Boost your system’s reliability

Perhaps the best people to ask where reliability needs improving are your users. They are the ones who put up with the frustration of system crashes. So when we visit clients who want to improve reliability, we take the users’ views, as well as those of the IT department.

We take a two-step approach to improving reliability. First we tackle the immediate problems. Then we identify where the biggest risks for potential problems and recommend preventative action.

If you agree with our recommendations, we can design and build the required solution. Sometimes one of our specialists can handle the task alone, or we might assemble a team for bigger projects.

Maximise your IT spend

If you are responsible for the IT budget in your organisation, you have to contend with the same problem every year. You have a budget and you know that spending wisely could improve efficiency and quality in your organisation. But you are also bombarded with claims from manufacturers and suppliers about the advantages of their products.
So you face these questions:

• What’s the best way for you to spend what’s left of this year’s IT budget?
• What will help your users work more efficiently, quicker and in a way that gives a better service to your customers?
• What potential purchases would be a waste of money?
• And what functionality simply isn’t worth bothering about?

Get answers to these questions or you could waste money on unnecessary functionality.You need to be confident that you buy what you need, and nothing more.

Oxbridge consultants have helped people make money-saving investment choices. We constantly monitor the market for new products, so we’re in a good position to make good recommendations. Also, we have worked on so many projects that we have a good feel for what are the best buys for most situations.

Configuration: set up your systems in the most effective way

Are your systems configured in the most effective way? Ask us to check your systems and we’ll make sure they are.

Here are just some of the things we can do for you:

• Add new levels of security and protection, by defaulting Microsoft Office applications to save documents on the server rather than locally.
  
• Stop people using out-of-date templates on their machines, by installing templates centrally so that all users create documents based on them.
  
• Make sure that all users can share their work easily with each other, by checking that every machine is configured in the same way with the same set of applications and the same versions of those applications.
  
• Look at how you are using Microsoft Office and suggest ways in which you might get more from it, perhaps by designing new templates or creating some simple automation of oft-repeated tasks to speed up them up.

Drive out errors with specialist testing

If you don’t thoroughly test before going live the results could be horrendous. Systems testing is a highly specialist skill that some organisations do not have in-house. But outsourcing can often be done for just a fraction of the overall investment, so why cut corners?

Here are some examples: