SECTORS & LOCATIONS:

• Our primary focus is within the London property, wealth and asset management sector.
• We offer an end-to-end service, but often look at specific issues and requirements on an ad-hoc basis.
• Digital solutions to meet business objectives.
  

Through the years: 2020...

We’ve been in this business since 1998 but only started summarising each year’s activity here 5 years ago.
2020 has been a bit different:

• Zoom and Microsoft Teams have brought out the management and governance issues inherent in all IT. 
• Windows Virtual Desktop, with the new Spring Release, has become the obvious answer to a problem no-one knew they had until WFH took off. We can now provide a scalable and super-secure environment in the cloud at a cost that makes it accessible to everyone.
• Reporting and BI are key to keeping a business in touch, and tools to do this at speed have never more vital.

…and a surprise benefit of Skykick Backup has been that there is no better way to keep a furloughed user’s data and email alive without ongoing O365 license fees! 

PROCESS AUTOMATION

Throughout 2019 we have been building a wealth of process automations to underpin the mainstream support and development work.  UI.Vision and Selenium IDE have been the workhorses, with Power Automate coming up fast on the outside.

A financial system migration was being held up by unclear constraints in the upload tools and opaque formatting requirements. We built a small army of bots to re-key each financial journal in the new system and reproduced 6 years of work by 3 accounts clerks over the course of a long weekend!

A steady stream of business reporting requirements has led us to build a library of SSRS reporting templates, supplemented by point solutions using Power Query to fill in the tricky gaps left by user-maintained BI tools.

Skykick Backup for Office 365 has been increasingly leading the field – as a managed service with
self-service for restores there really is nothing to beat it.

HMRC’s Making Tax Digital initiative certainly made work for accountants in 2019, but we were able to lighten the load with some timely interventions to put manual processes back into the systems where they belong.

DATA WHERE-HOUSE?

2018 has seen a lot of small but fascinating projects using web hooks and serverless functions to link up business processes and keep track of events across different teams and organisations. Our favourite larger projects included:

• building on Azure Data Warehouse to bring different accounting systems together for group-wide consolidation reporting,
• automating purchase invoice entry and approval using scanning and text recognition,
• creating a user-operated SQL toolset to split financials out into separate operational databases in line with corporate reorganisation – repeatably. When did a business ever stop restructuring itself?

They might sound like major projects, but small teams and big ideas can get a lot done quickly without costing the earth or shaking up the workplace.

POWER BI

In 2017 Power BI started to break through into the mainstream.  ‘Zero code’ must be good for the back office, and helps everyone to automate their way through the workload without building a legacy of undocumented and unsupportable scripts.  A few pointers to help them record their achievements are sometimes in order, though.

SharePoint was a hot topic last year: the new Modern List was another move towards empowering the user, and probably worth the few hiccups encountered in re-working custom themes and views.

We were called on to help out a rather larger consultancy with a wide-ranging IT Strategy review for an international wealth & investment manager in the City.  Always good to work alongside other teams, and it really helps when they are made up of top-flight individuals at the peak of their game. 

FINANCIALS

Our projects in 2016 were dominated by delivery of a cloud based financials suite to replace a well established accounting system the client was finding more than a bit creaky. Balancing the sometimes competing needs of the 4 separate Finance Directors across the group was interesting, and analysis and configuration soon took second place to the nitty gritty of data transformation. Everyone enjoyed pitching in to help with re-writing a stack of management reports, and it all helps to transfer skills within the team.

No shortage of new services and features in Azure, and the move to the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) delivery model makes it a much more manageable proposition for hard pressed in-house IT teams.

PROPERTY

The big project of 2015 was SQL migration and testing to help a property company move its in-house property management onto a new cloud-based system.  Some late nights, but a great project with interesting spin-offs and a happy client.

At the same time we were moving a well established FileNet document archive to SharePoint Online, with new workflows to streamline Accounts Payable and integrate with the line-of-business systems.  It is good to see the in-house IT team now making the running with SharePoint, and taking it on to greater things.