Bcs Branch Northampton

Speaker: Jacques Erasmus, Malware Director and Specialist with prevx.com shares his thoughts and knowledge in light of the amount of malware that has accelerated, rapidly driven by a change in motive amongst writers from malicious intent to commercial intent evolving from "occasional" exploits to a thriving global economy. With the increasing scale and sophistication of attacks ensuring you or your users are protected is an increasing challenge demanding a "collaborative" approach to beat the cyber criminals, protecting consumers and businesses.

Mike Hill from Itica Consulting presents on Business Continuity Management and demonstrates why it is just as important during a recession to manage risk effectively and provides some practical tips on how to make Business Continuity effective in your organisation

Listen to our guest speaker Peter James from Prodrive who gives an insight on how technology employed in motorsport ends up in the cars we drive on the road.

This was a most interesting, thought provoking and informative talk for people who wanted to know where the technology and the industry are heading. In his talk, Stewart Fraser from Unysis's UK Customer Education department used examples from the past to help identify which trends in IT are likely to have greatest impact in the future. While examples from the past were accurate, Stewart gave no guarantees of his predictions for the future!

Podcast of the Northampton BCS AGM

Method-based problem diagnosis is rarely understood and even more rarely practiced, and yet it offers an effective means to solving intermittent or long-running IT problems. In this presentation Paul will outline an IT specific problem resolution method called RPR and describes the core principles. He will describe how you can benefit from the approach and illustrates the effectiveness of RPR with two case studies from the finance industry.

The Skills Gap is high on the agenda of current IT thinking, but what exactly is it? What do seasoned IT professionals and newcomers to the industry need to do to make themselves relevant to IT in the noughties and beyond? With the growth of outsourcing to foreign countries how should IT workers position themselves in the jobs market to ensure continued employment in the UK?

Council Services have been undergoing modernisation to bring them up to increasing customer expectations and also to enable access via the 'e-channels'. Most councils now have Customer Relationship Management systems, telephone Contact Centres, and transactional web portals. One additional benefit of having ITC enabled services is the ease at which we can gather detailed management information and metrics. It is the extraction of this data that provides crucial operational performance management, which is another key driver in local government. The challenge is pulling this information together into a convenient place that is readily accessible by supervisors and mangers to review day to day performance, sometimes in real time. Jane Perrin (Business Analyst, Daventry Distric Council) and Peter Parkes MBCS CITP SocITM (Peake Performance) will describe how a simple MIS system was overlaid onto recently installed systems at Daventry District Council to provide real-time management information to operations teams