Graeme Walker – HCM (OpenPeople) Product Manager

The champagne corks were popping on the Advanced Business Solutions table at the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals (CIPP) Awards ceremony last night. Despite being up against tough competition, Advanced Business Solutions won the HR/Payroll Software Product of the Year category, and the broad smiles in the Advanced offices this morning are testimony to the team’s immense pride in winning this award.

The CIPP’s Annual Payroll and Pensions Excellence Awards are the most respected UK payroll industry awards and recognise and honour payroll and pensions professionals together with human capital management (HCM) software providers for their achievements and contributions to the industry. To win the award the team had to demonstrate that Advanced’s HCM system is up to date, easy to use, legislatively-compliant and well supported.  Winning the award is evidence enough that Advanced’s HCM system fulfills all this criteria, leaving competitor systems in the shadows. And so it is perhaps no surprise that the Advanced team’s grins are broader than ever this morning and are unlikely to fade anytime soon!

Do you remember the UK government’s G-Cloud initiative? Were you excited by the original plans to provide an on-demand and private cloud infrastructure for the public sector? As recently as late 2009, the then government CIO John Suffolk was talking about how the administration was working with about 100 people in the IT industry (see further reading, below). Suffolk expected the G-Cloud to come to fruition in early 2010.

Employees will be thinking that now is not the time to do something that might cause their company to think about the worth of their employment. Continuing economic uncertainty and job losses create an uncertain labour market. But there is another significant and regularly unconsidered element, which is helping to cause additional concerns. There is an often repeated belief that middle managers feel more nervous than most workers as rumours of redundancies surface in a company. Right or wrong, it is a perception that persists and research suggests it is unlikely to diminish.

Three or four years ago, going green was the latest business fashion. Then the downturn hit and sustainability got put on the back burner whilst organisations concentrated on managing the pounds and pence. While sustainable credentials can prove a hit with some customers, especially those in the public sector, many organisations believe that there is little point concentrating on environmental matters when revenue is falling off a cliff. Sustainable business practices quickly moved from the next business necessity to a nice-to-have. But it does not have to be this way; going green is by no means exclusive from economic efficiency. Implemented in the right way, sustainable business practices can help your firm to increase its effectiveness, cut costs and reduce its environmental impact. This fact is recognised by the financial professionals who were recently surveyed by document management provider, Version One. 90% of respondents stated that going green is still a key consideration within their organisations’ current buying process. 18% actually suggest that the concern is now more important than ever.

There’s only one thing worse than a know-it-all, and that’s a know-nothing. While the first type of annoyance can be frustrating, the second can be catastrophic – especially if your organisation relies on data to create new business opportunities.

And, even if you don’t recognise the fact yet, your business already relies on information. The amount of data the world produces increases every two years, according to researcher IDC. Such an astonishing level of growth sounds incredible.

Different organisations have different ways of dealing with organisational challenges. Sometimes there are no easy answers and the constant flux of modern business means that there are often grey areas regarding reporting lines and where certain departments sit in a business. One debate that causes consternation is the ownership of payroll. The discussion, as we have seen on our own Advanced Business Solutions (ABS) LinkedIn page, is both contested and heated (see a selection of responses, below).

Public sector professionals that are struggling with the dual constraints of restrained investment and the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) are probably not overly keen to hear about yet another cost-cutting initiative. But the concept of shared services is absolutely crucial. The context for such significance is simple – The Coalition administration is eager to look at cost reduction measures. Shared services are seen as a means to slash spending by up to a third and political momentum is not the only explanation; many public bodies are already committed to sharing services.

The history of Near Field Communications (NFC) technology can be traced back almost three decades to the early experiments in radio frequency identification (RFID) in the early 1980s. However, it is only thanks to recent developments in technology and mobile devices that NFC has started to have an impact on the way business works.

These developments have paved the way for a huge surge in demand in 2011. The payments arm of eBay is already logging up to $10m in mobile payments a day and projects it will receive $3bn in mobile-payment transactions by the end of the financial year, up from an earlier estimate of $1.5bn.

It is one thing having to pay for something; it is quite another thing wasting cash on an activity that is really quite unnecessary.

Far too many companies still process foreign currency payments manually. It is a time consuming and expensive form of data entry. Worse, this unnecessary intervention can be avoided through the implementation of smart technology.

If the worst-case scenario happens, and there’s a risk your organisation has lost everything, you’ll be fine because you have a business continuity plan in place. Right? The central role of IT in modern business means it would surely be incomprehensible not to have a business continuity plan. But do you know if your plan is suitable? More specifically, do you have one?