Leading the Way in NG Bailey

Mark Williams, Extrasys’s Head of Information Systems and Services, reports in his marking-up-meaning blog on his positive experience of NG Bailey’s Leading the Way programme and how it led to a video interview.

Visual Modelling using UML

Michal Pawlowski, Extrasys’s Senior Software Developer, reveals in his ITsudo blog his past and present experiences with the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and how it has recently proved useful as a visual requirements gathering tool for modeling an Extrasys client’s business processes.

ITIL Best Practice

In early 2008 Extrasys started looking at ways to change how we work by utilising ITIL’s principals of best practice. Because Extrasys is driven both by technology and the needs of our customers we are in a state of constant evolution. Best practice from ITIL is both current and practical, combining the latest thinking with sound, common sense guidance.

I myself took the ITIL course in March and was greatly relieved that we were already chiefly following ITIL’s principals. However, there is always room for improvement and I was eager to start implementing the principals I learned particularly in our Service Desk. Our Service Desk is our main contact with our clients and I wanted to begin there so our clients would experience the benefits of ITIL first.

One of the initial things we did was a simple name change of our Help Desk to a Service Desk. This is much more reflective of our frequent correspondence with our clients as the majority of our day is not solving incidents, but relates to account management, requests, general or sales queries and providing our users with good quality customer service and status updates.

After that we needed to review our current processes. By going through each process within our Service Desk and comparing it with ITIL’s practices I was able to see some gaps that needed to be filled to eliminate redundant work, decrease rework, reducing costs and improve our reliability and project delivery times.

Next we needed to solidify and document roles and responsibilities of each member of staff. By defining roles we then started to overlap the responsibilities of our team by sharing our knowledge and integrating our team further. This in turn improved our productivity and resources as we were able to better utilise our skills and experience. All of these little changes saw a positive impact on customer satisfaction through a more professional approach to service delivery. We then started to integrate ITIL with the sales and business demands improving communication flows between our technical and sales teams. ITIL’s principals have improved our business, customer and user requirements making us more a competitive IT service provider.

Four ways to a successful SaaS business

Mark Williams, Extrasys’s Head of Information Systems and Services, reviews in his muon cloud blog a list of four ways to a successful Software as a Service business, provided by an Ovum researcher, and he reveals that Extrasys seem to be doing all the right things.

Rage against the machine: stop computers destroying our planet

Pressure is mounting for businesses to take more responsibility for their environmental impact.  It’s coming from all directions – the government must meet its global carbon footprint commitments, energy costs are going through the roof and customers are demanding more sustainable solutions.  The ICT industry is no exception, “With a carbon footprint now equal to the aviation industry, ICT, and how businesses utilise ICT, will increasingly come under the spotlight as governments seek to achieve carbon-cutting commitments” comments environmental charity Global Action Plan in their 2007 report “An Inefficient Truth”.

I have recently been working as part of a four-man team investigating the feasibility of a new service offering for Bailey Teswaine.  The project, entitled “The ICT Energy Audit Service” was initiated as part of NG Bailey’s on-going commitment to sustainable building solutions and corporate social responsibility (CSR). 

Bailey Teswaine currently offer Network Audit Services as part of their Managed Services portfolio.  We can analyse the operational efficiency of our clients’ IT and communications architecture and make recommendations for improvement.  The ICT Energy Audit Service would augment this offering by also considering the business’s environmental impact.  In many cases, the recommendations for operational improvement also positively affect a business’s carbon footprint – and when you’re saving energy, you’re saving operational expenditure.

There are a number of improvements that can be made to the energy efficiency of a business’s network infrastructure.  These can range from large-scale network topology developments right through to personal desktop solutions; from large-scale storage area network (SAN) solutions to the use of thin client terminals on employee’s desks.  Remote working solutions, such as the Hosted Services provided by Extrasys, facilitate home working, reduce office space requirements and centralise energy-hungry servers.

To avoid the inevitable levels of scepticism with an “energy audit” service, it is important that any improvements made to a business’s carbon footprint are significant and measureable.  The aim of the ICT Energy Audit Service was to physically measure the client’s ICT carbon footprint, make recommendations for improvement and then implement those recommendations.  A second audit can then be conducted to measure the reduction in carbon emissions and the client’s remaining carbon footprint. 

In addition to the audit service, the project team also researched a number of carbon offsetting methods available through various projects within the UK and internationally.  Once a client’s carbon footprint had been significantly improved, it would be possible to offset the remaining footprint through a relevant offsetting scheme.  A number of options were considered, ranging from tree planting schemes to investment in “green technology” such as wind farms and ground source heat pumps.

The culmination of the project was a “pilot audit” conducted in one of Bailey Teswaine’s own data and communications rooms.  The carbon footprint of the IT equipment was measured, legacy equipment was replaced and the resulting reduction in carbon ascertained.  These simple improvements resulted in a reduction of 1.2 tonnes of carbon per year – a 15% reduction.  The remaining carbon footprint (6.6 tonnes) was offset over a period of 4 years using a tree plantation scheme in Cumbria.  To signify NG Bailey’s commitment to sustainable solutions, a single oak tree was planted (by yours truly) in the HQ grounds at Denton Hall in Ilkley.

A significant amount of market research and expansion to the technical scope of the service is required before such a capability can be added to NG Bailey’s portfolio, but it is undoubtedly the direction in which our business can and should be moving.  By providing such a service, we are not only positively affecting our own environmental impact, but that of our whole supply chain – from our suppliers, right through to the end client.

Quantum Cryptography and Extrasys

In his SaaS-in-a-box blog, Extrasys’s Chief hosting architect, Paul Dixon, explains why quantum cryptography is very exciting but effectively useless in the real world. Extrasys hosted desktop users benefit from three levels of security that are less exotic but work brilliantly well.

The New Voices of Extrasys

Last week I was at our Leeds office in order to train the Call Management Team based there on Extrasys calls, logging tickets and some basic 1^st line support resolutions.

The reasoning behind this was to not only integrate the Extrasys business unit further with Bailey Teswaine, and eventually other NG Bailey companies, but also to utilise the existing resources better within our own business. This transition will allow for faster response times to our tickets as our technicians will be able to concentrate fully on the issue rather than answering and logging calls.

As of the end of this week, Extrasys clients new first-point of telephone contact will be the lovely ladies of Ann, Donna and Karen at our Call Management Centre.

Since all three ladies have been working in the Call Management Centre for quite some time, they are already familiar with the tasks of professionally answering, logging and escalating calls to technicians for Bailey Teswaine and s2s and are familiar with ITIL’s best practice methods. This not only made the training easy, however, I also learned from their experiences and was happy to integrate their approaches of call management into our Extrasys Service Desk.

As with everything, there will be a learning curve as the Call Management Team become more familiar with the types of questions to ask and become comfortable using our RT ticketing system. However, I have every confidence that we will be able to maintain our high levels of customer service and set an industry standard first line fix rate.

Personally, I will miss conferring with our clients on a regular basis as I have developed good relations with them, nevertheless I will as always be available for direct customer service issues or tickets requiring more technical support. Anne, Donna and Karen each have their own engaging qualities which will make this transition smooth and I have every assurance that they will soon build their own relationships with our clients.

What does Software + Services mean for Microsoft Partners?

Mark Williams, Head of Information Systems and Services for Extrasys, reports back from a Microsoft Partners event in London and discusses the possible impact on Partners’ businesses, including Extrasys, as Microsoft’s Software + Services products go to market. Read the report on muon cloud.

Retro Future

In his SaaS-in-a-box blog, Extrasys’s Chief hosting architect, Paul Dixon, talks about SaaS, what it is, and why it’s a great thing but nothing new to a former particle physicist.

DRM for the office

Michal Pawlowski, Extrasys’s Senior Software Developer, reveals in his ITsudo blog how Microsoft Information Rights Management can help prevent people from redistributing content they read on their screens.