SI and tech insights

Beating the biometric fraudsters

Accenture — Fri, 10 May 2013 04:00:06 GMT

Biometric technologies were, until recently, widely used by just two types of people - police detectives and Hollywood spies. But the world is waking up to the fact that biometrics can enable faster, easier identity recognition. With governments and businesses...

Bridge over the troubled waters: The EU skills gap

Accenture — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:35:19 GMT

European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, unveiled plans for a “Grand Coalition of ICT Skills” designed to bridge the digital skills gap currently being felt in the Eurozone. In certain respects, this is not surprising. The pervasiveness of...

Active Defence: Adapting cyber defences to the threat

Accenture — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 13:48:39 GMT

Despite an increasing focus on securing businesses that are increasingly “going digital”, IT departments are struggling to keep pace with recent advances in security technology. This week IT professionals are descending upon the 18th Infosecurity Europe event with the hope...

Sustainability reporting: Going beyond a box ticking exercise

Accenture — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 12:33:55 GMT

Hands up if you have ever read a quarterly sustainability report. Don’t be ashamed if you haven’t, you’re one of millions. In my experience the only people likely to have read your company’s full sustainability report (past the executive summary...

How data architects can improve patient services

Accenture — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 11:26:05 GMT

As life sciences companies have developed enhanced pharma analytics capabilities to support their new business models, they have begun to better understand the role that information and data play in helping them achieve their objectives. For instance, data from patient-specific...

Energy industry: Who will win in the cloud?

Accenture — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:26:19 GMT

Most oil and gas companies are already evaluating the risks and benefits of the cloud, and some have taken major steps towards virtualising their internal infrastructures. But the majority have yet to implement the full-scale automation or self-service provisioning that...

The art of analytics

Accenture — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 17:30:00 GMT

Delivering value from analytics can be a mix of both art and science, as every organisation has its own requirements, practices and goals. It’s imperative that solutions are built by professionals familiar with the business ecosystem that they are modelling. If...

The social media revolution - Why energy companies need to act now

Accenture — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 15:29:36 GMT

The social media revolution has tipped the balance of power from companies to the consumer, and the energy industry is no exception. So, how can the industry harness that power and gain an advantage?A good starting point would be to...

The need for quality data and improved processes brings CFO and CROs together

Accenture — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Since late 2008, extraordinary volatility - in the form of currency fluctuations, new regulations, challenging business conditions and geopolitical events - has become the rule rather than the exception. Many CFOs and other senior finance executives have learned to live with...

Fostering the new data culture

Accenture — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 10:50:21 GMT

Data is a strategic asset. Facebook’s public offering valuation, for example, owed much to its storehouse of consumer data. This is an indication of the future and how moving forward a company’s success will depend on how it uses...

Is your Wi-Fi strategy enterprise-strength?

Accenture — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 10:39:00 GMT

Think of all those consumer devices your workers now bring into the workplace. Think of all those mobile applications they need. Think of your need to keep workers connected across offices, factories, shop floors and more. This is now much more...

Riding the waves of change

Accenture — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 15:07:44 GMT

Business confidence has been shaken over the last few years, and with the continuing economic uncertainty, it’s no surprise that cost reduction is staying firmly on the agenda. As one of an enterprise’s most significant areas of expenditure, IT is...

The opportunity for Cloud in banking

Accenture — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 10:03:08 GMT

We are all well aware the banking industry is facing many challenges; unhappy customers, increased regulation, strong competition and decreased levels of profitability. The question is; what do banks do to overcome them? Traditional commercial banks across the world must...

Visions of the future

Accenture — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 10:53:00 GMT

Until someone invents time travel, no one can predict with certainty the conditions under which businesses will operate. That means companies and their IT departments need to be ‘futures-ready’: ready to recognise the radically different ways the business environment could...

Reimagining Enterprise IT for an uncertain future

Accenture — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 16:50:00 GMT

IT leaders need a posture of future-readiness, allowing them to adjust to what happens next in the changing geopolitical, economic, regulatory and technical realms. Envisioning possible futures, their demands on IT and ways to meet those requirements will help them...

Agile IT: Scaling up or down

Accenture — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 10:00:00 GMT

The ability to scale up and down IT resources rapidly is imperative for meeting the changing needs of our users and customers. However, our recent survey shows that some UK businesses are not ready to adopt agile IT solutions because...

Social BPM: Engaging people in value-driven BPM

Accenture — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 09:05:07 GMT

Given the growth of social media, increasing interest and opportunity exists for using digital channels to support business process management (BPM). This emerging concept marries the flexibility and pervasiveness of social media with the management discipline of BPM to significantly...

A winning team: What business can learn from sports teams use of analytics

Accenture — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 04:35:11 GMT

The eyes of the world will be on London with this summer’s Olympics, all eagerly waiting to see which individuals and teams will take their place on the winners’ podium. There will be no end of discussion around the technology...

IT - Helping the business deliver marketing through efficient customer analytics, at scale

Accenture — Wed, 23 May 2012 11:59:23 GMT

Achieving relevance at scale — where the most pertinent content reaches the most promising customers at the moments of greatest influence across multiple channels — does not necessarily require more campaigns to appeal to each segment. It means putting analytics...

Governing business demand

Accenture — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:12:17 GMT

I heard the following anecdote from a client the other day that "when IT did an audit of the access databases in the IT landscape they found more databases than the number of people employed at that company". Stories such...

Visualise value and then industrialise it

Accenture — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:47:20 GMT

I was speaking to a COO the other day about the drive to deliver BI projects in short timescales. "That’s fine," he said. "But I’ve never known IT to deliver a project in six weeks."This underlined to me one of...

The maturation of enterprise social collaboration

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 13:02:51 GMT

Enterprise social collaboration (SoCo) technologies are rapidly maturing from their origins as internal corporate versions of the public consumer social networking services, like Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and others. What’s emerging is a new kind of collaboration platform, which we see...

Beyond cloud computing and Big Data

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 10:10:22 GMT

Today, the world of information technology is somewhat akin to a jigsaw puzzle. Contemporary catchphrases like "cloud computing", "Big Data" and "service-oriented architecture" may be increasingly better understood, but they are no more than pieces of a complex puzzle and...

Social media: stop talking and start doing

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 07:26:13 GMT

Everyone knows that social media is here and now. Everyone is talking about the impact it can have on business, how consumers are changing their behaviour - becoming more demanding as a result of mass adoption. We hear how brands...

The elephant in the room

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:22:31 GMT

Employees in organisations all over the world are increasingly, and successfully, using their Androids, iPhones and iPads—together with YouTube, Google Apps and Skype applications—to grapple with on-the-job challenges and solve them, with or without organisational approval. With consumer technologies increasingly...