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The article focuses on the Richard Gifford, Chief information officers (CIO) at logistics giant Wincanton, had to use technology to help the business work remotely due to the spread of Covid-19, It mentions that Wincanton is also tying data from this telematics system into its transport management system (TMS). It also mentions the firm has created an app, Winsight, that allows drivers to manage their movements through an android device.

The article offers information regarding the challenges provided by industrial control systems (ICS) vulnerability on cybersecurity of Great Britain. It mentions insight from Azeem Aleem, director of advanced cyber defence practice for Europe, Middle East and Africa (Emea) at security solutions provider RSA, about the opportunity provided by ICS in the country and Europe to attackers due to their systems which were based on legacy systems.

The article offers information about the challenges of dealing with legacy information technology (IT) systems and the concept of technical debt in the IT industry. It discusses how IT leaders often struggle with maintaining legacy systems and the pressure from enterprise software providers to upgrade to cloud-based solutions.

The article offers information on the views of Chris Youles, chief information officer at the Open University (OU) on the need of transformation in organizations. Topics include his views in 2019 SAP Community annual conference on the replacement of 20-year-old legacy systems in OU with new SAP cloud products; the efforts of companies such as Microsoft, Google and Facebook to provide distance learning; and the changes in OU's heavily customized Siebel customer relationship management system.

The article discusses a meeting on the VMworld 2017 European conference that was held in Barcelona, Spain. It cites on the views of experts on the future of information technology which changes the drives in innovation that may generate value to the society. The article also discusses on the challenge of legacy system and adopting technologies to unlock computing.

The article discusses the digital challenges faced by the banking industry with the next generation of information technology (IT) leaders to take on the legacy systems that have been regularly blamed for outages. Topics discussed include the diagrams created during design and maintained as part of the operational documentation and the options available for banks such as buying a modern core banking platform off the shelf and acquiring one of the growing number of challenger banks.

The article discusses a report which claims that several British banks are relying on outdated information technology (IT) systems as of January 2014, focusing on a call for the replacement of legacy IT in Great Britain's banking industry. According to the article, the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has experienced several IT-related problems. RBS' acquisition of fellow financial institution NatWest in 2000 is mentioned, along with frozen customer accounts and the value of technology.

The article focuses on information technology (IT) procurement and upgrading of legacy systems. It states after the global financial meltdown in 2008-2009, IT budgets were reduced and used primarily for remedial maintenance. It mentions companies often cannot skip software versions and are forced to invest in versions they missed, increasing the cost of change. It talks about a lack of liquidity and funding due to risk minimization efforts that limits loans for small businesses upgrading IT. INSET: THE GROWING NEED FOR CYBER INSURANCE.

The article presents information from a information technology security roundtable hosted by the journal "Computer Weekly" in Edinburgh, Scotland. Topics discussed includes the shift by criminals away from random attacks and toward targeted attacks, the threat that social networks websites like Facebook and LinkedIn pose for corporations, and mobile device security. It also talked about retrofiting security into legacy architectures on limited budgets and end-user awareness training.

The article discusses how to approach the challenge of managing the transition from a legacy environment to a globalised infrastructure. The author specifically refers to the company Unilever which exemplify the trend towards globalisation. Last year the consumer goods multinational extended a deal with British Telecom PLC (BT) to manage its global network infrastructure in an effort to lower costs. Tom McLoughlin, client managing director for BT on the Unilever contract, says the approach was integral to Unilever's business philosophy. INSET: CASE STUDY: HOW HSBC MANAGES GLOBAL DATACENTRE ESTATE.

The article considers comments from Andrew Bailey of Great Britain's Prudential Regulation Authority indicating it would be bold for banks to get rid of all their outdated, legacy software and replace it with modern technology. One unnamed source in information technology for the financial sector said such a project would be risky and costly. This person also said Internet companies such as Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc. that already use modern technology were likely to enter the banking industry.

The author discusses information technology errors at banking companies as of February 2014, arguing that issues involving management are as significant as issues involving outsourcing. Topics include cost cutting, the information technology of the Royal Bank of Scotland, skill transfers, and legacy systems.

The article discusses Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance company's chief information officer (CIO) Richard Williams and the reported benefits that are associated with corporate efforts to mix innovative technology with traditional systems as of January 2014. According to the article, Williams has established a three-speed approach to innovation. The use of legacy information technology (IT) products in the insurance industry and the Huddle enterprise content collaboration firm are examined. INSET: HUDDLE REDUCES COSTS, ADDS SECURITY AND FLEXIBILITY.

The article reports that a survey on next-generation access from the Communications Management Association has revealed that four in 10 businesses are unhappy with their broadband connection. The survey found that 41% of businesses using broadband were unable to receive the level of access they required owing to their geographic location. A third of respondents also considered legacy infrastructure and the last mile to be the main challenge for telecoms providers in rolling out next-generation access to businesses. Three quarters said that fibre would be the preferred infrastructure to provide the necessary quality of service.

The article focuses on the factors that are keeping the British banks away from replacing legacy systems. Don Free, research director at analyst firm Gartner, states that the complexity of replacing hundreds of applications developed, acquired and integrated over a long period makes it difficult for the banks to replace them. Ian Benn, managing director of payment services at banking systems provider Fidelity Information Services mentions that it is difficult for the information technology department to sell legacy system replacement to the business and opines that the replacement of system is costly, takes several years to install and offers similar services as the legacy system. It also stresses that slowdown in business has also forced banks to cut costs.

Furniture retailer MFI Ltd. has identified information technology (IT) as key to its business recovery as it presses ahead with ambitious plans to improve supply chain management, raise margins and expand internationally. MFI expects to save up to £ 35 million a year once the five-year IT overhaul, which centers around a company-wide business application software SAP roll-out, is completed in 2005. MFI has already invested £ 14 million in the IT revamp project, dubbed Atlas. The SAP-based system, which replaces 20-year-old legacy systems based on Digital and Open VMS technology, will improve integration and overall efficiency, leading to vast cost savings, said Allen Shoemaker, chief information officer at MFI. MFI's SAP technology will increase system reliability and make it easier to access business information, Shoemaker said.

The author discusses the term "legacy information technology (IT)" which is recognised by every IT leader to represent old software and hardware in their infrastructure. Topics discussed include the ultimate goal of any IT leader to eliminate legacy IT completely and whether one can invest in technology that does not become a legacy.

The author maintains that banks in Great Britain need to upgrade their information technology, but cites the case of Co-operative Bank to illustrate the difficulty of that task. The complexity of Co-operative's upgrade endeavor forced it to abandon the project and take a large write-off. In the author's view large banks should cooperate on developing cloud-based technology for handling core transactions.

The author reflects on the need for banks to work together to develop an efficient payment processing system. He mentions the failure of the Royal Bank of Scotland's (RBS) information technology in December of 2013 due to its failure to invest in core legacy systems and states most retail banks use payment processing systems (PPS) developed around 20 or more years ago. He suggests that as the British taxpayers own most of RBS the government should suggest banks work together to develop new PPS.

Several letters to the editor are presented in response to articles in previous issues including "Time to recognize security of data is a human problem" by Mike Gillespie and another on Banking's legacy systems.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one regarding legacy systems in Great Britain banks and another regarding the plans of BT Group PLC to improve its customer relations.

The article reports that Abbey National PLC has completed a project to replace 30-year-old legacy systems with Spanish bank Banco Santander SA's Partenon global banking platform. It is stated that the bank has moved its 10 million savings accounts, four million current accounts and eight million card accounts to the Partenon platform. Payment systems have been moved to Partenon and back-office processing engines integrated with the global Partenon infrastructure. The system uses in-house middleware called Banksphere and is built on an International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) database platform.

The article reports that banks are re-using technology to help them take advantage of a joint initiative taken by the Great Britain Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and banking industry to reduce payment processing times to one day. The introduction of the Faster Payments System (FPS), which goes live on May 27, 2008, is the latest IT challenge facing banks. FPS was the result of an agreement in December 2005 between the OFT and 13 British banks. Banks rely heavily on information that sits on thousands of legacy systems that are as much as 40 years old.

The article reports that as part of a £300m business transformation programme, the Nationwide Building Society has replaced its legacy systems with SAP AG's core banking platform and a service oriented architecture. The project aims to give Nationwide the agility to introduce products quickly and meet growing compliance demands. According to the Capgemini SA's 2008 Core Banking Systems Survey, more than 90% of banks are willing to change legacy systems. Paul Pullinger, head of retail banking sales at Capgemini, said nationwide's move to SAP is unlikely to be repeated by other banks in the near future.

The article reports on the postponement of the plan to replace legacy systems used by hospitals in Great Britain. Such decision came after protracted negotiations between the British National Health Service (NHS) and Fujitsu, its main information technology (IT) supplier in southern England. Fujitsu and the NHS have been negotiating for more than nine months on a contract reset to allow for changes in the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) since the 10-year, £ 896 million deal was signed in January 2004.

The article reports that Barclays PLC is about to complete a two-year information technology ( IT) project to link legacy systems to frontline applications using Java-based web services. The goal of the project is to make all customer data in Great Britain available from one place. The project will cut the cost of processing customer applications, reduce the risks associated with selling additional financial products to existing customers and increase opportunities for cross-selling. Olaf Theilmann, Barclays' managing director for direct channels in Great Britain said that the challenge was to find smart ways of linking all the relevant systems, particularly the frontline applications and the product engines.

The article reports on the adoption of service oriented architectures (SOA) and web services to extend mainframe applications by Information Technology (IT) departments in Great Britain. It was reported that IT departments were pressured from business units to deliver applications that provide new ways to retrieve old processes and data, and lower operating costs for modernizing legacy applications. It was found out that companies deploying SOA layers on the mainframe have achieved 60 percent of cost reduction in application maintenance projects.

The article reports that Sun Microsystems Inc. has unveiled Fortress, an open source programming language for high-performance computing, to replace the Fortran language originally devised by International Business Machines Corp. The company said Fortress had not been tied to legacy syntax or semantics so that developers could explore breakaway approaches to programmability. The Fortress component system and test framework facilitate program assembly and testing. The language's syntax and type system are tailored to modern high-performance computing, with support for mathematical notation and static checking of properties and definitions of domain-specific language syntax in libraries.

The article reports that the utility firm Centrica PLC will save £2.5m over five years after migrating to a consolidated intranet infrastructure based on Microsoft Sharepoint 2003. The owner of British Gas expects to make the savings after rebuilding its existing corporate-wide intranet and replacing previous best-of-breed legacy components, while also updating the site's usability. The new site went live to 32,000 employees and more than 20 sites operating across Great Britain, the U.S. and Europe in December 2006. The firm says that the cost of migrating to Sharepoint 2003, was cheaper than upgrading the older technology versions of the intranet with extensive customisations.

The article reports that London Borough of Hillingdon is going to cut its power requirements for legacy servers by upto 82%. The organization will consolidate forty servers onto three by using vitalization software. The energy consumed by the new servers is 3,450 kVAs annually, compared with the 18,720 kVAs used by the 40 legacy servers, an 82% reduction. However, Hillingdon's information technology department said that it was unable to put an exact figure on the cost savings, but the project is expected to pay for itself relatively quickly.

The article reports that Alliance & Leicester PLC has announced plans to replace many of its core banking systems with Accenture Ltd.'s Alnova Financial Solutions banking platform under a three-year information technology (IT)-led business transformation programme. The programme is intended to bring major back-office efficiencies and give the bank a single customer view. The change programme will see the bank move to a more component-based infrastructure and shift its internal resources away from maintaining legacy systems and towards web- and Java-based technologies.

The article reports that Microsoft Corp. has decided to revamp its Custom Support Agreement programme. The programme provides support for the legacy products of the company. As a result of the change, business enterprises will gain more time to adopt newer platforms. The revamping of the programme is a part of the company's plans to launch Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 which are scheduled to be released later this year. The company is also adding problem resolution support in the new programme for legacy products.

The article discusses the outcome of the Generic Clearing System project initiated through the merger between London Clearing House Ltd. and Paris-based counterpart Clearnet Ltd. Under the plan, a new clearing house was to be formed to replace inherited legacy systems with a single platform for clearing trades based on Java and Oracle technologies. The had already missed a series of internal milestones and one public go-live date despite a development programme costing tens of millions of pounds and involving four key suppliers.

The article focuses on the need for companies to change their Information Technology (IT) systems, so that they can adapt themselves to changing business requirements. According to Roy Schulte, vice-president of Gartner Group Inc., application design and integration is undergoing a change because of increasing demands from the business. According to Schulte, many IT departments faced the challenge of modifying the application softwares of several companies at a fast pace, but were hindered due to huge investments and prevailing legacy systems.

The article discusses the critique of an information technology (IT) project failure presented by senior diplomat Norman Ling to Great Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) last year. Looking at the lessons learnt from problems with the FCO's Prism project to replace 30 legacy systems with a single Oracle Corp.'s enterprise resource planning package, Ling said that the troubled implementation highlighted the shortage of project and program management skills at the FCO. He also urged greater transparency and independent scrutiny of future IT implementations.

The article reports that Nationwide Building Society is extending the use of its core customer relationship management (CRM) platform to let contact center staff handling inbound calls make more relevant offers to customers based on information collected during the call. The building society has also embarked on a related CRM project to give contact center staff access to self-service application screens that are already available online to customers. It said this would bypass some of the more unwieldy legacy systems that staff have been using. Nationwide has been using a Portrait CRM platform since late 2002 to manage its customer relationships. The system enables staff to have more relevant and commercially productive conversations with customers by generating targeted sales and service prompts based on analysis of customer behavior. Since the introduction of the Portrait system, Nationwide has run a scoring model against customer data to update its behavior profiles every month. It has now begun trialling a real-time analytics tool from Portrait which should generate improved prompts for staff to offer services, cross-sell or promote special offers.

The article reports that 2005 has been a good year for information technology at Amey PLC. The company continues to invest in its core systems and infrastructure. Examples include migrating all of its users to Active Directory and Exchange 2003, rolling out remote access systems, beginning the move to a converged IP wide area network and extending the use of IP telephony. The company has also extended its SAP platform to replace several legacy systems. The main issue for it has been delivering these changes while managing the impact of business growth through a number of major contract wins. So prioritization of the company resources has been essential.

The article reports that application portfolio management software could ease problems of relying on old code. Java and Perl applications that were developed just three years ago have developed "legacy" attributes. A deeper analysis of the complaints about these legacy systems reveals that the wholesale loss of application knowledge creates most of the maintenance issues, whether the applications are written in Java, Perl, or Cobol. The business relies on the applications but does not dare change them. Some portion of the business relies on the application functionality. Research published by Capers Jones of Software Productivity Research suggests that a lack of application knowledge can have a seriously adverse impact on programmer productivity. With annual savings reported in the range of 10% to 30% of the IT budget, these tools are worth serious consideration by any firm with a large percentage of custom-written source code. The answer to the chronic problem of lost application knowledge in large IT organisations with hundreds of applications lies in the newly available application portfolio management tools. INSET: How to solve the problem of loss of application knowledge.

The article reports that CIO Ian Watmore emphasized the role of CIO in local government organizations in order to realize the business benefits of IT in Great Britain. CIOs have a role in driving though IT-enabled business change. Watmore believes business change could cut public sector spending on legacy IT by 10 percent to 15 percent. The public sector spends 70 percent to 75 percent of its £ 14bn annual IT budget on legacy systems, so it could deliver savings of £ 1.5bn.

This article reports that East Devon District Council in England has deployed a financial management system to help it meet new reporting requirements from the Great Britain Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM). The deployment of CedarOpenAccounts eFinancials was part of a larger project to replace head office systems. Following a best-value review that looked at overall IT strategy, the council decided it would not replace its in-house system with an overarching enterprise system, but would instead implement best-of-breed applications. CedarOpenAccounts eFinancials was chosen for its specialist finance functionality. East Devon's in-house finance system was a legacy green-screen application. If council officers wanted a new set of data from the system, they had to submit a job sheet to the in-house development team. By the time the system had been redeveloped, the need for the new dataset had often passed. When the ODPM set new targets for local authorities, East Devon was stuck with a financial management system that could not be manipulated to produce the information needed.

This article reports that leisure group Whitbread PLC is to reallocate its 140 head-office IT staff between a new business division and a shared IT services operation covering its remaining brands. The restructuring will be announced when the company publishes its interim results on October 25, 2005. The new IT division will run Whitbread's restaurant and hotel brands, with the shared services operation providing systems and support to the group's remaining brands. The company has an IT contract with Computer Science Corp., which runs until 2010.

This article reports that British Gymnastics, the sport's national governing body, is installing a web-based membership management system from Concentrix Corp. to improve a range of member services. The Concentrix system, which goes live in September, uses Sage CRM software and will enable British Gymnastics to replace its spreadsheet-based legacy systems with automated processes.

The article discusses ageing legacy systems. It has often been suggested that there is an impending skills crisis as the staff needed to maintain ageing legacy systems are themselves approaching retirement. The first thing to consider is precisely which skills are at risk. Only after they have been identified can we provide a coherent statement about whether there is indeed a crisis looming. There is a world of difference between the skills required to manage a legacy platform and those required to maintain the applications that run on it. Mainframe systems administrators, for example, who are responsible for job schedules, systems security, operating system upgrades and the like, have different skills to the application developers creating the company's business logic in languages like Cobol, PL/I and Fortran. Some of these skills are essential to ensure business continuity. Others are less so, depending on IT's strategy. Knowing which is which is the next step in understanding whether you have a skills crisis within your organisation.

The article presents information on the future of legacy systems in Great Britain. According to step forward software supplier Derdack, art investigators no longer need to carry a notebook and an image catalogue on two CD-Roms to click through pictures in a time-consuming search to check for stolen works of art. The annual helpdesk industry conference is now well-established, but arguably not the most glamourous of events. Perhaps that is why the organisers have hired a celebrity to give the keynote presentation. The potential for staff to access dubious or illegal sites at work has become a major headache for information technology managers. Blue Coat Systems, a web filtering supplier, has launched a campaign based on a fictional online cartoon to persuade employees to use workplace computers more responsibly. The main character, an office worker called Bob Kent, uses his time at work to surf pornographic Web sites and wastes bandwidth by downloading large files and gets his come-uppance. Employers can order a range of Bob Kent merchandise, including T-shirts, wind-up radios and sombreros.

This article reports that regulatory issues are forcing IT managers to dig into legacy systems to find out which applications, operating systems and bolt-ons are really running the business. It may come as a surprise to some IT departments, but the average age of applications that run core business processes is 15 years old. A survey by HAL Knowledge Solutions SpA found that almost 30% of companies are maintaining software up to 25 years old. Legacy applications are commonly seen as a burden— a constant cycle of updates and maintenance where dedicated, highly skilled IT staff have to keep the heterogeneous mix of proprietary code up to date.

The British Environment Agency is struggling to get adequate performance from a £17m human resources and payroll system introduced in April. The system, supplied and supported by Oracle Corp., can only be accessed by half the expected number of employees at one time. Due to load-balancing problems, the agency's regional offices have been divided into two groups which are only allowed to access the system at certain times. The system, named 1B1S which means "One Business, One System," went live at the beginning of April. There was no period of parallel running with the agency's legacy systems. An Environment Agency IT department memo described the problem to IT staff. "At present load balancing isn't working and only one server is being used, effectively meaning 1B1S is running at 50%, hence the performance problems," it said. A spokeswoman for the agency said it was able to pay its 11,800 employees and bill 50,000 customers on time but did not deny ongoing performance problems. Oracle is involved in building the £325m NHS HR and payroll system and also has a role in the £2.3bn national program for IT.

The introduction of application management software could save EWS, Great Britain's largest freight train operator, £ 500,000 a year, its head of information technology (IT) has estimated. Matthew Crayton, head of IS infrastructure at EWS, said the application management software from AppSense Technologies Ltd. would reduce the knock-on effects of IT problems with legacy and thin client systems. EWS runs centralised IT services from a Doncaster, England datacentre, using International Business Machines Corp. blade servers, Citrix Corp.'s thin-client server software and the Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system. The company's 200 sites can range from offices with human resources and finance systems to a single-person shunter cabin, which needs access to business and safety-critical software. The legacy systems included a train scheduling system owned by Network Rail and a roster system that ensures appropriately skilled staff are assigned to each train. The Appsense Performance Suite will be rolled out to 2,000 end-users around Great Britain following a six-month pilot.

IT directors are still failing to convince the board of the business benefits of integrating legacy systems with customer service applications, a survey by research firm Vanson Bourne Ltd. has found. The survey of 100 IT directors in British businesses, commissioned by legacy IT integration specialist WRQ Inc., found that legacy IT systems are critical to providing customer service, 86% regarded legacy systems as essential to customer service delivery. In the survey, 66% saw the value of integrating legacy systems with customer service applications. Broken down by industry sector, IT directors from financial services have made the most progress, where 60% of financial institutes have integrated legacy systems with customer service applications. Worryingly, many IT directors admitted they faced difficulties in convincing management of the benefits of integration, and 28% of respondents said they had not integrated their legacy systems with customer service. Of the 41% who had not integrated legacy IT with customer services, a lack of buy-in was the main reason for putting off the integration.

They say that the devil is in the detail and nowhere is this truer than in the fine print of an outsourcing contract. All too often there are discrepancies between the scope of work both parties believe has been agreed at the outset and the finished work. Typical disputes include an imprecise delineation of responsibility for providing interfaces between legacy systems and the new product, both during migration and after it has gone live; and confusion about when users are entitled to request changes and how much they will cost. Two documents play a pivotal role towards guaranteeing the success of outsourcing deals: the client requirements and supplier's service description. Disputes can arise from poorly drafted versions of these documents and it is therefore critical that they are not open to interpretation. The client requirements will either describe the exact nature of the required service or be in the form of a more general output-based specification. Disputes about whether the supplier is obliged to meet additional requirements are likely to arise unless the issue has been dealt with in the contract.

The article presents news items related to technology trends in business computing. The World Wide Web Consortium has recommended a new standard that aims to improve Internet capabilities on handheld devices. The specification enables handheld devices to exchange content information with web servers to allow a mobile phone or personal digital assistant to tell the server its display size so that content is delivered to fit the screen. Novell Inc. has started shipping its Extend 5 suite, which aims to provide an IT architecture for building service-oriented web applications. The product is designed to help users build identity-enabled web services by integrating legacy systems and delivering portal services based on existing business systems. Oracle Corp. plans to make its business applications integrate more closely with Mozilla's open source desktop software.