NHS IT projects could be in line for cutbacks following this week's pre-budget report. Chancellor Alistair Darling told The Andrew Marr Show yesterday that the report, due to be published on Wednesday, will provide guidance on which areas of public spending were likely to be cut.

Encouraging businesses to go green is good but the government must better incorporate outsourcing in its carbon control scheme, says the NOA's Mark Kobayashi-Hillary Much is being said about the UK government's upcoming Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) scheme but it remains unclear how much of this talk is translating into action and what impact the scheme will have on the outsourcing and offshoring industries.

Working out your budgets and trying to figure out the tech priorities for your HR department in 2010? Nick Heath has a few suggestions for HR directors as to where to invest that cash on technology to get the most benefits for your team and the rest of the business. Consider standardising your systemsTake a look at what you do in the HR department and the chances are a number of companies are doing exactly the same thing: processes like payroll and benefits administration or training and recruitment will need to be carried out at any large organisation. As a result, adopting standardised systems for common processes is worth considering for enterprises that are relying on expensive, bespoke IT systems.

With recession leading businesses to cut IT costs as much as they can, tech workers are increasingly feeling the impact of offshoring, results from the exclusive 2009 silicon.com Skills Survey show. Almost half (47.5 per cent) of respondents said their organisation has probably offshored IT jobs - up from more than a third (36 per cent) who thought that was the case last year.

Zurich Financial Services has announced an outsourcing megadeal. The company said yesterday is has signed a 10 and a half year deal with CSC to supply datacentre and IT services.

No longer just the domain of call centres, Bangalore has matured into the place for world-class research and development, says Saritha Rai. Years ago, when the world pictured Bangalore they imagined an outsourcing hub full of call centre agents and paid-by-the-hour software workers. How that has changed.

Marketing emails are at risk of being blocked as spam because businesses are not correctly managing the email communications they send out, a survey has found. More than half of the 157 marketing managers surveyed by the DMA Email Marketing Council said their business did not restrict the number of messages that could be sent to an email account in a given period.

Outsourcing deals typically promise to deliver cost savings and increased efficiency - but all too often the promises fail to match the reality. At the National Outsourcing Association's Sourcing Summit last week, two heads of IT shared their experiences of how to get the best out of outsourcing agreements and make sure they're delivering long-term value.

How does a business pay less for its IT services when it's already getting them at rock bottom prices? It takes a long hard look at whether it needs to be gobbling up so many services in the first place.

Could some of the big names in outsourcing be among the victims of the much-hyped shift to cloud computing? As businesses begin to host their IT systems in the cloud - instead of hiring outsourcers to maintain and integrate their systems - outsourcers could start to feel the pain, according to author and technology thinker Nicholas Carr.

The controversial ID project has hit another delay, with the government missing its own deadline to get the cards into the hands of Manchester residents. The Home Office announced today that people living or working in Manchester will now be able to enrol their details for an ID card from 30 November, with the first cards issued around 10 days after enrolment.

As the hype around microblogging builds, should your business join the tweet-fest or keep schtum? silicon.com's Natasha Lomas deconstructs this Digital Dilemma. So you've heard about Twitter. You might even know what the word 'tweet' means. Well done. Your finger is well and truly riding the social media pulse. But here's the rub: should your business join the tweet-fest and set up shop on Twitter? Is microblogging the new marketing?

Your outsourcing deals must be able to ramp up or down depending on your business needs at the time. William Benn explains how to do it. Having explored security and reliability in your IT outsourcing arrangements, today I turn the spotlight on the next critical dimension: scalability.

Soon offshoring will no longer offer the considerable tax incentive it has to date. Lawyers Belinda Doshi and Nick Beecham explain how financial firms can protect their business. Banks, insurance companies and other financial services providers should be aware of an important change to the VAT rules due to come into effect on 1 January 2010.

Local council IT departments' tendency to outsource problematic tech functions means their outsourcing projects are rarely successful, according to a new report. The report, from consultants Deloitte, reveals that local councils need to change their overall approach to IT rather than hoping outsourcers can step in and solve all their tech problems.

Indian outsourcers certainly have the cash - so why aren't they buying up their competitors? Saritha Rai finds out. They have accumulated piles of cash so you would think top Indian outsourcing firms such as Infosys Technologies and Wipro Ltd would go hunting for sizeable acquisitions in the current market.

The taxman will cut £110m from its annual IT bill by trimming its IT infrastructure. HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) will reduce the £840m it currently spends on IT each year by ditching or shrinking the size of 40 computer systems and shutting down a number of datacentres.

When it comes to deciding how to spend a hard-won portion of the IT budget, who do CIOs trust for advice? Consultants? Blogs? Whitepapers? Or something else entirely?

Following its sale by parent company Ford last year, car maker Jaguar Land Rover has had to face the thorny problem of cutting itself loose from Ford's web of business applications. JLR is spending £200m separating its IT operations from Ford, largely on carrying out the painstaking process of copying and cloning more than 1,600 business applications.

We've had the 'citizen journalist', blogging from war zones or capturing breaking news on their cameraphone. Now step forward the 'citizen developer' - an individual set to play an increasingly important role in creating business apps, according to analyst house Gartner. Gartner defines a citizen developer as a user working outside the scope of enterprise IT and its governance who creates new business apps for others to use either from scratch or by mashing up and building on various existing services.

If you haven't guessed already: 2009 was a bad year for IT spending, analysts have found. But fear not - things are looking brighter for the coming years. According to research from Gartner, enterprise tech spending is down 5.2 per cent on 2008 figures.

Outsourced IT is of little value if it's not reliable. William Benn offers advice on how to make sure you can count on your technology. Last month I wrote about the critical dimension of security when outsourcing IT. Security ensures a safe environment in which the technology can operate.

A further eight NHS bodies have signed on with NHS Shared Business Services (NHS SBS), an outsourcing joint venture between the Department of Health and Steria. NHS SBS will supply the eight organisations - which include NHS Nottingham City, Trafford Healthcare NHS Trust and Western Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust - with services including finance, accounting and payroll.

Business support services company Rentokil Initial has signed up for the biggest enterprise deployment of Google Apps to date. The implementation of Google Apps Premier Edition will eventually cover 35,000 of the company's users across 50 countries.

The Home Office has announced it's extending IT contracts with suppliers Atos Origin and Fujitsu, under new deals worth £430m. The Home Office claims the contract extensions, which will run until 2016, will reduce IT costs by £100m over their lifetime.