Bryan has held the role of CIO for over four years at Rentokil where his vast experience in his previous senior roles at ICI, Vertex and SITA amongst others, has enabled him to solve Infrastructure problems on a global scale. A known big problem solver in the industry, at Rentokil, Bryan is responsible for the roll out of the world’s largest implementation of Google Apps to 35,000 employees across 50 countries.

“Having undertaken such a large roll out of Google in the Rentokil organisation, I am excited to join the board of Cloud Technology Solutions as a non executive director,” explains Bryan Kinsella.

“The company is a clear leader in the UK and abroad in terms of its migration tool set; moving users from GroupWise email systems to Google Apps in the Cloud. I’m pleased to be joining the company as it embarks upon ever more complicated projects with large enterprises to help them achieve true migration to the Cloud.

“Its the underlying Google Infrastructure that is the opportunity to really progress with IT that interests me. Apps is just one set of solutions that uses the power of one of the largest physical infrastructures in the world providing the collaborative glue to enable mobile access to corporate data silos – its an exciting time.”

Steve Kaye, CEO of Cloud Technology Solutions comments; “Bryan has all the qualities I admire of a business savvy executive with great vision and fantastic execution skills. He has also developed his own project methodology and it has a 100% success rate. To say he is going to be a great asset to the company going forward is an understatement.”

Cookies are widely used to help users navigate faster around sites they visit regularly, but when the EU directive becomes UK law in May, businesses will be required to get consent from every user that visits a website by ‘opting in’, so they can keep on using cookies.

“It will require many businesses to redevelop websites to either block the use of cookies, or to provide users with the ability to acknowledge that they know cookies are being used prior to them using the website,” said Ross Fobian.

“In many cases if the user chooses to block the website’s cookies they will not be able to access the website at all. A good example of this is Facebook.com as it requires cookies to log in; because of this most users will be forced to accept website cookies to be able to use the websites they visit, which renders this regulation useless.

“There are some 300,000 businesses in the North West, and around 7 in 10 businesses have a website. If each of those companies spends just £100 re-engineering their website – a conservative estimate – that’s a £21 million bill for the region’s businesses to comply with this regulation.

“Of course, there will be a far greater cost due to the impact that it will cause. The disruption to the user experience in requesting permission before a visitor can use the site properly would be very annoying. Imagine having to read and acknowledge a popup box every time you visit a website. This could cause European websites to be segmented from the rest of the internet, effectively killing the online export business, as overseas users will prefer to use non EU website to avoid the frustration of having to accept or reject the website cookies each time.

“Additionally, various industries like display advertising, affiliates, web analytics, behavioural targeting and many more, will also be directly affected as they will not operate as effectively as they once did.

“The law should make a distinction between the different types of cookies; first party cookies are used by almost every modern website and help the website function correctly. Third party cookies on the other hand are normally only used for tracking visitors across multiple websites, which is understandably where privacy concerns would become more questionable.

“Enforcing this EU cookie regulation could cost the UK hundreds of millions of pounds which it can ill afford considering the current state of the economy, and will impact the North West considerably. This is a large price to pay to educate the general public about an internet technology which has been in use for over a decade. I would urge the UK government to seriously reconsider the impact this law will have on the local economy and the actual benefits it will provide.”

Convert2Green scooped the award in a hard fought category to take the top prize due to its position as one of the top biodiesel producers in the UK and a leading waste-to-energy company.  In just four years Convert2Green has re-cycled over 13 million litres of waste cooking oil into bio-fuels; waste that would have otherwise gone to landfill, down the drain or for export abroad.

 “Convert2Green’s work in its sector is really an example to others and a company I’m happy to say I champion,” explains David Watson, chief executive, East Cheshire Chamber of Commerce & Enterprise.

“Aside from converting millions of litres of waste cooking oil into bio-diesel to fuel distribution lorries and power heating systems across the public and private sector, the company also provides its waste water to United Utilities where it ‘supercharges’ its sewage treatment plant and increases methane production by around 15%. The methane is used to provide electricity to run the plant – it’s a complete waste-to-energy cycle.

“Convert2Green is thoroughly deserving of this award in a hard fought category, and a company to watch in the future.”

 The 11.5 million litres of biodiesel produced have powered distribution lorries and sustainable heat and power systems across the public and private sectors.  On road transport alone, this has saved 25 million kg of CO2 compared with mineral diesel and our Combined Heat and Power plants have been installed in hospitals, food factories, leisure centres and office blocks to generate sustainable electricity and hot water. 

“We’re very excited to have won the award; of course we completely believe in the waste-to-energy cycle and more and more organisations are recognising the carbon savings that can be made by recycling used cooking oil, but it’s great to have the endorsement of East Cheshire Chamber & Enterprise,” concludes Andrew Webb, director, Convert2Green.

With a total of 500 mailboxes and plans to roll Google out across its radio division – a further 80 users – the need to simplify its email infrastructure to better support collaboration whilst upgrading to a brand new email system for no extra expenditure, were the drivers for change.

“Our old GroupWise email system required upgrading and for the same budget as we were spending on maintenance contracts we moved to the cloud and saved tens of thousands of pounds on a brand new email system,” explains Stuart Cooke, Group Digital Development Director, CN Group.

“Moving to the cloud means we have no hardware to look after, no back ups to worry about and a much faster system in terms of searching and recovery of emails for users. Emails are easier than before to access remotely and via mobile devices, and we don’t need to house the email servers in our datacentre – which makes the whole process much more carbon friendly.”

CN Group has three divisions; Cumbrian Newspapers Ltd in Carlisle which publishes the daily News & Star, Cumberland News, Times and Star, The Whitehaven News, the Eskdale & Liddersdale Advertisers and a range of county magazines; Furness Newspapers based in Barrow-in-Furness which publishes the daily North West Evening Mail;  J Catherall and Sons (printers) Ltd. which publishes the Hexham Courant.

“We chose to work with CTS because of its experience with migrating GroupWise email systems over to Google – the cloud based system we now have,” said Stuart Cooke.

“We had an old version of Groupwise, and CTS has proven experience in migrating such a system seamlessly to the cloud.”

Steve Kaye, CEO, Cloud Technology Solutions, comments; “For any IT related project to be a success you need to win the hearts and minds of the users and the people at CN Group were a pleasure to work with making the transition a lot easier. CN Group has taken a leadership position by the adoption of cloud and I look forward to helping it achieve further real business benefit as the use of Google Apps for Business is extended.”

Barnsley has successfully used Concerto Projects for the last two years to manage its information services and ICT projects and is now looking to deploy the software across the council to help with all manner of existing and new projects and programmes.

“Over the last two years, Concerto has given the programme management office and the information services team – around sixty people – an oversight of its IT projects and programmes as they happen in one centralised and transparent web-based system,” explains Peter Hague, programme management office manager, Barnsley Council.

“Concerto Projects has given the council greater oversight of the portfolio of IS programmes and projects and provided us with a central repository and a definitive list of project information. We can maintain greater control of projects and remove any duplication whilst having the ability to better plan and allocate resources.

Prior to the Information Services department deploying project management software, the council worked in ‘silos’ rather than looking at the project as a whole across council departments – this created some duplication of effort. Two years on, duplication has been eliminated giving everyone the same centralised view of each project, its status and communication across the teams.

“We began with a project register of around 250 ICT and information services projects and assignments that various departments were working on, and managed through a process of data cleansing to rationalise them by almost 30% – down to around 170 projects and assignments. We now have a clear oversight of all projects and the stage at which they’re at,” said Peter Hague.

“Once we’d installed Concerto Projects we were able to role out and embed a more consistent approach to managing projects, in a more joined up way that allows project team members to view project information and collaborate more effectively. This is an approach we want to replicate across many other functions within the council as we plan our transformation programme.”

“Concerto Projects is an intuitive system that project managers have taken to well. We can immediately see the benefit of having a central system that allows project collaboration.”

“The aim is to empower our students to be able to monitor their own progression on their chosen course by being able to access Active Dashboards to see how they’re performing against their own target grades, as well as against other learners,” explains Paul Cornick, director of corporate strategy, Birmingham Metropolitan College.

“Ultimately, the learners’ success is our success and we want to foster this ‘ownership’ approach. Active Dashboards is the ideal tool with which the learners can understand better their performance and take leadership with regards to their learning objectives.”

The dashboard software is supporting the college in build on its current ways of working to become more sophisticated in terms of accessing, analysing and using its data; trends that may otherwise have gone unnoticed, are now very evident and easier to act upon when plotted in a highly graphical format for all to see.

“The data is critical and is helping us to be more sophisticated in the way we manage the college; we know this can be emulated by the students when they are given access to the technology in the way they manage their own work and success during their time here,” explains Paul Cornick.

“We chose Active Dashboards because it is so intuitive – and that’s going to be extremely important when we consider the diversity of users we have planned to use it with. It has to be user friendly, engaging and provide the information the user needs at the click of a mouse –that’s exactly what it does.

“We considered six dashboard software providers and Dynistics was by far the most user friendly – we could see the students and teaching staff being able to use it with very little training required at all.”

Anthony Dent, managing director, Dynistics comments: “Given its highly respected reputation as an innovator in the college sector, we are particularly delighted that BMET has joined the rapidly growing number of UK colleges that are adopting Active Dashboards software to assist in making the right operational decisions”.

“Our unique approach includes an implementation model that helps us to create a real return on investment for colleges, both in terms of short-term productivity gains and in supporting its long-term strategic aims.”

The SLMM is a pre-built suite of dashboard template reports that graphically illustrate key metrics for Trusts and highlight areas where efficiency improvements can be achieved.

“Dynistics has developed its SLMM through collaboration with a number of NHS Trusts around the country resulting in a solution that presents the key Service Line Reporting information we need to make better informed decisions,” explains Simon Taylor, director of finance, Kings College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

“The software was deployed in a matter of days and immediately assisted the finance team to analyse patient level costing and service line reporting information from Trust level through to costing information for individual procedures and consultants.”

The software automatically retrieves data from our Patient Level Costing application and presents information in a range of interactive charts with the added ability to drill down into the detail within each dashboard where required.

“It’s very intuitive to use and easy to understand so that clinical, operational and finance managers alike can use it to interpret data with ease – and once its rolled out across the trust offers an invaluable tool for decision making at every level,” said Simon Taylor.

“It’s been deployed quickly and cost effectively making interpretation and analysis of raw data much easier, with the ability to monitor data so that trends can be spotted and informed decisions taken as necessary.

“Going forward we’ll be able to analyse everything from the cost of the patient through his or her ‘journey’ in the hospital, to departmental cost analysis, specialty group costs and drill down lower to identify the cost of individual patient procedures – increasingly valuable information for managing the Trust.”

Dynistics Active Dashboards software has gone live this month and is already having a positive impact on the college as a method for identifying and tracking performance across the college – with a view to rolling it out to all operational managers and departmental heads.

The college is target-driven in terms of learner numbers, funding received and success rates of students and the dashboards are being developed to highlight trends as they happen. Performance management in colleges is increasingly important in terms of justifying where money and resources are being spent and ensuring maximum efficiency.

“Only weeks after installing the software the dashboards are helping to identify and eliminate pockets of inefficiency within the college to help it save costs and maximise returns,” said Len Tildsley, vice principal, Shrewsbury College.

“Active Dashboards allows us to set performance parameters so that it’s possible to compare current performance with targets agreed at the start of each year – making it very simple to see if we’re meeting them.

“Trend analysis taken from historical data also helps us predict what the coming months may hold – early indication is vital to us hitting our targets and identifying any underperformance before it becomes an issue is much simpler now Active Dashboards is installed.”

Active Dashboards is able to take the live data from the college’s many data sources and integrate and cross tabulate it so that performance can be measured on a daily basis. It provides users with a full picture of college performance helping management make better informed decisions as a result.

“We’ve been live for less than a month and already the increase in productivity is very quick to see. We chose Dynistics over the competition because it’s very simple to set up, provides a rapid return on investment and is streets ahead in terms of usability. It has made a significant difference to the management information we have at our fingertips – almost over night,” concludes Len Tildsley, vice principal, Shrewsbury College.

Going forward, Shrewsbury College plans to use Active Dashboards to integrate data from its human resources, financial and student data systems so that it can cross reference and correlate results; for example, student performance with staff sickness. The college has 300 staff, 8,000 students and is based across two principal campuses.

Convert2Green will supply eight of the Environment Agency’s operational depots in England and Wales with B25 bio-diesel which is recycled from 100% waste vegetable oil taken from fully sustainable sources in the UK.

“The waste cooking oil is sourced in the UK, recycled and blended to create the bio-diesel so it has a low carbon footprint and the whole waste to energy process is undertaken in a plant that is powered by its own bio-fuel generators,” said Andy Webb, director, Convert2Green.

“For Convert2Green to be working with the Environment Agency to help it achieve its goals is a fabulous endorsement of what we try to achieve daily. The Environment Agency’s strongly held commitment to minimising CO₂ emissions and reducing its impact on the environment has driven it to find a sustainable source of fuel for its road fleet and we’re delighted to be working together on this initiative.”

Ends

Salford Software will implement the solution at no licensing cost to the trusts under an Enterprise Wide Agreement from Connecting for Health. It will enable the trusts to improve efficiency and reduce costs by automating the staff starters, movers and leavers’ process whilst improving security by restricting access to sensitive information such as patient data.

This solution has been designed to be scalable so that that further trusts can be included later, providing a single identity repository across the region.

“In these times of austerity public sector organisations including the NHS are looking to reduce costs.  By making these systems more efficient, the impact of an Identity Management solution can be rapid whilst making internal systems more secure and identity driven across the trusts,” said Gus Hartley, Programme Lead (ICT Infrastructure), North West SHA.

“IDM will also help to ensure that those employees accessing sensitive patient data do so based upon their identity and access rights. The new IDM system will make the trusts compliant with security directives issued by the Government and highlighted by audit and Information Governance requirements.”

James Doggart, Managing Director, Salford Software comments; “We have successfully delivered the rapid implementation of Identity Management to a number of trusts across the UK and remain at the cutting edge of IDM for the NHS – it’s great to see that these trusts in Cumbria and Lancashire will also now benefit from improved efficiencies, security and compliance.

“Nine trusts will benefit at the outset, but the new solution may be rolled out to more over time so that they may all benefit from the implementation.

“Under the terms of Connecting for Health’s Enterprise Wide Agreements, the Identity Management licensing comes at no cost to the trusts themselves, and so the North West SHA has been able to take full advantage of the programme.”

NHS Connecting for Health put in place a number of Enterprise Wide Agreements (EWA) with major IT suppliers to the NHS in England. The objective of the EWAs is to significantly reduce the cost of supply of a variety of widely-used software, hardware and services. The savings released can then be put back into local patient care initiatives by benefiting NHS organisations.

ENDS

*Trusts include;

Blackburn with Darwen PCT,
East Lancashire PCT,
East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust,
Central Lancashire PCT,
Lancashire Care NHS Trust,
University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust
Blackpool Fylde & Wyre NHS