2011 continues to be a rewarding year for Advanced. Recently, we attended the House of Commons where, for the fourth year running, we were presented with a prestigious Green Apple award in recognition of our environmentally friendly technology.

This year at the Green Apple Awards, we were honoured for our HR Self-Service solution, which enables paper-heavy HR and payroll administration to be replaced with a web-based solution.

Setting up a defendable IT perimeter is one way to deal with the external threat of hackers and crackers, but how do you deal with the errant activities of internal staff?

One of the better-known techniques used to defraud a business is salami slicing, where an individual repeatedly rounds to the nearest penny or unit and deposits the money collected into separate accounts. Salami slicing is a popular mechanism in fiction but it also happens in real life, with a Californian man arrested in 2008 for fraudulently creating 58,000 accounts (see further reading, below).

You can’t have failed to notice that more and more people across business and media are talking about big data. At a time when cash is low, the need for intelligent information to help drive organisational decision-making has never been higher. The rise of big data is being pushed by a confluence of consumer, cloud and social technologies. Individuals can now use mobile technologies to access crucial knowledge on the go and to make the type of quick decisions that equal the difference between success and failure in a tight economy.

Award season has officially arrived and Advanced Business Solutions (ABS) is clearly on a roll. Hot off the heels of scooping the prestigious Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals (CIPP) HR/Software product of the year award, the team learned this week that they have been shortlisted in the payroll provider of the year category of the Payroll World Awards 2011.

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).