In this week’s issue of Computer Weekly we kick-off a programme of content aimed at providing a resource for IT training, education and career development. We also look at the controversial supplier contracts for the NHS IT programme, and examine the challenges of Big Data - plus our usual analysis of the week’s news. Download the latest issue now. 

Leading life sciences companies are recognizing the need for synchronized, enterprise-wide pricing and contract management processes. An integrated solution can provide the transparency needed to satisfy auditors, balance pricing with go-to-market strategies, and support sales and finance teams - including accurately predicting margins. 

Financial companies handle highly sensitive documents that require various signatures and approvals -- but many struggle to strike a balance between quality service that meets customer expectations and ensuring documents remain secure and compliant. Read on to learn about an electronic signature tool that can alleviate this challenge. 

In this transcript of the webcast, TIBCO Spotfire's John Callan will discuss how you can perform Total Spend Analysis to help drive supplier consolidation, contract compliance and identify maverick spend in a user-friendly, visual analysis environment. 

In this week's Computer Weekly: Amazon and Microsoft earn $5bn in public cloud revenue – we ask if public cloud is now ready for the mainstream. Banks face huge challenges replacing legacy IT – but is the short-term nature of CIOs hindering progress? And we look at how user experience can deliver return on investment for IT. Read the issue now. 

Juniper Research defines mobile banking as  “the provision of banking services to customers on their mobile devices”: specifically we mean in the vast majority of instances “the operation of bank current and deposit or savings accounts”. 

In this week's Computer Weekly, we look at IBM's work with England's rugby team and Premier League football on how business analytics can improve the chances of winning at sport. We find out the issues to consider when negotiating cloud contracts. And we examine how software-defined networking will automate network management. Read the issue now. 

The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council has demanded the development of mobile applications that include comprehensive security controls. This expert resource will help you understand what the new guidelines call for in terms of security controls, the history behind these standards, and further developments. 

The adoption of virtualization by corporations is being spurred by the availability of high performance multi-core servers that deliver the processing power, memory, and connectivity speeds. 

As the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS, or PCI) becomes more widely adopted in both the United States and Europe, organizations face five major challenges when navigating the PCI compliance landscape. Read this white paper to learn what they are and how to overcome them. 

In this paper, we give an overview of FIM, an explanation of how FIM provides data protection and improves security, and what capabilities FIM must offer to effectively provide that data protection and security. 

Banks today are redirecting their focus to retail banking and are reinventing themselves as customer-centric organisations. Many institutions, however, still use legacy infrastructures and processes that hinder necessary readjustments Read on to find out how to overcome these challenges.