The business world has been excited about the potential of big data ever since the term was first coined in 2001.

While information has always been a critical element of forming business strategy, big data means taking advantage of modern levels of computational power and data availability to extract meaningful insight from extremely large datasets in ways previously impossible.

Business possibilities

The possibilities promised by big data seem limitless. There is the famous example of US superstore Target reportedly identifying a teenager’s pregnancy before her father, having found a correlation between her purchases and those of pregnant women and sending her vouchers for baby products.

And, yesterday it was reported that Manchester City have teamed up with German software company SAP to use big data analytics in an attempt to improve performance on and off the pitch.

Put simply, by using big data, businesses hope to improve their products and services, create more effective targeted marketing campaigns, and improve productivity by analysing staff behaviour.

To implement a big data strategy and start extracting these meaningful insights, a business requires two things: a large amount of data, and a software system with which to analyse that data.

Luckily, as computers increase in power at almost the same rate that available data grows – roughly doubling every two years – both are now readily available, even to small businesses.

Risks to businesses

As businesses process increasing amounts of data in search of new opportunities, they also expose themselves to a number of risks, with concerns over cyber security increasing in the wake of the recent USA data breach, now confirmed as having involved over 20 million names.

People continue to be the weak link in data protection – vulnerability to social engineering and individual mistakes can inadvertently grant hackers access to data, putting organisations at risk of serious data breaches. If and when proposed EU-wide data protection laws come into play, the risks will also include cripplingly large fines if security measures are not in place.

As companies increasingly utilise cloud-based software-as-a-solution (SaaS) services and implement CRM systems to manage big data strategies, they must ensure that individual employees follow correct procedures to maintain data integrity and security.

Now, more than ever, data protection cannot be seen as just the concern of the IT team, especially when employees increasingly have remote access to large amounts of sensitive data.

Businesses must ensure that every single member of staff is acting in a way that protects the organisation’s data – or face the consequences.

Find out more about our Data Protection training – aimed at giving all employees the training they need to protect your business from data protection breaches.

Fraud continues to be a high profile news story: in the last week, a former Ukip MEP has been jailed over £500k expenses fraud, the finance director of Bannatyne Group was in court over fraud amounting to £8m, and it was revealed that in 2014 insurance fraud was worth an incredible £1.32bn.

Fraud, or deception for personal gain or to cause loss to another party, comes in many forms, making protecting your organisation against fraud an ongoing challenge.

There are numerous risks to organisations: job applicants lying on CVs in order to get jobs, employees filing false expenses claims, and senior staff abusing their positions for financial gain are just a few examples.

As well as fraud within organisations, every individual working for an organisation is a potential target for fraudsters – and it could well be the organisation’s money and reputation which ends up lost.

Consequences

The consequences of fraud are extremely serious, including imprisonment, hefty fines and damage to reputation of both the individual and the organisation.

Fines, lost revenue and legal costs associated with fraud can lead to reduced wages, cancelled bonuses, decreased morale and even redundancies.

Our Online Fraud and Market Abuse training is designed to help protect organisations against the various threats posed by fraud by raising awareness among all staff.

Everyone in an organisation is responsible for detecting fraud and protecting the organisation from its consequences. This excerpt from the ‘Identifying and preventing fraud’ section of the course demonstrates 12 red flags to help individuals detect fraud in your organisation:

Behavioural red flags

  • Employees who consistently work longer hours than their colleagues for no apparent reason and are reluctant to take time off.
  • Employees with a sudden change of lifestyle and/or social circle.
  • Employees under apparent stress without identifiable pressure.
  • Employees who request significant detail about proposed internal audit scopes or inspections.

Financial red flags

  • Employees known by others to be under external financial pressure.
  • Employees who appear to make a greater than normal number of mistakes, especially where these lead to financial loss through cash or account transactions.
  • Employees with unexplained sources of wealth, or at the highest level of performance (e.g. sales) where there might be a concern that they are achieving this through suspect activity.
  • Employees with competing or undeclared external business interests.

Procedural red flags

  • Employees making procedural or computer-system enquiries inconsistent or not related to their normal duties.
  • Customers or suppliers insisting on dealing with just one individual.
  • Managers who avoid using the purchasing department.
  • Poor engagement with corporate governance philosophy.

These red flags are designed simply to raise awareness and help in the detection of fraud by giving employees an idea of what to look out for – they do not constitute evidence that fraud is taking place.

Our Online Fraud and Market Abuse training covers identifying and preventing fraud in much greater detail, including technology fraud, internal and external fraud, the Fraud Act 2006, the consequences, investigation and reporting of fraud.

Vinciworks, the leader in online compliance learning, has just released a free guide to the SRA Accounts Rules, which includes hot topics, key definitions and best practice. This guide will come in handy when you need to quickly reference topics such as “office money vs. client money” and “matter completion.” You will constantly be able to refresh yourself on the topics of:

  • Mission briefing
  • Critical terms
  • Whose money is it?
  • Client money checklist
  • Matter completion

With these quick refreshers, your firm will not have to worry as much about the SDT and SRAs fines or restrictions. Also, each page in the guide comes as an individual, print-ready poster.

Screen Shot 2015-07-07 at 11.00.06 AMDownload guide

 

Managing eLearning is a complicated and ongoing task, leading many organisations to hire staff dedicated solely to this function.

With responsibilities including managing learners, eLearning courses, enrolments, communications and reports, to name a few, the administrative burden on staff responsible for eLearning is large.

We’re about to release our brand new eLearning platform, Astute. Throughout its development, we’ve listened to client feedback to come up with Astute solutions to some of the most common eLearning pains, including:

1. User administration

Being able to monitor results is a key benefit of eLearning, but being able to correlate results with learners requires each learner to be allocated a unique username.

While eLearning platforms typically allow users to be added and deleted one by one, as organisations get larger this becomes an increasingly complicated way to manage users.

Staff turnover also means that the list of required users evolves constantly, making keeping an eLearning platform’s users up to date an administrative nightmare, consuming time whenever someone leaves or joins the organisation.

Our Astute solution: With Astute, use Active Directory single sign on automation or synchronise users with your existing systems using batch CSV import to painlessly keep your eLearning platform’s user list up to date.

2. User enrolment

Once learners are registered, they need to be enrolled onto the right courses, which may seem straightforward at first glance: find the user, select the courses to enrol them on, and enrol them.

Imagine repeating that process to enrol fifty users onto a number of courses specific to each of them, though, and the time involved grows rapidly.

When it comes to a global corporation with thousands of learners and a catalogue full of available courses, it really gets out of hand.

Many eLearning platforms are designed with only a straightforward individual user enrolment in mind, which simply doesn’t scale efficiently to the demands of a larger organisation.

Our Astute solution: Astute has a number of bulk management features for course enrolments and re-enrolments. Enrol users based on name, team, function, or any custom field of your choice in bulk to take the pain out of enrolments, no matter how many learners and courses you’re dealing with.

3. Communication with learners

In an ideal world, once users are created and enrolled onto relevant courses, administrators would be able to simply sit back and wait for them to complete the courses.

In practise, each time a learner is enrolled on a course a number of associated communications are required, such as informing the learner of the enrolment, their log in and access details, confirming completion of the course, and notifying managers of course completions.

Multiply all of these requirements by the amount of users involved and it quickly becomes a huge task, requiring constant communication with learners, managers and relevant stakeholders.

Our Astute solution: Astute’s in depth triggering system means any action can automatically create a reaction, specified by you. For example, when courses are enrolled on, create a trigger to email the user automatically, or when courses are completed, notify specific users – there are limitless opportunities to create triggers to automate communication throughout the user journey.

4. Chasing learners to complete courses

After learners have been enrolled and sent details of how to log in and complete their courses, it may seem like a matter of time before course completion rates reach 100%.

However, being overwhelmed with emails and tasks often means that emails about eLearning enrolments can often get lost, saved for later and forgotten about, or simply ignored.

eLearning platforms typically offer the ability to view users yet to complete a course, enabling an administrator to remind them, but this becomes yet another time consuming ongoing task.

Our Astute solution: Astute enables you to setup automated chaser emails for incomplete courses, as well as escalation reports to local champions or the person responsible for the learner in question – all customisable by the administrator.

5. Analysing data

One of the most valuable benefits of eLearning is the vast amount of data generated about each learner and their interactions with each course.

Utilised properly, this data can help businesses to identify areas of performance in need of attention to improve results, as well as identify which employees are outperforming their colleagues.

Most eLearning platforms offer the ability to view data generated, but to make meaningful, actionable sense of the data requires analytical skills.

Our Astute solution: Inbuilt dashboard summaries provide an overview of eLearning performance at an organisation-wide level, which can be drilled into to explore data at a course or learner level. Numerous included report templates highlight users based on course completion, team, and more, or use the powerful custom report builder for specific reports. Best of all, reports can be delivered automatically at scheduled intervals to the inboxes of administrators and key stakeholders in Excel, Word or PDF format.

6. Managing refresher schedules

It is good practise for employees to take regular annual refresher training, especially in critical subjects such as compliance.

Organisations typically manage this by setting an arbitrary annual date by which all employees must complete eLearning courses. Not only does this create extra administrative work, with manual re-enrolments every year, it also means staff who have joined in the interim have to take courses twice in less than a year.

Our Astute solution: Astute’s built in auto enrolment features can be based on a user’s individual course completion date, meaning that their re-enrolment date depends on when they last completed the course. Once set up, this runs automatically without requiring any intervention from your administrator.

We’ve designed Astute to take the pain out of eLearning administration, with many features aimed at making life easier for eLearning administrators. Release is imminent and you can be one of the first to see Astute in action: book a demo of Astute today.

As we have reported previously, our poll found that over 50% of solicitors plan to transition to the new approach to continuing competence before it becomes mandatory on 1 November 2016.

The SRA has published a toolkit with detailed guidance on how to comply with the new approach. However, some of the information is confusing. We have chosen to highlight two short documents that explain most of the requirements at a glance.

Under the new approach, you must:

  • Reflect on the quality of your practice by reference to the Competence Statement
  • Plan and address learning and development needs based on the reflection
  • Record and evaluate the learning activity
  • Make an annual declaration to confirm you have completed the above

The following two templates from the SRA clarify what is required Continue reading