Anaeko will be at the Think G-Cloud event in London on June 18

Client Media Release

London June 05, 2013 – Software company Anaeko will demonstrate how its G-Cloud listed ServiceClarity solution helps government bodies to improve service and reduce costs of their shared services organizations with actionable key performance indicator reporting.

Anaeko, the IT service management software company, is exhibiting at the Think G-Cloud event in London on June 18.  This conference draws together leading technology strategists from across government with a strong interest in G-Cloud – the UK Government’s programme designed to change how the public sector procures and operates ICT.

Anaeko’s ServiceClarity solution helps organisations monitor, manage and automate large IT environments.  This is especially critical to government which is trying to ‘join-up’ services across departments and local authorities through shared services initiatives.  Shared services promise lower cost and better quality of service for citizens.  However, they can also introduce significant complexity into the IT Service environment.

According to Colm Hayden, Anaeko’s CTO, “Our solution – available from G-Cloud – allows government organisations to quickly implement stakeholder reporting across shared services environments.

“The delivery of shared services requires a myriad of operational tools and processes to manage the complex service environment. It’s often a struggle to make sense of the metrics collected by these tools. ServiceClarity from Anaeko combines these low-level metrics into simple actionable, business-level KPIs at governance, partner, management or customer level. This means that the shared service provider can focus on service objectives – thereby ensuring that users get consistent quality of service and managers can drive continual service improvement and cost reduction.  This is increasingly important given the government’s commitment to efficiency and reform.”

Attendees at Think G-Cloud will be able to better understand how by implementing shared service stakeholder reporting they can drive continual service improvement and reduce the costs of shared service organizations.

Delegates will also get the chance to meet members of Anaeko’s professional services team that can support cloud data integration projects.  The team focuses on IT process automation, and cloud application development that supports social and mobile citizen interaction across a myriad of touch-points and devices.

About Anaeko

Anaeko is an IT service management (ITSM) software company with a focus on solving the service management and reporting issues of large organizations. The company delivers tailored software products and solutions that help these organizations maximise business benefits from large investments  particularly in  hybrid environments that combine on-premise, private cloud and public cloud resources.

ServiceClarity is Anaeko’s service management product suite for hybrid environments. The product suite includes Service Catalogue, Service Level Management and IT Financial Management.  It enables the definition, cataloguing, monitoring/review and reporting of services and key performance indicators associated with them.  This helps with the achievement of service level agreements (SLAs) between all stakeholders. ServiceClarity is a Software-as-a-Service product that reduces the operational overheads associated with benchmarking, monitoring and reporting on service levels and helps drive continual service improvement.

Anaeko has a world class consulting practice focused on IT process automation in which commonly executed IT processes are automated to reduce operational cost, apply best practice and improve service delivery. Anaeko delivers this consultancy around products from vendors including Microsoft and VMware and integrating products from vendors including HP, IBM, BMC and CA. Anaeko has delivered consultancy on the largest IT process automation project in the world for a UK Government department and has developed a range of plugins to market leading ITSM products for Microsoft’s IT process automation product, System Center Orchestrator.

For further information please visit www.anaeko.com and www.serviceclarity.com

The interview will be shown in full at the Citizen 2013 event in London on June 13.

In this excerpt Martha argues that government service designers need to ‘start with the web first’.

More than half the people in the world live in or near cities today. By the middle of the century, urban areas will be home to over two-thirds of the global population and a large share of economic activity.

“Cities must be an integral part of international efforts to make our economies more sustainable, with local and national policymakers working together to reduce urban environmental impact, stimulate growth and improve well-being for their residents” said OECD Deputy Secretary General Yves Leterme. “The potential synergies between the environment and the economy in cities are obvious.  For example, reducing congestion and pollution makes a city more efficient and more attractive to firms and highly skilled workers.”

The OECD’s city-level case studies provide urban leaders with new insights on how environmental policies can contribute to different types of growth.

• Job creation: the right urban sustainability policies can include retrofitting the existing building stock for improved energy efficiency.  For example, the Chicago Tri-State metro-region has built a regional specialty in green building design and retrofitting. In 2010 it gave 45 000 people green jobs, 36% of which were in the green building sector.

• Attracting firms and workers: efficient transport systems, in particular, good public transport networks, help cities to lure investors.  The private sector in the Paris/Ile-de-France region has long recognised this, and firms that benefit from proximity to the transportation system contribute to its financing.

• Innovation and entrepreneurship: cities can foster the growth of the green technology sector by creating green regional clusters that build on existing industries, services, research and innovation. Kitakyushu has built an impressive recycling cluster, the Eco-Town, which recycles hundreds of tons of industrial waste every day, while producing energy for residential and commercial neighbourhoods.

• Increasing the value of urban land: redevelopment, infill, and eco-districts can enhance land values while increasing density and reducing residents’ environmental impact.  Following the success of its Hammarby Sjöstad eco-district, Stockholm is now working with the private sector to develop the Stockholm Royal Seaport eco-district. Buildings there will use less than the energy of others in Stockholm and the new district will have an advanced smart grid and district heating.

According to the OECD there is an urgent need to find better ways to “green” urban finance and to mobilise private finance for green infrastructure. Introducing green incentives into municipal revenue streams would be a big step towards a more sustainable growth path. Property taxes could help prevent sprawl by eliminating the preferential tax treatment of single-family homes that exists in many places. Congestion charges and parking fees can help reduce traffic and pollution, while fees for water and waste services should be more responsive to actual resources used. For example, the City of Stockholm is greening its income with revenues from the congestion charges system. Implemented in 2006, this system has led to lower CO₂ emission and traffic congestion and is also becoming a substantial source of income. National governments also have an important role to play in setting the pricing signals and standards that will provide coherence, attractive environment for green financing.

Gold Sponsors of the Qt Insights program

Quadriga Consulting has launched a new program called Qt Insights – a research based consulting and thought leadership program for a consortium of sponsor organisations – including Blackberry (Canada), Digia (Finland), KDAB (Sweden), basysKom (Germany) and ICS (USA).

Qt Insights will paint an in-depth picture of how the developer community is creating cross-platform applications using the Qt development framework.

The program will include an international user survey, interviews with senior developers, as well as round table discussion panels in Europe and North America.

Further information is available on the program micro-site at qtinsights.com - where content will build over the next few months.

Jeff will ask Nicky Hurst, CEO of MyCSP, what progress has been made over the last year – since the creation of MyCSP. Nicky will outline what the challenges have been, and what lessons have been learned.

This will be invaluable insight for the hundreds of civil servants expected to attend the event.

Also taking part in the session will be Rannia Leontaridi, Head of the Mutuals Programme at the Cabinet Office. Jeff will ask whether the government is making the progress it had hoped for in terms of mutualisation of government services – and what we might expect in terms of shared provision of services.

Civil Service Live is free to attend for government employees.  Register here.  

Read the Article in Brand Quarterly

It used to be easy – or at least easyish – to know about markets.  A focus group here.  A survey there.  Markets were boring dull things that lumbered about occasionally.  But, more often they slept like drugged Orks.

But markets are not like they once were.  They’re a tad more active.  They change and disappear.  They reinvent themselves and replicate or splinter.

It’s all because of the blistering speed of global communications and a gargantuan increase in information sharing.

Markets can now be created overnight.  Brands can come and go and be destroyed in the blink of an eye.  But there’s a wonderful democracy about all of this.  Big businesses find it no easier to deal with the deluge of data and opinions and social media than smaller companies.  In fact small companies might just have competitive advantage.  Because the social dialogue has a pulse – it’s a living breathing thing.  And we can get to know living and breathing things if we just spend a bit of time investing in the relationship.

The wonderful thing is that social media presents us with a head-spinning array of opportunities to know things about our new dynamic, hyperspeed markets – in real time.

Think about any topic.  Let’s say you’re a vendor of apple seeds.  Try typing “apple seeds” into Twitter search.  Before your eyes you’ll see what people are saying about apple seeds in real time – or just seconds ago.  Let’s say you provide medical equipment to people with dodgy knees.  In seconds you can create a community around dodgy knee issues.  In just a few days you’ll have built an international community of dodgy knee people – all of whom you can get to know by first name. You can ask them about knee stuff and get them to try your products.  Or you might want to tap into an existing dodgy knee community on Facebook.  Or you may want to feature photos of knees on your Tumblr account or WordPress blog.

In short, regardless of what products you peddle you can piggy-back on communities or create your own.  You can act as a voyeur and easily listen in to conversations.  Forget about “quantitative” research or “qualitative insight” – you can ride the roller-coaster of global customer conversations.

But, here’s the problem.  You may end up knowing the beast or simply wrestling with it (fully greased).  Because just because information is vastly more accessible doesn’t mean it’s any more understandable.  You may, in fact, end up with lots of information and no business.  And by observing your markets you may end up influencing it.  In fact you may make it angry.

The trick is to know what to listen for and adopt a humble attitude to knowledge.  Pervasive, global and highly available knowledge is a great thing.  If you choose to ignore social conversations about the markets and issues upon which you depend – well you’re missing a great opportunity.  Moreover, you can jump in and participate in the debate.  People often spread myth and nonsense via social media.  You can seed the conversation and become a thought leader.  But that requires investment of time.  And you’ll need to think carefully about what you want to say and what you’ll be willing to hear.

Some of the most successful SMEs do just that.  If they have something interesting to say they participate in the conversation.  They realise that there are two sides to the conversation bargain – giving and taking.  They also know in advance what persona they want to adopt and what language they need to use.

Social consumers appreciate that.  They don’t want some type of tell-sell.  They want to reach their own conclusions – and they’ll respect organisations that treat them as thinking, rational adults rather than supine idiots.  The marketing ego-rant of old simply doesn’t cut it anymore.

Business is now much more interesting and challenging than it used to be.  SMEs now have the chance to get to know their customers and people who influence their markets.  The companies that realise what a privilege that is will be the ones that most deserve their success.

—

Jeffrey Peel is Managing Director of Quadriga Consulting Ltd – a company that helps other companies build knowledge and presence in a socially connected world (www.quadco.co.uk).  Jeff is a former Director of two leading global market research firms.  His clients include leading technology businesses as well as early stage venture capital funded companies.  He’s @jeffreypeel on Twitter.

It’s comforting to note that content marketing is becoming increasingly important to marketers.

Uberflip has created this infographic to explain the latest ‘state of play’ in content marketing.

It’s encouraging no note that 91% of marketers are using content marketing of some kind.  The 9% that aren’t must be an odd bunch.

CSIT’s Cyber Security Summit is in Belfast, Northern Ireland, March 14-15

By Jeffrey Peel

I’m attending the annual Cyber Security Summit organised by CSIT – the Centre for Secure Information Technologies at Queen’s University.  CSIT is a Centre for Excellence in data security R&D.  The conference runs over 2 days on March 14 and 15.

This year’s line-up of speakers looks very impressive with keynote speakers from McAfee (Raj Samani, CTO EMEA); Cisco (Hugh Eaton, Intelligence and Defence Director) and Nokia (Timo Skytta, Senior Director Consumer Services) – among others.

I’ll aim to intercept a few delegates/speakers and feature some AudioBoo interviews here.

Download our latest white papers prepared for Equiniti Group

We were recently commissioned to write two white papers for Equiniti Group.

The first looks at how IT has the opportunity to transform government service. It discusses the ‘Digital by Default’ mantra and suggests how technology might make the relationship between citizen and government better.

Transformation: The Opportunity for Government IT

The second paper discusses new models for delivering government services based on a so-called mutualisation approach where government, the private sector and employees can work together for mutual benefit.

A New Model for Investing in Government Services.

Click on the links above to download both these reports.  (Registration required).