunes to MongoDB to track music consumption on mobile

  Irish startup Soundwave is using NoSQL database MongoDB to help it track what people are listening to on mobile devices  Continue Reading

• Unilever puts SAP at the captain’s table

  Consumer goods company Unilever works hand in glove with SAP in “speeding up its growth”, according to senior executives at the two firms  Continue Reading

• Talent management software revives stale HR practices

  A new generation of cloud-based talent management software promises to bring the performance review back from the dead  Continue Reading

• Making pancakes: How Russia plans a technology sector to rival Silicon Valley

  The Russian government is putting £10bn into the Skolkovo Innovation Centre – an ambitious project to create Russia’s equivalent of Silicon Valley  Continue Reading

• Standard Life blazes savings trail with Oracle Fusion

  Standard Life has generated £8m in cash savings on a £12m investment in Oracle Fusion applications but wider market take-up has been slow, says Forrester  Continue Reading

• IFS ERP investment underlies port firm’s growth

  PD Ports has seen its traditional markets in chemicals and heavy industry dwindling. It aims to diversify, supporting retail sector and renewable energy. It chose IFS for its new ERP  Continue Reading

• Keeping your corporate data in sync

  For collaboration to thrive, the appropriate tools need to be in place, and perhaps the most important is data synchronisation  Continue Reading

• Cloudera v Hortonworks: Hadoop to complement or replace data warehouse?

  As the market for enterprise Hadoop heats up, the battle lines between two suppliers - Cloudera and Hortonworks - become more clearly defined  Continue Reading

• Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust secures government backing for £6m IT modernisation programme

  CIO interview: Joanna Smith, CIO. Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust  Continue Reading

• Write-through, write-around, write-back: cache explained

  Cache is vital for application deployment, but which one to choose – write-through, write-around or write-back cache? We examine the options  Continue Reading

• Supplier profile: Workday

  Computer Weekly analyses the strengths and weaknesses of the rapidly growing cloud HR and finance software company, Workday  Continue Reading

• Nordics lead initiative to share European patient records data

  The Nordic countries have played a leading role in epSOS, an EU project to establish infrastructure for patient records data exchanges  Continue Reading

• Undercover economist Tim Harford decries data visualisation dazzle

  The Undercover Economist author says 200 years of statistical science should not be cast aside for the blandishments of ‘big data’ propagandists  Continue Reading

• Bywaters waste management uses BI to improve customers’ recycling

  Bywaters, a recycling and waste management company, has improved productivity by 4% using Pentaho data integration and business intelligence software  Continue Reading

• Messier-Bugatti-Dowty gears up BI with QlikView toolbox

  Messier-Bugatti-Dowty, an aviation industry specialist in aircraft landing and braking systems, is using QlikView to support business process improvement  Continue Reading

• Check the state of network security and stay safe

  Many organisations are planning to increase their investment in proactive security controls and threat intelligence measures.  Continue Reading

• Accenture’s UK analytics head sees clients reorganising for digital

  Ray Eitel-Porter is managing director of analytics for Accenture UK & Ireland. He talks to Computer Weekly about how data management has assumed a more elevated strategic role as companies go digital  Continue Reading

• IT security analytics: the before, during and after

  Effective IT security calls for intelligence ahead of, during and following an attack.  Continue Reading

• Using NoSQL databases to gain competitive advantage

  NoSQL is attracting growing interest from businesses - we examine three case studies: Amadeus, i2O and Temetra  Continue Reading

• Mölnlycke Health Care and Axfood demonstrate divergent ERP strategies

  Two Swedish firms, Mölnlycke Health Care and Axfood, demonstrate divergent ERP strategies - one standardised, one customised  Continue Reading

• The private sector answer to exploiting public sector data

  The big IT suppliers emphasise the importance of transparent governance and maximising the benefits of open government data.  Continue Reading

• The digital CIO: How digital technology will change the way organisations work

  If you are an IT leader, digital technology is likely to be a pivotal factor in your career over the next five years  Continue Reading

• The digital CIO: How digital technology will change the role of IT leaders

  We have now reached the point where corporate IT as we know it will succeed or fail  Continue Reading

• Using public sector open data to benefit local communities

  Tech City’s Flood Hack shows how open data can help communities - an aspect attracting interest in Leeds council and other UK cities.  Continue Reading

• Big data storage in the Benelux

  Organisation in the Benelux countries are turning to big data analytics, but big data storage options can vary significantly between the lab and production environments  Continue Reading

• How open data can mitigate the floods of the future

  Live, open government data – collated on third-party platforms – can change peoples’ lives profoundly in a wide variety of ways.  Continue Reading

• Hadoop 2 opens new vistas beyond current UK data management practice

  Hadoop 2 enables a greater range of data-crunching tasks, beyond Hadoop’s previous scope of batch processing, directly within the stack itself  Continue Reading

• Uppsala Ambulance, Dagens Nyheter favour Swedish-born QlikView for BI

  Sweden has played a big part in data visualisation tools. QlikTech, NComVA and Tibco Spotfire have roots there. Uppsala Ambulance and the Dagens Nyheter newspaper are QlikView users  Continue Reading

• Advanced data visualisation tools transcend traditional bean counting

  Advanced data visualisation tools take Muddy Boots and Volvo beyond conventional business intelligence  Continue Reading

• What does 2014 hold for HR technology?

  A look at the key battlegrounds in HR technology in 2014  Continue Reading

• Cloudera CTO: enterprise ‘data hub’ is smartphone to data warehouse SLR

  Amr Awadallah is the chief technology officer and a co-founder at Hadoop distributor Cloudera. Here he briefs Computer Weekly on how the supplier is advocating the concept of an ‘enterprise data hub’  Continue Reading

• SAP execs predict more innovation as economic outlook improves in 2014

  SAP executives are looking to 2014 as a year to establish the supplier’s innovation agenda of in-memory database technology, cloud and mobile  Continue Reading

• Minerals firm Imerys upgrades IFS ERP as economy lifts

  Imerys has 30 different ERP systems around the globe. A plan to move to a single instance of ERP, thrown off course by recession, was achieved in 2012; other business benefits have accrued  Continue Reading

• Top 10 information management stories of 2013

  Top 10 information management stories of 2013. Putting analytics to work emerged as the most popular theme, with Tesco, McLaren, and Telefonica Ireland among those leading the data analytics pack  Continue Reading

• Optimising application performance with flash storage

  At a Computer Weekly roundtable, IT leaders heard how Cancer Research UK achieved a 30% improvement in application performance  Continue Reading

• Procter & Gamble uses Teradata cloud analytics for global marketing

  Procter & Gamble has 15,000 websites, but sells almost exclusively through retailers. This makes gathering intelligence on customers tough  Continue Reading

• Future Gazing: The Future of IT in 2020

  The next six years will see the influence of technology accelerate, and that will mean radical changes for the role of the IT department and the CIO  Continue Reading

• Failure to invest in sentiment analytics could lead to brand damage

  Early adopter companies in retail and investment banking are exploring social media sentiment analytics  Continue Reading

• Tryg and Scottish Widows improve customer response with analytics

  Tryg Insurance uses Portrait, and Scottish Widows Oracle CRM on-demand to better analyse customer behaviour, reduce churn, and increase revenue  Continue Reading

• BAE builds the business into ERP team for Infor implementation

  BAE Systems Military Air and Information is upgrading and unifying seven ERP systems, with a project team mostly from the business  Continue Reading

• Skillpages develops DataStax Cassandra to rank trades with NoSQL

  How do you find a good tree surgeon you can trust because he or she has been recommended by someone in your social circle?  Continue Reading

• Basho CTO Justin Sheehy describes NoSQL movement as ‘Cambrian’

  Justin Sheehy (pictured), CTO at NoSQL database company Basho, describes the NoSQL movement as ‘Cambrian’  Continue Reading

• Data discovery tools open up new vistas for healthcare informatics

  The newer generation of BI tools, often called ‘data discovery’ software, is opening up new vistas in healthcare informatics. Orlando Agrippa, QlikView enthusiast and NHS health BI leader proselytises  Continue Reading

• EU open data promotion could benefit UK economy, says CEBR

  The EU’s moves towards an open data directive will create 58,000 jobs in the UK and add £216bn to the economy  Continue Reading

• Data-driven innovation

  Still in the early adopter phase, some shining examples of predictive analytics demonstrate the potentially enormous benefits it can deliver.  Continue Reading

• Virgin Media uses ETAdirect to manage engineers more predictively

  Virgin Media is using predictive analytics to get the right engineer out to the right problem. It believes its use of TOA Technologies cloud-based ETAdirect system gives it a competitive advantage  Continue Reading

• CW500: The rise of the machines – how devices are taking over the internet

  By 2020, there will be a trillion sensors sending data over the internet  Continue Reading

• Big data journalism exposes offshore tax dodgers

  How journalists harnessed big data to challenge offshore financial secrecy  Continue Reading

• Huddle vaunts enterprise collaboration as productivity engine

  Cloud-based enterprise collaboration company Huddle has won plaudits from customers including the Care Quality Commission. Last month it was a Computer Weekly European Enterprise Software winner  Continue Reading

• Anglian Water opens floodgates for external data

  The water company has overhauled its data systems to efficiently manage and share information to benefit staff, customers, partners and regulators  Continue Reading

• Big data storage choices

  Big data storage demands capacity and processing/IOPS performance and a range of choices exist such as scale-out NAS, object storage, hyperscale and hyper-converged storage  Continue Reading

• Good data management cuts costs and boosts compliance

  Organisations can gain value from data by learning how to create information – and subsequently knowledge – from it.  Continue Reading

• Power in the palms of their hands: serving the customers of the future

  Customer information is provided at every touch in our socially enabled lives. By 2020, everything will be known about us  Continue Reading

• Getting the measure of collecting data for a future of personalised service

  Businesses that know about their customers have always been able to use that data to offer a bespoke service - big data brings new opportunities  Continue Reading

• Big data and analytics: a large challenge offering great opportunities

  The ability to collect and present information in a way that a business can understand, so it can make decisions faster, will be key to keeping competitive  Continue Reading

• From chess to ping pong: How Pegasystems is capturing the Fortune 500

  Pegasystems is winning business from the world's leading companies as business process management technology enters the mainstream  Continue Reading

• APIs can be strategic tools to unlock business value

  Accenture’s Technology Vision asserts that every business is a digital business, and digital business ecosystems are powered by application programming interfaces  Continue Reading

• Information security is a big data issue

  First-generation security information and event management (SIEM) products have been overwhelmed by the volume of data they now harvest  Continue Reading

• Three approaches to HANA adoption: business need, process, full ERP

  Accenture consultants identify three ways to adopt HANA: tactical, addressing a single business process, full-scale ERP transformation  Continue Reading

• CW500: Why Channel 4 is crunching big data

  Bob Harris, Channel 4's chief technology officer, charts the broadcaster's technology strategy to use big data to form closer links with viewers  Continue Reading

• CW500: Forget the fancy graphics: how to make big data work for ordinary people  

  If there is one thing big data specialist Chris Osborne has learned after five years of working with big data, it is that the public don’t like graphs  Continue Reading

• Aadhaar project data collection: An interview with Mindtree's CEO

  Get a view into the data collection efforts for the Aadhaar project from Krishnakumar Natarajan, the CEO at service provider Mindtree.  Continue Reading

• UK firms take disciplined approach to cloud applications selection

  Trunki and Reed.co.uk show how more disciplined procurement approaches are replacing the 'land and expand' strategies favoured by pioneering suppliers  Continue Reading

• European banks raise data management game in response to new regulations

  European banks need to improve their handling of data if they are to recover from the financial crisis and comply with demanding legislation  Continue Reading

• EMC ViPR software-defined storage: Why, and can it succeed?

  EMC’s ViPR software-defined storage aims to provide a multi-vendor management layer with cloud and big data capabilities. But can it convince other storage companies to play ball?  Continue Reading

• Brake-maker Eurac chooses Logi Analytics for more agile BI

  European brake manufacturer Eurac chose Logi Analytics to combine with its Infor ERP system to gain a more agile view of its operations  Continue Reading

• Metro, NI civil service, Reynolds Catering power business innovation

  Enterprise software powers business innovation: new things done at DMG Media, the Northern Ireland civil service, and Reynolds Catering  Continue Reading

• Mobile business intelligence attracts non-traditional users

  Mobile business intelligence gives organisations more accessible, lightweight and flexible decision and operational support  Continue Reading

• Microsoft SQL Server data profiling tool put to work

  Andy Hogg demonstrates how to clean up dirty data with the data profiling tool that comes with Microsoft SQL Server  Continue Reading

• CW500: Thinking outside the big storage box

  Big data doesn’t necessarily mean big storage infrastructure  Continue Reading

• What does a petabyte look like?

  How can you visualise a petabyte of data? What is it in real terms? Some experts try to make real the colossal size of the mighty petabyte  Continue Reading

• Social technology, big data can increase productivity, says McKinsey

  Social technologies and the effective use of data can stoke economic productivity, according to the McKinsey Global Institute  Continue Reading

• Organisational design of data analytics sparks brightest and best

  Business leaders confront thorny issues in the organisational design of data analytics. Buy or build vies with data science or democracy as issues in play  Continue Reading

• How to manage the risk of the human factor in database administration

  Fail to manage the risk of the human factor in database administration and you court disaster. DBAs, like air traffic controllers: work in pairs?  Continue Reading

• Business applications, data analytics can make business lean

  Centralised business apps, such as ERP and CRM can frustrate, but also make a business lean. Data analytics has a fresh Six Sigma role to play  Continue Reading

• Storage struggles to keep up with data growth explosion

  Big data analysis needs a split from the traditional approach of matching back-end infrastructure to application requirements.  Continue Reading

• Rugby Football Union uses IBM predictive analytics for Six Nations

  IBM tries out predictive analytics software, TryTracker, developed in association with the Rugby Football Union (RFU)  Continue Reading

• CW500: Skills shortages loom as development comes back in-house

  Businesses will have to raise their game to recruit the developers they need to take advantage of cloud, big data and mobile computing  Continue Reading

• CW500: Five technology forces that will change businesses forever

  CIOs have a unique opportunity to take the lead in innovation as disruptive technologies overturn traditional business models  Continue Reading

• Process big data at speed

  Low-cost solid state memory is powering high-speed analytics of big data streaming from social network feeds and the industrial internet.  Continue Reading

• Choosing a platform to manage the big data mix

  Big data requires a change in both mindset and technology as businesses seek to analyse various forms of data from myriad sources.  Continue Reading

• Online gambling sector bets on business intelligence

  Online gambling and gaming industries crave structured business data. Volumes can be huge and they need to react to customer behaviour  Continue Reading

• Buy or build afflicts data scientist capability

  ‘Data scientist’ once barely registered as a search term but is now close to a million web results. What is this job role, of which so much is said?  Continue Reading

• GE uses big data to power machine services business

  GE, one of the UK's largest manufacturers, is using big data analytics with data generated from machine sensors to predict maintenance needs  Continue Reading

• How clean is your data?

  Within a transactional system, data rarely appears to be anything other than squeaky clean. Find out why data is dirty, and how to see the dirt  Continue Reading

• Big data and master data management more coupled than expected

  Master data management provides the dimensions for big data facts, as a slew of big data projects highlight a link to data governance and quality  Continue Reading