Focus – on ICT Reform

The Scottish Government release a response to John McClelland’s Review of ICT infrastructure in the Public Sector in Scotland. Both this document and the original review may be accessed from the featured short-cuts at the bottom of this page.

Flick through today’s hot topics using the series of grey dots directly below this graphic.

Forum

This is social networking with a purpose. You can post threads for comments and feedback, from your piers, industry experts and suppliers. You can also post announcements, case study stories, cost savings ideas, requests for information, notification of new shared documentation and videos. There is also a calendar forthcoming of ICT events.

Focus on Service Desk Operations

Is your Service Desk operating as efficiently as it could be?
Are you using knowledge bases, self-service and automated password re-sets? Using this type of functionality and reviewing your processes could save a significant sum. See IT-TV for a short presentation and visit the Library for additional documentation.

Focus on Patch Management

The vast majority of Scotland’s Public Sector rely on Microsoft’s WSUS for Patch Management, largely because it’s ‘free’. In fact the manual overhead of system not only leaves you open to potential, expensive, malware attack, but, may be costing up to £100 per PC per annum more than automation. See IT-TV and the Library for a presentation and supporting documentation

Focus on Power Management

This can be one of the quickest routes to cost savings yet 250,000 Public Sector PC’s have little or no power management policies. Operating system capabilities, scripts and asking people to turn off PC’s will not do the trick. Longer term virtualization, cloud and thin client solutions are all good, but, there is money to be saved today. See the Power Management presentation in IT-TV

Focus – Hot topics

The forum will automatically detect hot topics and you can search for these or matches to any query. The Library is where you will find discussion documents, case studies, white papers and more.

IT-TV is the location for on-line presentations on quick wins and hot topics, these are typically less than 10 minutes long, but, can convey huge amounts of information.

Submissions welcome.

Focus on re-cycling information

The creation of tenders can take vast amounts of time. Can share templates for tender creation? This would dramatically reduce the manpower overhead and potentially improve quality by adopting the best of breed core ITT. Standardization in tenders will also encourage vendors, in particular SME’s, to bid and provide a wider range of solutions to choose from.
Have your say in the Forum.

Focus on products and services

Over 500 ICT tenders are published on PCS every year, but, there is little visibility of the results. This is effectively research and development work, carried out by skilled staff at a detailed level. If we can share tender information then their is potential to reach quicker conclusions.

Why not start with the Forum or the Library rather than Google?

Focus on Quick wins

Whilst Shared Services are the ultimate goal, the pressure is on to deliver cost savings today. Share with your piers examples of where you have saved money and if you are a supplier, upload case studies and success stories (via the moderator).

Can we use the PCS Quick Quotes system to help provide quick wins? Do new buying models like SaaS make this a possibility?