Make Confident PRogress

Strategy

Security & Controls

Your reliance on systems increases year by year, and the sophistication with which those system interact with one another grows in line with this There is a parallel increase in the risks present in these systems as their complexity makes it hard to track and understand the gaps that inevitably develop, which make your systems and data prone to some level of risk.

We can help you determine where risks exist, and formulate effective responses to manage and mitigate these. Since so many risks relate to security, our review includes a considerable security component.

We can map the outputs of our review to various standards to suit different needs, including Cyber Essentials, GDPR, ISO27001, SOC2 and cyber-insurance renewals.

Accountants and lawyers are assumed to be trusted guardians of client data. There are any number of technological solutions to help maintain privacy and security, but as the challenges and the solutions become more complex you need expert insight and advice to ensure they are being correctly applied.

We provide varying levels of service to help you:

  • One-off reviews, for you to get an overview of your situation or meet a particular need such as an insurance renewal
  • Repeat reviews, as above, typically on a annual or half-yearly basis
  • Fractional CISO (Chief Information Security Officer), working alongside your internal technology team, providing on-going expert insight and advice without the commitment of a full-time CISO

 

Auditors must increasingly provide insight into IT general controls, especially where these can lead to risk of material misstatement or consequential serious impact. If your firm needs more experts and expertise in this field, especially for those clients with large ERP platforms or with many interconnected systems, we can help.

Our review process can be mapped to ISA315 requirements, providing you with a turnkey solution that you can package into your own audit service with a minimum of effort; alternatively, we can simply provide an opinion or insight if you need some extra help.

"Jeremy Hyman Associates have worked with Francis Clark helping us to determine and follow the best technology strategy for the firm. They are knowledgeable and forthright, and bring an external view at Board level that we value."

Andrew Richards / Managing Partner at PKF Francis Clark

"Our projects are varied and sometimes complex, with many operational and technical considerations. We consider the insight we get from Jeremy Hyman Associates to be very useful when considering the options at our disposal. They have wide experience and have demonstrated the ability to work with our technical, administrative and production teams."

Julie Berry / COO at Saffery Champness

"We have ambitious growth targets and see technology as key to achieving these whilst still maintaining our very high standards of client engagement. To help us meet these goals, we have worked with Jeremy Hyman Associates for many years and found their insight invaluable in supporting our internal teams"

Andrew Sandiford / Managing Partner at Bishop Fleming

“As a large firm we are able to rely in-house for most of our technology resources. However, we appreciate some outside counsel, to open our horizons and to act as a reference point for our decisions. The team at Jeremy Hyman Associates have the experience and independence we value and provide this input for the firm”

Chris Madden / Head of IT at Kreston Reeves

“Through the years Jeremy Hyman Associates has given us good strategic and operational input, helping us procure and utilise a range of good suppliers to good effect”

Alex Peal / Managing Partner at James Cowper Kreston

“As an ambitious and highly successful firm, we know the value of expert advice – we are, after all, in the advice business ourselves. Jeremy Hyman Associates have helped us plan and implement change, especially with their team of experts covering different areas of knowledge, available as and when we’ve needed them”

Adam Cramer / CEO at Wilson Wright

“As a mid-sized firm we had always managed our IT internally. As we’ve grown, we have needed to access more knowledge and advice, but independence was of the utmost importance to us. Jeremy Hyman Associates have provided the ideal service for us”

Peter Winter / Managing Partner at Carter Backer Winter LLP

“By working with Jeremy Hyman Associates, we are confident that we’ve made good strategic decisions that have been impactful on the efficiency and growth of the firm into a dominant force in our region. We have found the support and guidance from Jeremy and his team to be invaluable. Challenging our thinking in the area of technology to ensure that what we are doing is of real commercial benefit to our business.”

Paul Dickson / Managing Partner at Armstrong Watson

“We wanted to provide insight and expertise to our member firms from a partner that knew how to engage as advisors, not salespeople. Jeremy Hyman Associates has proven to be exactly who we needed.”

Andrew Leck / CEO, MSI Global

“As a start-up, we felt we needed a range of experts available to guide us through the challenges we knew we would face. Having worked with Jeremy Hyman Associates before, they were the natural choice and have contributed to our success”

Andrew Watson / Managing Director at Petrolprices.com

“Working with you has been valuable to the firm and me. We have worked through some critical periods and your insights and experience have provided us a plan for the immediate needs and a way forward.”

Margot Sunter / Chief Innovation Officer & Chief Operating Officer GGFL LLP
Strategy

Major Systems

From time to time firms will undertake the replacement of a major system. This can be a daunting task, as it places great demands on the IT team and users, and also often has impacts far beyond the system being replaced, especially in terms of data and process change.

Major systems are usually expensive and making the wrong choice of system or supplier can lead to an unsuccessful or suboptimal result. The cost and resource commitment expended means that this will have to be endured for years, and so the stakes of “getting it right” are considerable.

We have a great deal of experience in determining what a new system must deliver, selecting the right solution and vendor, procuring software and services, and setting out a realistic path for the project to migrate to the new environment.

Our particular areas of expertise are set out below.

At the heart of a firm is its practice management system (PMS). Many of these systems are really quite ancient, with technology often twenty or more years old. Changing PMS is not for the feint-hearted however. Over the years, most PMS evolve to cater for many nuanced operations within a firm, detailed reporting requirements, and countless integrations.

We can help you really understand what your PMS needs to do and help you review the market (both within your sector and outside of it, and to include both PMS and ERP systems). We also look at data and processes, and formulate better data architectures and improved processes. We help you migrate data and implement process change.

 

Client Relationship Management (CRM) is probably the least well-understood software in professional firms. Its very flexibility and agility can make it very hard to specify, and its overlaps with other systems – often quite old, legacy systems – can make integration and implementation a particular challenge.

We have extensive experience with most leading CRM systems, both general market and industry specific, allowing us to advise you on their selection, implementation and, most importantly, their adoption.

CRM can be the most powerful tool you ever deploy to support business development and pro-active client engagement. But choosing and using it well is a subtle art, and CRM has perhaps the biggest gap between what vendors want to supply, and the precise needs of your firm. It is a gap we can fill, increasing the chances of a successful deployment.

Document Management Systems (DMS) have been in use at most firms for many years, and most of our clients are now on their second or third iteration of these systems.

However, in recent years the market has progressed considerably, particularly with the advent of cloud-based systems. These are also evolving from being back-office repositories into more integrated and client-facing systems, often providing portal and e-signing facilities alongside traditional storage functions.

We have extensive experience of choosing a new DMS, migrating what can be very substantial amounts of data, and defining and helping with the adoption of new processes to make the most of a next-generation DMS in your firm.

 

Examples of our Assurance work