Seminar News

A one-day, free seminar in London on Thursday, 14^th June 2001 (by invitation only)

"The Asset Management Business Engagement Process"

Dave Manning, Tangram’s Director of Business Development, has more than 15 years of business-to-business project management experience in both the domestic and international markets. Dave is an expert asset management consultant, well versed in designing strategic asset management best practices that allow organisations to realise the maximum value from their technology investments. A dynamic and entertaining speaker, Dave will discuss the importance of asset management to every business process and application in your organisation, as well as how to optimise your asset management experience through a best practices engagement process.

With diverse platforms, technologies, and software abounding within corporations, a simple snapshot or one time inventory will not give you the historical information you require to determine the true cost of ownership or the value you are realising from your current assets. Compounding this, the movement of desktops and people—not to mention whole businesses—means that tracking software and hardware from procurement through retirement has become a highly complicated issue. Join Dave as he illustrates the benefits of an up-front business engagement process: bringing all of the partners and managers on board with the asset management initiative, achieving fine-tuned co-ordination in defining requirements and commitments, and ensuring long term value from the business’ technology assets.

"Challenges to buyers in service procurement negotiating on virtual assets and services"

Ian is a Director in KPMG’s Outsourcing Advisory practice. He is responsible for managing large outsourcing engagements where KPMG assist clients through the outsourcing process - from scoping client outsourcing deals to contract negotiation with the outsource provider to contract termination at the end of their existing outsourcing arrangement. He is KPMG’s global practice leader in outsourcing and is a frequent speaker at conferences in Europe, the USA and South Africa on Service Level Agreements and outsourcing.

As organisations specialise more and shed those activities that they deem to be ‘non-core’ they will increasingly need to purchase services from third parties. The concept of purchasing services rather than products presents new challenges to organisational buyers - particularly when they cancel existing contracts. This talk looks at some changes in the service procurement markets, large scale commercial and contract negotiation issues and the problems faced when trying to determine the true value of the services and the assets in the company.

"IT Asset Management—The Integration Factor"

It is common practice in large organisations and government bodies to attempt the implementation of high-dollar framework solutions, such as Tivoli, TNG or CA Unicenter, to help in the control and management of distributed IT assets. What’s more, organisations must find an effective and efficient means for integrating the valuable information housed in the frameworks with other business-critical applications, such as helpdesk, CRM, and fixed asset solutions, in order to realise the promised value of any application. But, how does an organisation successfully accomplish these feats—smooth implementations of behemoth framework solutions and the effective sharing of data among solutions? The answer lies in adopting a full-featured asset management solution, coupled with expert best practices services, to act as integrator and facilitator between the various solutions. With this in place, organisations will see dramatic progress in their technology planning, smoother rollouts of software solutions, greater synergy between business applications, and overall improvements to productivity and the bottom-line.

* Lunch 12.45 to 1.45 p.m. A complimentary light lunch will be served.

"Software Asset Management – More Options"

Mike worked in Germany throughout the 1980s with two major software houses specialising in Migration Projects across multiple platforms and MVS Systems Support. Projects planning encompassed all aspects of the Computer Centre (Hardware, OS, System Software, Applications Software, Personnel, etc.). Fitz Software & Co. was formed 10 years ago this June and today has 130+ licensed users across the UK, Ireland and German speaking countries, specialising in Disaster Recovery, Migration software and Configuration & Asset Management.

 * Open-Session 2.30 to 3.00 p.m. Any questions to any of the speakers.

For registration or more information telephone Fiona at 00-353-21-4832131 or email  seminars@fitzsoftware.com