The recent proposed Green Paper, and in particular its element on "stakeholder engagement", called for the voices of employees and customers to be heard in the Boardroom. It followed the PM’s U Turn on her commitment to put employees on company boards, but echoed the Chancellor’s sentiments on UK productivity.

As Mr Hammond reminded us in his Autumn Statement, UK productivity lags behind that of the US and Germany by some 30 percentage points. According to research from Qualtrics, British workers think a third of their working day is wasted. Giving employees a "voice", however, dramatically improves outcomes, because low productivity and dysfunctional employee engagement are two sides of the same coin.

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According to IDC, by 2018 at least half of IT spending will be cloud based, reaching 60 percent of all IT Infrastructures, and 60 to 70 percent of all software, services, and technology spending by 2020.

As cloud has become a standard way of doing business, organizations globally are using it as a tool for innovation and business transformation. Those who successfully use the cloud to achieve growth will have a mature, strategic view of how best to implement and integrate it across their organizations. All approaches to cloud have advantages. From the straightforward simplicity of public cloud services, versus the increased security and control of a private cloud, there is a cloud environment to meet every organization’s needs.

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Multi-cloud has been discussed within the cloud computing industry for a while, but there is still confusion and disagreement about what it is. What most can agree on is that multi-cloud is about mixing and matching the best-in-class technologies and services from different cloud providers to create the best possible solution for a business.

This flexibility is what will define the industry in the coming years, allowing organizations to leverage the relative advantages, price-points and geographic locations of the solutions to their best advantage. However, the transition to a multi-cloud solution can be fraught with risks if improperly managed. As a result, enterprises looking to gain advantage through this technology are seeking expert help in the form of third-party managed service providers.

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Slack came from nowhere to be one of the leaders of the collaboration market in just two years. But being a leader means other people are keen to take a share of your business and team messenger application Flock is the latest to be eyeing up Slack's market.

Today Flock is launching a development platform, FlockOS. It describes this as a chat operating system, that allows developers to build customized apps, bots and integrations. These can either be used within their own organizations, or published on the Flock Appstore, making them available for all Flock users.

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If Gartner’s right, smart machines will become a business mainstream by 2021. Its new report, entitled "Smart Machines: Consulting and System Integration Services Market Forecast and Opportunities", says smart machines will see a 30 percent adoption in the next five years among large enterprises.

Gartner says cognitive computing, artificial intelligence (AI), intelligent automation, machine learning and deep learning are all considered "smart machines". By becoming mainstream, smart machines will open up an entirely new industry, which is expected to be worth approximately $29 billion (£23.3bn) by 2021.

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The data processing landscape has seen huge changes since 1995, in May 2018 the EU is replacing the Directive with a new regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Enforceable from May 2018, organizations have had to take account of their responsibilities under the DPA for many years now.

Many have mature and well-considered data management policies in place that already address elements of the GDPR. Nonetheless, with the threat of significant penalties for data breaches under the GDPR it would be prudent to reexamine procedures and to consider how these can be enhanced to ensure compliance when GDPR comes into effect in May 2018.

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Enterprises that rely on mainframe are having a hard time delivering applications as fast as they need to, a new report by Forrester and Compuware has shown. Nine in ten (90 percent) of enterprises are having these issues, the report says, adding that it is a serious issue, as the majority of new business initiatives include the mainframe.

Almost half (48 percent) have moved some apps off the mainframe, which resulted in security issues, higher costs, poor performance and project delays. More than four in ten (41 percent) are trying to work around the mainframe, resulting in greater complexity, more expenses, double tooling and more security risks.

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Every fifth business is planning on adopting the Internet of things (IoT) to help address customer demand, and improve engagement. This is according to a new report by analytics firm SAS.

These companies are mostly focused on improving front-end processes and efficiency. Only after tackling these issues will they focus on internal processes.

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A new survey of over 250 senior IT executives reveals that 89 percent of IT leaders are planning on implementing more cloud based disaster recovery in the next year.

The study by disaster recovery and business continuity specialist Quorum also reveals that 80 percent of IT leaders say it takes more than an hour for them to recover from a server failure, with more than 25 percent saying they need more than two hours.

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The lack of skilled workers in the IT industry is putting pressure on IT professionals in more ways than we'd previously imagined. A new report, recently released by Unified Security Management and AlienVault says IT managers that will take days off during the holidays will actually spend them worrying about work.

The "good news" is -- less than a third (29 percent) will actually take time off during the holidays. The rest will just keep on working.

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Companies are struggling to manage and secure their WANs, especially at branch locations, according to the findings of a new report.

The study, conducted by Dimensional Research for Versa Networks, finds almost all participants state that maintaining security policies, network devices and complexity due to cloud and mobile applications are the most difficult aspects of managing the WAN.

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While 75 percent of organizations set fixed time limits for investigating potential security incidents, many of them fail to meet their investigating and reporting targets.

According to a study from contextual security technology company Balabit 44 percent of respondents report missing internal or external deadlines for investigating or reporting a breach in the last year, and seven percent say a missed deadline had resulted in serious consequences.

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Software asset management and IT managers around the world, mostly fear being audited by Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. This is according to a new report, just released by SAM solutions developer Snow Software.

Polling managers worldwide, three quarters (75 percent) say they fear being audited by Microsoft. Just over half (53 percent) say the same for Oracle, and a third (33 percent) about SAP.

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Marketers are shifting their focus away from customer acquisition and tools like buy buttons in favor of brand loyalty and awareness according to a new study.

The report from email marketing platform Campaigner shows that compared to this year 9.5 percent fewer marketers have customer acquisition as a top goal for 2017, while 14 percent more selected brand awareness and 11.4 percent brand loyalty.

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Despite seeing how painful poor cyber-security posture can be on a company, IT decision makers are still skeptical of the funds given to them by upper management to combat the threat, and lack the confidence, too. This is according to a new report by cloud business applications provider Intermedia.

The company surveyed 350 ITDMs, asking questions in four categories: security, general IT services, infrastructure and skilled IT workforce. Overall, the confidence score is 7.2 out of 10, which Intermedia calls "modest" (0 means a company is not confident at all, and 10 means the company is "extremely confident").

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