News

Jan 2012

Upcoming Training Courses

COBIT Training in Dubai

We are running a public COBIT 4.1 Foundation Course in Dubai on the 17-18 January. The course fee is AED 3,600.00 (and this includes the official ISACA examination fee).

Full details can be found at:
http://www.e-quant.co.uk/training-services/popular-accredited-courses/cobit-4-foundation.html

If you are interested and would like to book a place on this course please contact us at enquiries@e-Quant.co.uk

COBIT Training in Dublin

We are running a public COBIT 4.1 Foundation Course in Dublin on the 21-22 February. The course fee is Euro 810.00 (and this includes the official ISACA examination fee).

Full details can be found at:
http://www.e-quant.co.uk/training-services/popular-accredited-courses/cobit-4-foundation.html

If you are interested and would like to book a place on this course please contact us at enquiries@e-Quant.co.uk

Green IT Training in Dubai

We are running a public ISEB Green IT Foundation Course in Dubai on the 5-6 March. The course fee is AED 4,600.00 (and this includes the ISEB examination fee).

Please contact us directly for more details about this course.

If you are interested and would like to book a place on this course please contact us at enquiries@e-Quant.co.uk

 

September 2011

UK Councils & Green ICT

e-Quant have recently completed a study of how UK Councils are addressing the issue of Green ICT.

If you would like to see the complete results of this study then please contact us at enquiries@e-Quant.co.uk

Summary

Over 400 UK Councils participated in this study.

Although there are targets in place for reducing the central Governement ICT related Carbon Footprint there are as yet no mandated targets for local Governement to achieve – and this showed!

It would appear that from the results of this survey that the provision of Green ICT is notreally a concern for the vast majority of UK Council IT Directors / CIOs.

Some Key Points

Over 90% of the Councils surveyed had set targets for the overall reduction in the Carbon Footprint of the Council. However only 4% had a specific target for reducing the ICT related Carbon Footprint.

Where the Council had outsourced the primary IT support activities not a single Council had set any targets relating to achieving a reduction of the ICT related Carbon Footprint within the outsourcing agreement.

Only 3 Councils currently measure ‘their’ total ICT related Carbon Footprint. A more impressive 76 Councils do partially measure their ICT related Carbon Footprint – this is mainly related to Data Centre operations. However all the above ICT related Carbon Footprint measurements are based solely on power consumption from PCs, Servers etc. Not a single Council has attempted to measure the ICT related Carbon Footprint associated with general IT Support activities.

19% of Councils have developed some form of Green ICT strategy – but in the majority of cases this is not really a strategy more a ‘statement of intent’

In no UK Council does the ICT Division have visibility of all ICT related energy costs (which makes it a practical impossibility to give the ICT Division responsibility for reducing these costs).

Over 150 Councils stated that Green ICT was a ‘Low Priority’ at this time; whereas only 121 Councils stated that it was a high Priority. Worryingly many Councils that classed Green ICT as a Low Priority also stated that this was because only cost saving measures were currently being given a High Priority within the Council. This does seem to indicate that many Councils do not associated Green ICT with reduced costs.

May 2011

Greek Government goes LEAN

Using our specialist e-VAL methodology e-Quant have just completed phase 1 of a LEAN IT assignment for the Greek Government. This phase consisted on identifying and analysing the volume of Failure Demand waste that was being experienced by their central IT Service Desk.

The analysis showed that 61% of the calls being made to the Service Desk by users are Failure Demand related.

Phase 2 is now underway. We have already analysed the Failure Demand calls to identify their primary causes, and actions are now being undertaken in order to eliminate their occurrence. We will update this site at the end of Q1 2011 when we will be able to gauge success in terms of eliminating the majority of Failure Demand related Service Desk calls..

In January we will also begin phase 3 of the assignment. This involves assessing the levels of waste in the central Incident and Change Management processes.

March 2011

UK Council Cost Benchmarking Study

e-Quant has just completed a benchmarking study of the cost of IT within UK councils. Over 350 Councils participated in this study.
If you would like to see the complete results of this study then please contact us at enquiries@e-Quant.co.uk

Some key points:

23 Councils could not participate in this study because they did not have up to date financial information about their IT costs. The primary reason for this was because local Council departments held their own IT budgets and there was no overall view of total IT expenditure from the individual departments.

The cost of IT per annum on a per user basis varied enormously across Councils. The lowest cost Councils were able to spend less (capital and operational expenditure) than £1,000 per annum per user on IT. However for 10 Councils this figure was over £6,000. For the highest spending Council (per user) the figure was £9,548.

Over 50 Councils have increased their IT budget in 2010-11 from their 2009-10 actual expenditure.

There does seem to be a partial correlation between the number of users within the Council and the cost per user. There are indications that it is the larger councils (over 1,000 users) that are the most cost efficient in their provision of IT Services. The more expensive (per user) Councils do tend to be those with below 1,000 users (although there are exceptions to this!).

One overall conclusion - it does look as if there is a lot of ‘fat’ or waste in the way that UK Councils manage and deliver their IT Services. It is our belief that the total per annum costs for IT should not exceed £600 per IT user. If this figure were to be achieved by all the Councils participating in this study the total saving would be around £200m per annum.

December 2010

e-Quant trainer wins prestigious award

e-Quant are pleased to announce that their Lead Trainer / Senior Consultant, Charles Fraser has won the prestigious Lothbury Service Management Individual of the Year (2009) award.

The awarding panel noted that ‘although the completion for this award was as usual extremely high, Charles stood out as the obvious winner due to his simply outstanding ITIL training results throughout the year, and his success rate of 100% for the ITIL v3 Foundation course is simply without - it is quite simply a staggering achievement!’

The Lothbury award is a wholly independent award which is presented on an annual basis to the individual who is deemed to have made the most outstanding contribution in the field of IT Service Management over the previous 12 months. The awards are voted for by panel of industry experts.

Charles is widely recognised as one of the most experienced and highly respected Service Management trainers in the world. As well as holding the highest level of ITIL v2 qualification, Charles has also passed ALL of the ITIL v3 Intermediate qualifications (and Managing Across The Lifecycle). He is also a highly experienced Green IT and CobiT instructor.

He has delivered ITIL training and led Consultancy assignments throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific.