(A book is the best way to build a consulting practice, ask me about ghostwriting your book.)

“The use of big data will become a key basis of competition and growth for individual firms. From the standpoint of competitiveness and the potential capture of value, all companies need to take big data seriously,” says McKinsey’s Business Technology Office, in a report titled: Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity.

Well into the report sits this tidbit that should be immensely interesting to Big 4 consultants:  There will be a shortage of talent necessary for organizations to take advantage of big data. By 2018, the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions.

And much of that shortage will be found in the last mile of big data. Most consultants today are staking their big data initiatives on the technology platform, but that’s a game that will only benefit the big technology vendors.  The last mile of big data, however, addresses the specific client situation, which “is different in every case, very context sensitive—this is the last mile, the final customization of pre-built models and algorithms,” says Phani Nagarjuna, CEO of Nuevora, San Francisco, CA.  Nuevora’s proprietary Big Data Analytics & Apps Platform (nBAAP™) configures and customizes a broad set of pre-built big data analytic models and algorithms to enable a consultant to pave the last mile for its clients.

Of course, a consultant can pave the last mile of big data analytics on his or her own.  It is just a matter of researching, defining, and testing any number of models to come up with those that work consistently and deliver predictable and repeatable proven results.  The same goes for the algorithms that provide the substance behind the models. Again, there are many possible algorithms for every kind of business problem that a consulting client might want to solve.  Each algorithm needs to be tested repeatedly for every problem.

There are not that many problems today that consulting clients are turning to big data analytics to solve.  One, for example, is the challenge of predicting and reducing customer churn. Another involves identifying potential fraud.  Still others want to comb through big data to highlight opportunities to increase value from the customer relationship, either by generating more frequent sales to the customer or selling a variety of different products.

But even if the number of problems clients want to solve using big data is limited to a dozen or so, there are variations with each of those.  The churn problem, for example, might also be applied to address employee turnover, another costly problem for many companies. Each variation of the basic problem requires tweaks to the underlying models and algorithms. A one-size-fits-all big data solution rarely works well.  The problem of customer churn at an insurance company, for instance, will be considerably different than for a bank. Although at one level both provide financial services the last mile of big data for each is not the same.

That’s why paving the last mile of big data analytics is so challenging and why the big platform vendors avoid addressing it specifically. It is costly to configure and customize each big data solution for the customer’s specific problem to be solved.  But this provides a perfect opportunity for the consultant who understands the client’s problem and want to use big data analytics. By leveraging tools like those offered by Nuevora the consultant can address the client’s issue fast and without a large investment.

Nuevora provides a big data analytics platform for the consultant aiming to solve its client’s issue through the use of big data. It draws in any type of data and runs it though its big data processing, modeling and apps engines. For any given problem it selects the most appropriate model from its wide range of proven models and then applies the analytic frameworks, and data heuristics that will deliver the best results.  The results can be deployed to the client’s preferred business intelligence / reporting platforms, whether Cognos, Oracle, Tableau, or whatever else the client uses, even Excel. The Nuevora nBAAP platform handles the data, provides the models and heuristics, recalibrates on an ongoing basis for continuous improvement, and can augment the client’s data with Nuevora’s own proprietary data or outside data it pulls in.

Through such a platform consultants can become more client-centric by focusing on the desired business outcome rather than on the technology. In the process, it enables the consultant to breathe life into his or her big data plans and roadmap for the client. In effect, it provides a proven starting point for big data allowing the consultant, who knows the client’s business and needs, to configure the last mile confident that it will work.

The post Paving the Last Mile of Big Data Analytics appeared first on Big4.com.

(A book is the best way to build a consulting practice, ask me about ghostwriting your book.)

Who is driving cloud computing decisions? A recent study by Capgemini  suggests that the business, rather than IT alone, is taking charge in driving Cloud strategy.

In North America, business is taking the lead over IT by 48.9% to 42.6%.  Only in Asia-Pacific does IT (51.6%) still drive the cloud decision while business (40%) takes a back seat.

The study found three major attractions of cloud computing to business managers: 1) reduced cost, 2) reduced time to market/faster realization of revenue, and 3) operational efficiency. All three directly impact the company’s financial and business picture.  Clearly the cloud should not be just an IT decision.  IT expertise, however, must be involved and stay involved whether the business or IT is driving the initiative. That’s where you, the consultant, become pivotal.

The advantages of the cloud certainly don’t stop with the three cited by the Capgemini study above.  Cloud computing offers a variety of operational and financial advantages. For starters:

• Worker flexibility can boost productivity—they can use applications and data remotely. Anywhere workers can connect to the cloud, even from a smartphone, they can they can access and share data and conduct business.

• Minimal investment required—investments your clients already made in desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets can fully leverage the cloud. Your clients can keep as much or as little of the backend IT infrastructure as they want.

• Little or no initial upfront cost required and few or no exit costs—pay only for what you use for as long as you use it. Turn on and off applications, services,, and resources at will.

• Minimize IT staffing—the cloud service providers handle much of the IT work, bug fixes, upgrades, backups, and other maintenance while you client’s  IT maintains the network, user access, and handles any remaining backend systems and integration.

• Elimination of over-provisioning—most organizations buy more IT resources than they need just in case. Provisioning to support new products becomes a costly gamble where they tend to err on the safe side. In the cloud they can scale IT resources up and down at will, often at a moment’s notice and pay only for the capacity they use.

• Greater business agility and flexibility—no longer is the business constrained by the capabilities and capacities of existing IT infrastructure to support change and new initiatives of the speed at which it can deploy new applications.  Instead, your  clients can add IT resources and services as needed to grab new opportunities and do so very quickly.

Best of all, cloud computing is not an all or nothing proposition.  Your clients can mix it with their own IT infrastructure, use as much or as little as they need, and change the mix as their situation or the business changes.

For sure there are concerns and you will need to guide your clients here too. Security is a big one but security should be an equal concern with their on-premise IT infrastructure too.  On-premise or in the cloud, they must take appropriate security measures from the start. Similarly, compliance can become an issue. Again, establish and monitor governance from the start, both on-premise and in the cloud, and put in place appropriate enforceable service agreements and policies to ensure they stay in compliance.

As Capgemini found in its study, most companies follow an incremental approach to cloud adoption with 88% citing the economic climate as driving them to adopt cloud. In terms of cloud preferences, 40% prefer off-premise or partner-hosted cloud services while 26% prefer an on-premise private cloud approach, which will be more expensive but allow more control.  Over three-quarters (77%) report working with multiple cloud vendors.  As previously noted, this isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition.  You can start your clients small and scale it (and your own involvement) up or down as needed. That’s  the beauty of cloud computing.

The post Who’s Driving the Cloud? appeared first on Big4.com.

(A book is the best way to build a consulting practice: ask about ghostwriting your book)

Hurricanes, hybrid superstorms, earthquake-tsunami combinations, extreme heat, heavy snow in April are just a few signs of chaos. For IT professionals specifically, chaos comes from the proliferation of smartphones and BYOD or the deluge of data under the banner of big data. A sudden shift to the deployment of massive numbers of ARM processors or extreme virtualization might trigger platform chaos.  A shortage of sufficient energy can lead to another form of chaos. Think of it this way: chaos has become the new normal.

Big consulting firms have latched onto the idea of chaos. Deloitte looks to enterprise data management to create order out of chaos. At Capgemini, the need of organizations to increasingly deal with unstructured processes that ordinary Business Process Management (BPM) solutions were not designed to cope with can be enough to lead to chaos. Their solution: developing case management around a BPM solution – preferably in conjunction with an Enterprise Content Management system – solves many of the problems

Eric Berridge, co-founder of Bluewolf Group, a leading consulting firm specializing in Salesforce.com implementations, put it best when he wrote in a recent blog that CIOs must learn to harness chaos for a very simple reason: business is becoming more chaotic. Globalization and technology, which have turned commerce on its head over the past 20 years, promise an even more dizzying rate of change in the next decade.

Berridge’s solution draws on the superhero metaphor. The consultant has to become Captain Chaos, the one able to overcome a seemingly insurmountable level of disarray to deliver the right value at the right time. And you do that by following a few straightforward tips:

First, don’t build stuff you don’t absolutely have to build. You want your clients to travel as light as possible. If you build systems you are stuck with them. Instead, you want your clients to be able to change systems as fast as their business changes in response to whatever chaos is swirling at the moment. That means you need to encourage an agile IT infrastructure, probably one that can take tap cloud services and turn them on and off as needed.

Then, recognize the consumerization of IT and the chaos it as sparked.  This is not something to be resisted but embraced and facilitated in ways that give your clients the measure of control they need. Guide your clients on how to take advantage of it through responsive policies, elastic infrastructure, and flexible security capabilities.

Next, encourage the organization’s R&D group to also adopt agile methods and approaches to innovation, especially through social media and other forms of collaboration. Even encourage R&D to go a step further by reaching out to customers to participate.  Your role as consultant at this point is to drive interaction among the parties who can create successful innovation.

Finally, layer on enough just-in-time governance to enable the organization to manage the collaboration and interactivity. The goal is to rein in chaos and put it to work for the organization. To do that you need to help your clients set priorities, define objectives, execute plans, and enforce flexible and agile policies—all the things that any successful business needs to do but now does so in the context of a chaotic world that is changing in ways you and your clients can’t predict.

As a consultant this puts big demands on you too. To start, you have to keep your finger on the pulse of what is happening with the world at large, in business, and with technology. That means you need to place sensors and monitors that can tip you off as things change. You also can’t master every technology. Instead you need to identify an ever-changing stable of masters you can call on as needed and familiarize yourself with the vast amount of resources available in the cloud. In the end, these last two points will enable you to deliver the most value to your clients despite the chaos of the moment. Only then can you truly become Captain Chaos, the one your clients go to repeatedly.

The post Chaos Means Opportunity for IT Consultants appeared first on Big4.com.

(A book is the best way to build a consulting practice: ask about ghostwriting your book)

A software vendor’s typical go-to-market strategy is to deploy its direct  sales force for its biggest clients; then arrange with a few selected partners, some of which may be consulting firms or system integrators; and finally partner with VARs to sell whatever other market segments it can pick up. Making Profit Velocity’s approach different, however, is that it sells primarily through consultants and also works with private equity firms’ portfolio companies. This is where you, the consultant, can win.

“There are many business issues a manufacturing customer must consider when they use our product so we don’t want to sell directly to them. That’s why we rely on consultants,” says Michael Rothschild, founder and chairman of Profit Velocity, the provider of PV Accelerator, which enables manufacturers to identify and analyze how much profit per hour—what it calls the profit velocity—their machines yield as various products flow through them, effectively enabling manufacturers to maximize the return from their existing assets. You can find more on Profit Velocity from Ventana Research here.

This may seem simple if you have one product and one assembly line, although even then it is not. But when you have, as do many large manufacturers, dozens, hundreds, even thousands of products, multiple manufacturing facilities with multiple production lines, the challenge becomes mind-bogglingly complex.  And if you need to prioritize the production of orders flowing in for all these products in near real time in an effort to maximize profit you will be lost. Simply put, PV Accelerator gives manufacturers more visibility into asset return—not just per unit, but per hour and do it for every product, every customer and every production line at every facility.

The problem comes down to getting the right numbers fast enough to use them effectively. In today’s world, where businesses meticulously track so many metrics (quality, on-time delivery, order fill rates, cycle time, unit margins, plant utilization, and on and on), managers often say they are drowning in data.

Yet, as Rothschild explains, everyday information systems pump out reports crammed with column after column of metrics, but, with rare exceptions, not one of these reports includes a column labeled “Profit per Hour.”  That is the crucial missing metric that we call profit velocity.

The metric is missing because accounting systems were designed to measure unit margins, and until a few years ago, the raw data required to even accurately calculate profit velocity was neither captured nor stored in databases. Until the arrival of Rothschild’s product, PV Accelerator, no information platform existed that could weave the necessary raw data together to calculate and report on the missing metric.

When manufacturing managers finally see the missing metric demonstrated they have that moment when the proverbial light bulb suddenly explodes in their head. At that point they need help, more help than Rothschild’s company can provide. They need serious consulting help to implement this tool, which is delivered as a SaaS offering, and help with everything from prioritizing production to rethinking pricing to redesigning incentives for the sales force. This requires business savvy consultants who understand analytics and how to put insights into action. Might that be your firm?

Manufacturers look to consulting firms for ideas that generate bottom line results.  The consultant who can extract ERP, accounting, and manufacturing system data and deploy PV Accelerator to create a new view of profitability and returns that goes far beyond profit-per-unit can truly help its clients by guiding the use of this data to squeeze more profits out of existing assets.

Beyond consultants Profit Velocity also partners with private equity firms. It assists them in due diligence as well as with profit improvement strategies for portfolio companies in manufacturing. “PE firms know all about fast data analysis. For them we are a really quick bolt-on extension of the hard work they already do by adding profit velocity, the missing metric, to what they have,” says Rothschild. “Without the missing metric,” he adds, “all their information is just a big pile of data.” With the velocity metric, all this data suddenly makes sense.

Rothschild makes it clear that the company is seeking active consulting partners starting immediately. You can check out their partner page here.

In looking at the technology, PV Accelerator has a standard architecture except for its breakthrough analytics software. Oracle forms the backend database. The front end consists of Java, Javascript, and Ajax. PV Accelerator is accessed via a browser and also runs on the iPad.

From the standpoint of a manufacturer’s IT, PV Accelerator is just another VM running on the network. After a quick mapping exercise, it will start collecting a blend of historical and current data and begin analyzing it. Results show up fast. The manufacturing CIO welcomes PV Accelerator as a tool that leverages the IT investment in a way that has the potential to deliver a huge payback, adding points, not just fractions of a point, to return on assets.  Then imagine, for instance, a sales rep sitting in Starbucks with an iPad deciding which product he should offer right now to maximize both his commission and profit for the company. That’s information-based decision making on steroids.

The post Big Opportunity for Consultants that Understand Manufacturing Metrics appeared first on Big4.com.

While most individuals today may say they know their way around a computer, what a lot of IT professionals find when interacting with the average computer user is that they know how to do very specific things; like checking email, updating Facebook, and doing other tasks online that they’re familiar with. But very few individuals have computer literacy in the form of understanding intuitively how technology works or doesn’t work. This creates a significant obstacle for employers looking to implement idea management software in the workplace.

Effective idea management software creates a platform that doesn’t just collect ideas, but allows you to implement a user interface that’s echoes some of the technology your employees are already using. If employees are able to “follow” an idea, “like” it, “vote” for it, or post comments on it in a similar fashion as they would on Facebook or Twitter, they are far more likely to engage in the innovation process than if they have to learn a brand new piece of technology.

Whenever making the choice for an idea management software provider, make sure you consider not only how well it collects and analyses ideas, but also what sort of user interface and experience it provides your employees, clients, constituents or stakeholders. Without an effective grasp on the user experience, you might find that whatever platform you implement has limited success and capacity.

If you’re interested in exploring how idea management software can parallel social networks, consider downloading our Guide.

—

Simon Hill is CEO and co-founder of Wazoku, an idea management software company, an Associate Director with the Venture Capital Firm Find Invest Grow and an active member of the London technology and entrepreneurial community. Simon is an alumni of PWC, Deloitte and Cap Gemini.

The post Idea Management Software Engagement appeared first on Big4.com.

By Tim Reed, Big4.com Guest Blogger    

The waves of Technology keep coming, some more powerful than others. We have an opportunity to harness each wave and drive new levels of performance and ultimately new levels of success.  The advent of mobile applications, real time cloud solutions and other new advances have created the reality that organizations are faced with an immediate challenge to managing multiple competing interests amongst multiple business organizations, all striving to take advantage of the latest new  wave.  IT organizations are struggling to react to each new wave, often viewed as getting in the way of delivery, not reacting quickly enough and, in some cases, curtailing overall business delivery.

My view is that instead of standing in front of the wave and deciding whether to jump out of the way or into the wave, it is wiser to learn how to surf the wave and take advantage of the new-found capability. Once you are able to figure out how to surf, you will start to realize the energy it will bring to your enterprise.

Think about whether or not you are able to do the following:

• Are you using a short evolutionary cycle or developing and deploying the latest technologies?    One strategy you could take to drive performance and new capabilities is to require that new technologies adopt a short cycle of prototyping and testing, no longer than 60 days. This gives you the ability to understand if the latest technology fits your enterprise and what will be necessary for integration into your current environment.  This approach can limit the risk exposure and provide a path to examine whether the technology meets the demands of the line of business and the overall enterprise.   The teams who are able to make this shift, can change the overall model and perceptions of IT performance and delivery.  The pressure shifts from IT delivery to the business’ ability to choose technologies that meet the business need by speeding delivery, lowering risks and improving overall enterprise capability.  At this point you are not just riding the wave, but also encouraging others to join the ride.

• Can you predict where performance is needed?    A quick query into the methods you use to forecast your performance demands, delivery expectations, and the tools you use to meet performance requirements will identify the performance gaps that need to be addressed.  Consider a new approach that creates a process to provide rapid feedback with leads from several internal and external areas (eg: think of your current vendors, the cloud marketplace, industry forums) to provide a rapid response to your issues.   Expand your view of performance to address both new development and IT infrastructure and operational delivery. Once you have the feedback, take another look to determine how you can deploy the solution. If you are challenged with timing and precision around deployment, consider the notes above …can you shift to a shorter cycle to deploy the solution?  Applying this approach will move the conversation from a reactive response to pro-active engagement, driving a broader and more integrated focus.  If you can make this shift, you will be able to see the wave coming and predict where and how you need to move.

Creating an approach to accept, identify and react to new technologies is critical.  IT has the ability to drive exploration and then move forward with technology choices that work for your organization.  The challenge is how best to harness or capture the “Technology Wave” to drive new performance and improve capability.  The business user expects IT to be riding the Wave, reacting quickly and moving to the next Wave.

Tim Reed, CEO at ReedITC worked at E&Y , focusing on Global Fortune 50 Firms. ReedITC is a strategic IT & Operations consulting firm focused on Cost (Ability to operate efficiently at scale ), Growth (Ability to drive top line growth) and Compliance (Ability to provide services securely).  Working for multiple global firms, the ReedITC Team  has led several  IT and Operational initiatives, including Data and Enterprise Cloud Transformations. For more information, please visit www.reeditc.com or contact tim.reed@reeditc.com

The post Surfing the “Technology Wave” to achieve Performance and Success appeared first on Big4.com.

Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

With companies encouraged to innovate more, companies may be wondering what the best way to receive and manage ideas may be. Many companies result to what we call the idea black hole – the suggestion box.

But what makes the suggestion box so nebulous? It’s not the actual box. It’s the process surrounding the box. Businesses must ask themselves the basic questions about their suggestion boxes and their innovation process: Who, what, where, why, when and how?

1. Who is your suggestion box serving? Who submits ideas frequently? Who reviews the ideas? And who implements them? Knowing the people you’re working with allows you to get a clear vision of the entire process.

2. What is your box? Is it an actual box? Or is it a piece of idea management software? Is the software providing you with all of the features and add-ons that you need in order to fully access and analyse your ideas? The method of collecting the ideas can be just as important as the ideas themselves.

3. Where is your box? Is it accessible for all people or designed to be out of the way? Ask yourself what the purpose is for even having a suggestion box if it’s not designed to accept responses from anyone. Consider that maybe a crucial demographic may not be able to access it and therefore your customer response data may be incomplete.

4. Why do you have the box? What drove you to put out a suggestion box? Did you receive harsh suggestion that helped improve your business and decided you’d like even more of those suggestions? Or did you create it to funnel complaints away from the ears and inboxes of your staff? Or did it just seem like “something you do”? Being honest with yourself about why it is you implemented the suggestion box will help you figure out your motivations for keeping it.

5. How do you implement ideas? If there’s no foundation for how your suggestion box works outside of it being a box, there’s basically no innovation process and you go back to why you implemented the idea in the first place.

Inevitably, if you’re a company that wants to continue to innovate, you’ll realise the limits of something like a suggestion box and you’ll consider expanding to idea management software. Companies that embrace the value of the input of their employees, customers, stakeholders, or constituents need the ideal situation for receive, analysing, and implementing these ideas.

—

Simon Hill is CEO and co-founder of Wazoku, an idea management software company, an Associate Director with the Venture Capital Firm Find Invest Grow and an active member of the London technology and entrepreneurial community. Simon is an alumni of PWC, Deloitte and Cap Gemini.

The post Suggestion Boxes vs. Idea Software appeared first on Big4.com.

(A book is the best way to build a consulting practice: ask about ghostwriting your book)

Cloud computing clearly is gaining traction and consultants should be helping their clients get there.  A September study conducted by the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), found that organizations are embracing the cloud at a 15% faster rate than previously forecast.

Of course, you expect members of a leading technology group like ODCA to be early adopters. But what if your client isn’t an early adopter? Deloitte offers a cloud readiness survey to identify inhibitors to cloud adoption here. Capgemini also has a cloud readiness approach here.

Even after your client understands what it wants to achieve with cloud computing, it still may not be ready. Whatever their interest in cloud computing IDC identifies five questions you should ask them that set the stage for any cloud deployment.

The questions below are intended to help you orient your clients to what is required to effectively leverage cloud computing.  Over time cloud options will become just another part of the standard IT capabilities set and will be used to a different extent by almost every organization. Until then, however, there is work for you getting them started.

1.   To What Extent Are IT Resources Used to Support Company Objectives? This gets to the issue of whether IT is an integral part of the company’s strategic thinking. IDC found that almost 60% of midsize firms agree strongly that advanced technology is an important competitive tool when used as a strategic resource. If IT is integral then cloud computing can become a competitive differentiator. The cloud also represents an attractive option for companies that view technology as a way to save money.  Although the immediate benefit of cloud technology will be tactical cost and deployment advantages, longer term the strategic implications of cloud capabilities will be even more valuable.

2.   How Physically Complicated Is the Company? The number of company locations supported by the current IT infrastructure will be important to consider in any cloud computing implementation. On average, midsize firms have 6.4 locations, with IT staff typically based at headquarters. This can complicate general maintenance and installation of new software and upgrades. With cloud-based software all users run the latest version of hosted applications, simplifying support for multiple locations. In effect, the more locations you have and the more diverse your IT environment, the more the cloud can do for you in coordinating and managing application deployment.

3.  What Is the Company’s Pace of Organizational Evolution? How Much Change Is Under Way? The cloud can provide access across the organization to a central set of rationalized technology offerings. While these are easier to manage than multiple legacy approaches, the real benefits come from improvements in worker cooperation and collaboration. And don’t overlook future M&A activities. The integration of IT resources is not among the top concerns in an acquisition until a deal is completed. But then its impact can emerge in very unpleasant ways. For firms undergoing major change cloud engagements today can provide a foundation for improved organizational flexibility tomorrow.

4.   How Are Mobile Workers Supported, and Could They Benefit from Access to Cloud-Based Resources? Enhancing worker productivity is a key reason for expanding technology investment and providing access to advanced networking capabilities via the cloud to achieve anytime, anyplace resource access. From an ROI perspective, the mobile worker case for cloud computing can be intuitively compelling, especially if it improves the sales close rate or speeds on-boarding new customers. IDC suggests that even a 5% improvement could translate into an effective financial justification for a cloud computing investment.

5.   What External Forces Are Encouraging/Discouraging Cloud Computing Adoption?  A changing competitive landscape as well as the regulatory environment can provide strong incentives or disincentives for the adoption of cloud computing. Note that external forces will continue to be in a state of flux as cloud computing becomes more widespread. If external forces are discouraging cloud adoption, plan to revisit those attitudes regularly because the increasing adoption and evolution of cloud computing changes attitudes fast.

Use these five questions to get clients and prospective clients to begin thinking about a cloud engagement.

The post Five Questions That Set the Stage for Cloud Deployment appeared first on Big4.com.

One of the first things companies ask about idea management software is whether they are too small for an idea management system. This operates on the assumption that the smaller the company is, the easier it should be to manage all of the aspects about a company.

But in reality, the practice is far from the idea. Instead of smaller companies having more time to process and handle ideas, what we find is that quite frequently few employees in most small companies are stretched thin across multiple tasks. When you have only ten to twenty employees in your business, very few of you may actually devote time towards just one focus, whether it be sales, marketing, or any other aspect of the business. Small business owners frequently become Renaissance workers, spending a lot of their day just spinning all of the plates they have to to keep the company going.

Whereas, larger companies have the issue of ideas and contacts being too spread out. Administrators who spend a lot of time either managing employees or clients rarely have the time to devote towards just ideas. Unless a large company has made a significant investment towards innovating their company either by employing a person who specifically manages ideas or, as we’re suggesting, utilising idea management software to capture these ideas, it’s more likely than not that all of the innovation that passes through their doors slips straight through their fingers.

So whether you’re a small company or a large company, idea management software could take off the administrative stress and pressure, as well as giving you the ability to have a space to work through these ideas, test them,  take them seriously, and not lose them – in a space that’s not already taken up with tasks, like your board meetings. Depending on your sector, you may be missing  valuable opportunity to create new or improve upon products and services as well as providing a culture for your employees that sees themselves as part of your company because their input is valued.

—

Simon Hill is CEO and co-founder of Wazoku, an idea software company, an Associate Director with the Venture Capital Firm Find Invest Grow and an active member of the London technology and entrepreneurial community. Simon is an alumni of PWC, Deloitte and Cap Gemini.

The post Assessing your idea management needs appeared first on Big4.com.

(A book is the best way to build a consulting practice: ask about ghostwriting your book)

The next frontier in the ongoing talent war, according to McKinsey, will be deep analytics, a critical weapon required to probe big data in the competition underpinning new waves of productivity, growth, and innovation. Are your clients ready to compete and win in this technical talent war? Are you?

Similarly, Information Week contends that data expertise is called for to take advantage of data mining, text mining, forecasting, and machine learning techniques.  The coming IT talent war can be a boom for Big4 consultants who can provide IT skills or find the IT talent their clients need.

Finding, hiring, and keeping good talent within the technology realm is the number one concern cited by 41% of senior executives, hiring managers, and team leaders responding to the latest Harris Allied Tech Hiring and Retention Survey. Retention of existing talent was the next biggest concern, cited by 19.1%.

This past fall, CA Technologies published the results of its latest mainframe survey that came to similar conclusions. The talent needs cross all platforms.  It found three major trends on the current and future role of the mainframe:

1. The mainframe is playing an increasingly strategic role in managing the evolving needs of the enterprise
2. The mainframe as an enabler of innovation as big data and cloud computing transform the face of enterprise IT
3. Demand for tech talent with cross-disciplinary skills to fill critical mainframe workforce needs in this new view of enterprise IT

Among the respondents to the CA survey, 76% of global respondents believe their organizations will face a shortage of skills in the future. Most acute would be the need for the newer technologies like Java, SOA, Linux, big data, analytics, mobile, and cloud.

The Harris survey was conducted in September and October 2012. Its message is clear: Don’t be fooled by the national unemployment figures, currently hovering above 8%.  “In the technology space in particular, concerns over the ability to attract game-changing talent has become institutional and are keeping all levels of management awake at night,” notes Harris Allied Managing Director Kathy Harris.

The reason, as suggested in recent IBM studies, is that success with critical new technologies around big data, analytics, cloud computing, social business, virtualization, and mobile increasingly are giving top performing organizations their competitive advantage. The lingering recession, however, has taken its toll; unless your client’s data center has been charged to proactively keep up, it probably is saddled with 5-year old skills at best; 10-year old skills more likely.

The Harris study picked up on this. When asking respondents the primary reason they thought people left their organization, 20% said people left for more exciting job opportunities or the chance to get their hands on some hot new technology.

Some companies recognize the problem and belatedly are trying to get back into the tech talent race. As Harris found when asking about what companies are doing to attract this kind of top talent 38% said they now were offering great opportunities for career growth. Others, 28%, were offering opportunities for professional development to recruit top tech pros. A fewer number, 24.5%, were offering competitive compensation packages while fewer still, 9%, offering competitive benefits packages.

To retain the top tech talent they already had 33.6% were offering opportunities for professional development, the single most important strategy they leveraged to retain employees. Others, 24.5%, offered opportunities for career advancement while 23.6% offered competitive salaries. Still a few hoped a telecommuting option or competitive bonuses would do the trick.

Consultants can step in to play any or all these high demand roles, either on a short term basis or as a sustained, long term engagement.  If you lack a particular skill, get trained fast. Or, enlist someone with the right skills as a partner to get you started, and the client will underwrite your training with the engagement.

The post High Demand Skills Win the Coming Talent War appeared first on Big4.com.

By Tim Reed, Big4.com Guest Blogger   

Organizations today are  facing a number of new challenges and opportunities related to the deployment and use of Big Data concepts, processes and technology. A number of trends and key directions are starting to develop, creating the main focus areas that business and IT leadership should consider as they approach deploying and operating Big Data for their organization.

Leveraging Data

One of the keys to effectively leveraging and realizing the value of Big Data is to understand  some of  the approaches you need to take. Whether you are trying to get closer to your customers or to your business, points to consider include:

• Aggregate – What are the standards or principals you need to apply to efficiently and effectively drive aggregation? Look at whether you have setup the standards and controls so aggregation is not just efficient, but also cost effective.

• Organize – Have you organized your approach to Data in a way that benefits your customer and your organization?  Most organizations have not considered using external validations, such as webex based customer seminars or Google analytics that look at sales data.

• Apply - What are you doing to apply the data and tools required to succeed in this space? One consideration is looking at the tools you are using today and considering how you can drive consolidation and savings, in order to fund a new focus on Big Data and analytics.

Delivering Products that matter

The approach you take will not make a difference if you do not have a grounded view or strategic vision to where you want to go. The key trends and focus areas we are seeing today include:

• Support Collaboration – Using Big Data to support collaboration, both internal and customer focused.

• Drive Analysis – Improving analysis and the current approaches are myriad. Spotting patterns in data and framing relevant analysis is more evident. Using new tools such as semantic data toolsets, Hadoop and Cloud Services provide new analysis capabilities and opportunities.

• Increase Efficiency – Look at the new products you are going to deliver. Are they able to increase the efficiency of your customer services or will the products improve the internal services you provide?

Big Data Tools

The opportunities related to using the tools of Big Data may not be evident. The world of mainframe computing and using ETL to address massive amounts of data has changed.  Take a look to see if you can use tools like Hadoop to drive savings. Are you able to reduce of eliminate ETL (extract, transfer, load) altogether? Can the new tools reduce mainframe costs?  How about embracing open source tools and see how you could replace Unix with Linux? Using the new tools of Big Data could provide the platform for innovation, consolidating databases and driving significant efficiencies.

Tim Reed, CEO at ReedITC worked at E&Y , focusing on Global Fortune 50 Firms. ReedITC is a strategic IT & Operations consulting firm focused on Cost (Ability to operate efficiently at scale ), Growth (Ability to drive top line growth) and Compliance (Ability to provide services securely).  Working for multiple global firms, the ReedITC Team  has led several  IT and Operational initiatives, including Data and Enterprise Cloud Transformations. For more information, please visit www.reeditc.com or contact tim.reed@reeditc.com

The post Big Data, Big Opportunities appeared first on Big4.com.

(A book is the best way to build a consulting practice: ask about ghostwriting your book)

PwC is bullish on mobile, projecting a 35% CAGR through 2015, driven in large part by solid state disk (SSD) technology.  The PwC researchers now see it extending beyond mobile to other types of computing.

Deloitte takes SSD enthusiasm even further: By the end of 2012, SSD will likely store data in 90% of mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, MP3 players), up from just 20% in 2006, the consulting firm predicts. More surprising, Deloitte expects up to 15% of laptops and netbooks to rely on SSDs, four times more than in 2010. Even in the data center, SSDs could rise to 10%.

The growing penetration of SSD into enterprise data centers presents a clear opportunity for storage consultants.  Even with the price-performance improvements, however, SSD remains significantly more expensive than hard disk drive (HDD) storage on a cost-per-gigabyte basis.  This calls for building a compelling business case for SSD.

“The increasing use of flash in enterprise solutions, explosive growth of mobile client devices, and lower SSD pricing is creating a perfect storm for increased SSD shipments and revenue over our forecast,” according to IDC’s 2012 market report.  The researchers expect SSD shipments to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 51.5% from 2010 to 2015.

With SSD prices dropping below $1 per gigabyte that still leaves SSD considerably more expensive than HDD on a cost/gigabyte basis.  Cost/gigabyte, however, is not the only cost metric important to enterprise data centers.

SSD has at least two cost metrics it brings to the party that you can use to build the business case for SSD:  dramatically lower cost in terms of I/O performance. This is particularly apparent when you look the I/O cost per second (IOPS).  SSD also requires considerably less data center energy and space.

The way you boost IOPS performance with HDD is to aggregate hundreds, or more likely, thousands of the fastest spinning HDDs to boost IOPS performance. Even at the low HDD cost/gigabyte, the cost adds up fast.

Also, few data centers these days have cheap rack space to spare so more rack space will need to be found, adding to data center real estate cost. Finally, all those spinning disks consume electricity, raising energy costs. so add the cost of data center space and energy. On a cost/IOPS basis of a few thousand HDDs, which is what it would take to generate a comparable level of IOPS to a just a few SSDs, the HDD solution is no IOPS bargain. SSD storage, by the way, uses 90% or less energy than HDD. Figured on a cost/IOPS basis, SSD energy consumption is negligible. This is the foundation of your business case.

Then add to it other SSD advantages, specifically the low latency of SSD. Typical SSD latencies are a couple of hundred microseconds.  For applications and workloads where low latency is critical, SSD beats HDD hands down.

This is not to say that SSD has no drawbacks. SSD life expectancy can be a concern. In short, SSDs wear out.

The SSD industry has come up with several solutions to the wear out problem. The most widely adopted is load-leveling. Through load-leveling, writes are distributed across the cells in a way to minimize the wear on any cell. Through load-leveling organizations can effectively stretch the useful life of SSD by years.

Another solution is hybrid storage.  Hybrid storage combines a little SSD with HDD. The result is the fusion of the SSD high IOPS performance with HDD cheap capacity and high durability. Fortunately, a relatively small amount of SSD when used right can have a big impact.

It will be years, if ever, that enterprise data centers completely replace HDD storage with SSD. In the meantime, tune your business case for SSD and start introducing it to your clients.

The post Building the Business Case for SSD appeared first on Big4.com.

(A book is the best way to build a consulting practice: ask about ghostwriting your book)

Gartner recently revised its forecast for worldwide IT spending in 2013, upping its Q3 2012 figures from 3.8% growth to 4.2% although a chunk of that gain results from currency fluctuations. Still, it’s good news for consultants hoping to boost their own revenues this year. Better still, Gartner predicts IT services revenue will increase from under 2% last year to over 5% this year. Enterprise software revenue will jump from 3.3% in 2012 to 6.4% this year and 6.8% in 2014.

Accenture also does market forecasts but not quantitative projections like Gartner. It 2012 Information Market Forecast  instead looked at six broad trends: context-based services, converging data architectures, industrialized data services, social-driven IT, PaaS-enable agility, and orchestrated analytical security.

For IT consultants the challenge is to stake out a distinctive area of expertise and build the practice around it. Each of the areas below has an attractive business case but hasn’t yet been so saturated that it reverts to being a commodity service. Where’s the money in that?

Below are 10 good areas. Let’s start with the first five and pick up the rest in a subsequent piece.  Feel welcome to add some others you think of.

1. Combating zero-day attacks
2. Machine generated data
3. Cloud systems integration
4. Corporate app stores
5. In memory computing
6. Enterprise SSD
7. NoSQL and alternatives to relational data
8. Totally mobile (detached)workforce
9. Virtualized automated enterprises (software defined everything)
10. VDI

Combating zero-day attacks—an IT system threat or attack that exploits a previously unknown vulnerability in a computer system.  It strikes before (zero-day) the vendor, IT, and security teams have had no time to prepare by coding a security patch or otherwise addressing the vulnerability. The easiest defense is to help your clients create and enforce a white list of tested safe code and only allow code on the white list to run.

There also is money in identifying previously undiscovered vulnerabilities. Andy Greenberg at Forbes reports that you can share the new vulnerability with HP’s Zero Day Initiative and earn as much as $10,000 for helping the company shore up its security gear. He also documents a black market for zero-day vulnerabilities. For example, a Windows vulnerability could get your $120,000, a Chrome or IE vulnerability brings as much as $200,000, and an IOS vulnerability commands $250,000.

Machine generated data—also referred to as machine-to-machine (M2M) data, can form a significant part of the explosion of data your clients are experiencing. The data comes not from users or your regular applications but from computers communicating with other systems. Machine-generated data tends to be the result of automated sensing and monitoring, logs, RFID data, GPS captures, and more.  It increasingly is poured into analytics systems as part of big data efforts to measure, analyze, and streamline business processes.  According to a report in Consultant Value Added, the M2M services market is expected to rise to $35 billion by 2016. The best role for consultants will be to help clients conceive, design, and develop analytic approaches that extract business value from the data.

Cloud systems integration—the adoption of cloud computing in various forms by enterprises is expected to turn from a trickle into a steady stream this year. This will create a growing need for fast systems integration as organizations need to integrate their existing on-premise systems and various cloud offerings from multiple providers. A report from Global Industry Analysts  suggests that cloud adoption and virtualization are driving increased demand for easily accessible and flexible integration services. The systems integration market is projected to grow at about 5.15% annually through 2017. And this isn’t just about private enterprise; government, federal and state, will require integration services.

Corporate app stores—most are familiar with the big consumer app stores from Apple and Google. The era of BYOD, however, is driving the need for organizations to rein in the uncontrolled use of these stores. The solution is to provide a corporate app store that allows workers to get the approved apps they want while your clients retain a level of control. Forbes described the corporate app store as iTunes for enterprise software, allowing workers to download software applications when needed. Corporate app stores give employees the freedom to select the applications they need within minutes and without the typical helpdesk intervention. To justify bringing you in as the consultant to set this up a corporate app store brings about IT helpdesk cost and time reductions. With 12% of IT helpdesk ticket requests from new software, a corporate app store could save more than $8.6 billion a year in IT helpdesk costs.

In memory computing—this is about speed. In-memory computing stores information in a computer’s immediate memory rather than on slow storage devices. It enables organizations to capture and analyze data in near real time for decision-making. An organization, for example, may be able to influence a purchase while the prospect is still online or detect churn patterns on the fly and reverse the churn.  As was the case with M2M data, your job will be to identify the processes and systems that will deliver the biggest paybacks fastest and then design, execute, or deploy the required real-time analytics and automation. Probably start with big data.

This should keep you busy in 2013.

The post New Technologies to Build a Practice Around in 2013 appeared first on Big4.com.

Guest blog by Heather Townsend, co-author of ‘How to make partner and still have a life‘ and author of ‘FT Guide To Business Networking‘, and guest blogger for Big4.com:

LinkedIn is probably the only social network where you can bump into senior corporate decision makers and professional intermediaries. 

Events are no longer supported

LinkedIn switched off events at the end of November. This means you can no longer publicise your event using the old event application.

Applications are no longer supported with the new profiles

This means that you can no longer share your blog, documents, presentations or video clips via google apps, box.net or slideshare within your LinkedIn profile. However, LinkedIn is slowly rolling out the feature where you can embed rich media, such as presentations, documents, video clips within three sections of your Linkedin profile – your summary, experience and education section. Effectively, you can add in a link to the media content that you want to share within your LinkedIn profile.

Profile has been rejigged and refreshed

This is mostly a cosmetic update to the LinkedIn profiles. However, instead of your profile being one big block where you can move around all the different sections, there are now several different sections and you can only move the sub-sections around in the sections.

The sections are now (in order): Activity, Background, Recommendations, Connections, Groups and Following.

LinkedIn has integrated your recommendations into the experience section and shows the two recommendations at the top of the list for each role you have added on LinkedIn.

The recommendations still all appear at the bottom of your profile, but only the top 5 on the list are automatically shown, you have to expand the rest of the section to see the rest of the recommendations you choose to show.

With recommendations now being relegated to the bottom of the LinkedIn profile the endorsements that you receive for your skills and achievements are now very important. This is the 1st snapshot people looking at your profile will see of your externally verified credibility.

And the final change to the actual LinkedIn profile, is the specialities part of the summary has now been removed.

Ability to embed rich media in your profile

This is a big change to the functionality of LinkedIn. It is also a major opportunity to see your Linkedin profile as the start a journey someone takes to find out about you and your firm – be they prospective client or recruiter. Before you whizz in and start embedding documents and videos left, right and centre, it is worth taking a step back and thinking about what media items you can use to showcase your expertise or lead the reader on a journey to discover more about you.

For example, these are things which possible on the new LinkedIn profiles:

• embed links to published articles
• embed links to landing pages on your website and blog, allowing you to customise the pathway that a visitor from LinkedIn takes to your website
• embed links to white papers, guides and templates which help to educate and inform your prospects and clients
• video clips introducing yourself and your firm, or even you being interviewed on a topic

Network statistics

LinkedIn now provides an infographic of your network on your profile. This means that you can click on your connections profiles and see where they have large clusters of people that they know from the same industry, school, location or company. If you would like help with how to win business via your network, how about downloading our free (email required) guide to building your personal networking strategy?

What do you need to do as a result of these changes?

1. Request the new profile if you haven’t already got it.
2. Take a long hard look at the recommendations you have received on LinkedIn and make sure that the most important ones are in the top 5 on the list for each of your roles.
3. Consider whether to add in some more roles, so you can segment the documents, presentations etc so the reader of your profile can easily verify your credibility and expertise.
4. Decide on what parts of your ‘story’ you will share presentations, videos, website links to to help strengthen your credibility
5. Decide on what landing pages you will direct visitors from LinkedIn too on your website, via embedded links.
6. Take note of critical content which you are currently sharing on LinkedIn profiles via the Box.net, Google Apps, Slideshare applications and make plans to share this content within the new LinkedIn profile
7. Add in skills to your profile
8. Start going into LinkedIn daily and participating, as your activity on LinkedIn is now given far greater prominence on your profile.

Author Credit

Heather Townsend helps professionals become the ‘Go To’ Expert. She is the author of the  award winning and best-selling book on business networking, the ‘FT Guide To Business Networking’ and the co-author of ‘How to make partner and still have a life’. Heather regularly blogs at How to make partner, Partnership Potential and Joined Up Networking

The post 8 changes to LinkedIn that you need to know about appeared first on Big4.com.

(A book is the best way to build a consulting practice: ask about ghostwriting your book)

The end of the year stimulates consulting firms to make predictions for IT in the coming year. Accenture (UK/Ireland) made more detail predictions than most. Capgemini blogged 3 cloud predictions for 2013. Deloitte presented its trends, one of the few including security in the list.

Of course, the big research players with large teams of analysts weigh in each year. Find Gartner’s top 10 predictions here. You might note what they say about personal clouds. Forrester’s cloud predictions for 2013 are here. You might want to check what they say on getting real about cloud costs.  Symantec makes some interesting 2013 predictions here, particularly about software-defined data centers, a term you’ll starting hearing a lot more. Let’s look more closely at some of the predictions.

Symantec calls the software-defined data center the new buzzword. A nascent buzzword at this point for sure. This blogger thinks of it as software-defined everything. Software-defined data centers, networks, and anything else are really about virtualization taken to its extreme. Expect more of it.

This is what Symantec says: “Software defined data centers will take on cloud computing to become the new industry buzz word. Most large enterprise data centers will evolve to software-defined data centers where IT services are separated and not dependent on the underlying hardware. Commodity hardware, appliances and cloud will become increasing reliant on smart software that will define and drive the future of data center computing.” Symantec doesn’t talk about cost but it probably won’t save money. Rather, it will deliver greater agility, flexibility, and responsiveness to business and technology change.

Gartner is bullish on mobile phones. By 2013, it predicts mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide; by 2015 over 80% of the handsets sold in mature markets will be smartphones. In early 2010 this blogger wrote that your next PC might be a smartphone and took a lot of flak for it.

More interesting is Gartner’s idea of the personal cloud gradually replacing the PC as the location where individuals keep their personal content, access their services and personal preferences, and center their digital lives. The personal cloud, Gartner explains, will entail the unique collection of services, Web destinations and connectivity that will become the home of people’s computing and communication activities. There no platform, form factor, technology or vendor will dominate, and managed diversity and mobile device management will be an imperative. The personal cloud shifts the focus from the client device to cloud-based services delivered across a variety of devices.

Forrester talks about getting real around cloud costs and cloud cost modeling. For two years the research firm has been preaching that the cloud isn’t always cheaper but only cheaper with the right use model, a subtle distinction that consultants could use to build a little practice around. If you want to get the best ROI out of your use of cloud services and platforms, Forrester advises, you need to actively model the cost profile of your applications, monitor their resource use, and adjust accordingly. Forrester isn’t saying cost should solely drive your cloud deployment decisions, only that cost can no longer be ignored or assumed. In 2013, the firm notes, the CFO will wise up to cloud costs and pressure IT about cloud cost management.

None of the prognosticators above, except Deloitte, mentioned anything about security in their 2013 predictions. Don’t take that as a sign to let down your guard.  In fact, here is one security prediction that will become more important in 2013 and beyond: digital forensics will become a critical IT security skill. Might be a good way to expand your IT consulting practice, so too might be brushing up on software-defined everything. Virtualization definitely will live on.

The post IT Directions in 2013—Where are the New Practice Areas appeared first on Big4.com.

Team A are the crowd evangelists, those for whom the power of the many, collective insights and collaborative innovation represent a new highly effective and powerful tool for informed decision making and innovation.

Team B are the sceptics who will vehemently argue that group think, poor insight and inaccurate data/decisions are the true output of crowdsourcing.

Taking these two viewpoints and overlaying expertise is genuinely interesting (at least for me!).

Let’s consider an organisational crowd, a group of a few hundred people across a company, who represent each part of the company and a cross section of seniority, tenure and of course expertise. The company looks to source ideas to a complex challenge the business is facing in its engineering division. The business throws this challenge out to all employees.

The most popular ideas are in favour of Team B not feasible or practical for the business. They are too expensive, not really addressing the issue (it was complex after all) or have already been tried and failed. However, one suggestion, relatively poorly described is seen by a member of the engineering team and it sparks an idea in his mind. He feedbacks and branches the idea out, bringing others in. (Team A are feeling pretty happy all of a sudden!). However, this team member is a pretty junior member of the team, not recognised as a particular expert in his field (see Gladwells 10K hours).

Does this matter- of course not! The idea is surfaced, it develops and proves a huge success. Our junior engineer’s reputation in this area grows too, and the whole organisation shared in this.

The conclusion, at least in my mind, is a practical one. Taken at face value the arguments of A & B have merit, but embracing systems and process to truly engage a wide group in the ideas development process, evolving input and learning expertise can and does derive value, as this account bears testament to!

Simon Hill is CEO and co-founder of Wazoku, an idea software company, an Associate Director with the Venture Capital Firm FindInvestGrow and an active member of the London technology and entrepreneurial community. Simon is an alumni of PWC, Deloitte and Cap Gemini.

The post Experts in a digital age: The expert in the crowd appeared first on Big4.com.

(A book is the best way to build a consulting practice: ask about ghostwriting your book)

How many screens does a mobile user use? Well, there’s the smartphone and a tablet and don’t forget the wifi-capable laptop or netbook. Then you’ve got myriad iOS and Android devices.

In the BYOD world and now the multi-screen user world mobile app dev is changing. Leading consulting firms, like Capgemini, Accenture, Deloitte, and more have jumped on the mobile app dev wave. But the challenge, however, is getting more complicated by the day.

Even how users work with mobile is changing. For example, they might start with an email message that pops up on their smartphone. When they get into the office they may reply to that message from their laptop. The message might reference a QR code so they might pull out a tablet to bring up the QR code.  Before long they are switching between 2, 3, or more devices, going back and forth between them without even thinking about it. What does that do to mobile app development?

This goes beyond multi-tasking seem. Maybe we should call it something different, like multi-dimensionaling as you jump between multiple mobile screens in the course of completing a task. That’s exactly what Google researchers dub the new norm in mobile behavior.

The Google study, The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior, found that 90% of people move between devices to accomplish a goal, whether that’s on smartphones, PCs, tablets or TV. If this is true we need to rethink how organizations design and build mobile apps.

The researchers found that the most popular cross device activities were Internet browsing (81%), online shopping (67%), managing finance (46%), and planning a trip (43%).  Search, it turns out, is the most common ways users continue from one device to another. Although these activities are distinctly consumer oriented, there is a clear business counterpart to these activities. Managing finance is not much different from submitting T&E expenses or planning a business trip.

Where consumers and business diverge is when it comes to online shopping. Over two-thirds of consumers report using multiple devices sequentially to shop online. Of that shopping 19% is planned while 81% is spontaneous, spurred by the smartphones accessibility and the kind of deals, often location-based, that increasingly pop up. Business shopping is unlikely to be spontaneous, at least until Staples starts offering instant groupons on office supplies.

The critical connector in all this turns out to be search, the researchers report. Furthermore, they found that when people use multiple screens sequentially to complete an activity, they often use search to pick up where they left off. That means developers should enable users to save their progress between devices and support keyword parity to ensure that they can be found easily via search when that user moves to the next device, the researchers suggest.

This research, if it is validated by subsequent studies, has serious implications for mobile app developers:

• Plan apps for multiple devices and formats
• Apps need to behave as they would on the native device in all circumstances
• Developers need to accommodate both sequential and simultaneous multi-screen usage
• Recognize the importance of search and keyword persistence
• Invest in tools that enable you to code once for multiple devices and formats
• Design applications that leverage the specific attributes of each device

But there is even more involved here. This kind of usage of multiple mobile devices also suggests that the underlying application and network infrastructure—servers, switches, middleware, storage, security, management, tools—be redesigned for new and significantly different demands and usage models. For some time it has been obvious that mobile is not your father’s client/server or even browser-based computing.  The latest mobile devices are much more and much different than browsers and fat clients. With dimensionaling, that should become more apparent than ever.

The post Developing Mobile Apps for the Multi-Screen User Base appeared first on Big4.com.

(A book is the best way to build a consulting practice: ask about ghostwriting your book)

A study released in June by North Bridge Venture Partners found that companies are accelerating their move into cloud solutions, with 50% of respondents already confident that cloud solutions are viable for mission critical business applications.

Other results show Software as a Service (SaaS) remaining the primary type of cloud investment, with 82% of respondents using it today. Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) will see significant growth in the next five years, with PaaS nearly doubling to 72% and IaaS growing jumping 15 points to 66%.

The big consulting firms have jumped on the topic. Deloitte writes about the cloud having technical advantages that translate into business value. Capgemini chimes in with 8 ways to measure Cloud ROI and KPMG offers its view of cloud ROI.

Bluewolf Group, a cloud-driven consulting company specializing in agile business, takes a distinctively different view of maximizing cloud ROI—looking at the people issues. Eric Berridge, Bluewolf’s co-founder and a leading advocate of social business, wrote recently that companies are shifting resources to the cloud for a variety of reasons: efficiency, cost, analytics, customer service, etc. While these are worthy goals, he notes, there’s a more fundamental reason to tap the cloud: unlocking the collective brainpower of your workforce and customer base.

In his piece on maximizing your cloud investment, Berridge says:  The true cost of cloud is greater than many realize. While the cloud removes the burden of paying up to 10 times the amount for self-hosted applications, it is a mistake to think that there are no costs beyond the purchase of licenses and consulting services. That’s why it is essential to maximize your investment in the cloud. His tips for doing just that are summarized below:

Form a cloud governance board. While your system may stagnate with too little innovation, conversely it may break down under the stress of too much innovation. A cloud governance board can establish system stability and ensure all changes occur at appropriate intervals and address top priority business issues.

Gamify adoption.  Leverage game mechanics—rewards and incentives—to bring everyone onboard with changes brought by the cloud.

Prime the feedback loop. Continually adopt your cloud to your organization’s needs. Keep your finger on the pulse of what your people need, like, don’t like, and want next. Give them an easy way to provide feedback and make their input an integral part of your governance.

Never stop training. Cloud functionality is continually evolving. It’s this flexibility that drives value. The day you conclude training is the day that your workforce begins to fall behind.

Don’t think of the cloud as simple. The infinite flexibility of the cloud actually adds a new layer of complexity. If you don’t take advantage of this flexibility you’re short-changing the organization.

Use one naughty word. Outsourcing has become a dirty word.  Cloud providers, however, are outsourcers that enable you to be elastic; changing your mix of talent and system as your needs change and opportunities arise. So, don’t be afraid of that naughty word.

All of these tips, in the end, revolve around people, not technology. Cloud computing has done more than change how we acquire and deploy technology—it has fundamentally altered the role of technology in companies. For the consultant looking to build a practice on cloud computing, maximizing the client’s investment in cloud technologies comes down to one thing: making the technology work for the business’s people, not vice versa.

The post Six Unconventional Tips to Maximize Cloud ROI appeared first on Big4.com.

(A book is the best way to build a consulting practice: ask about ghostwriting your book)

There is good money, it appears, to be made in streamlining and simplifying IT and process complexity.  Accenture knows that; it built a Complexity Management practices around the issue. Deloitte has focused on complexity in the financial services segment, highlighting seven leadership principles that could help leaders and their organizations respond effectively to the complexities inherent in financial services today.

Earlier this month, Symantec released its annual state of the data center survey results. You can view the full report here. The overriding issue, it turns out, is the increasing complexity of the data center. You clients probably feel this more than you but there seems to be little they can do except request more budget and more resources.  This is where you come in.

Although the study cites a number of factors driving data center complexity, survey respondents appear to focus in on one primary response, an increased need for governance. This is not something a CIO would typically initiate on his or her own. But a consultant could engage the various parties.

Also suggested in the survey is taking steps to intelligently manage organizational resources in an effort to rein in operational costs and control information growth. More specifically, Symantec suggests that organizations implement controls such as standardization or establish an information governance strategy to keep information from becoming a liability. Again, a good job for a consultant.

Nobody doubts that the seemingly unrestrained proliferation of data and of systems that generate it and use it are driving data center complexity.  But don’t blame IT alone; it is the business that is demanding everything from mobility to real-time analytics.

The leading complexity driver, cited by 65% of the respondents, turns out to be the increasing number of business-critical applications. Other key drivers of complexity include growth in the volume of data, mobile computing, server virtualization, and cloud computing.

Other impacts cited by respondents include: reduced agility (cited by 39% of respondents); longer lead times for storage migration (39%) and provisioning storage (38%); longer time to find informa­tion (37%); security breaches (35%); lost or misplaced data (35%); increased downtime (35%); and compliance incidents (34%).

According to the survey, organizations are implementing several measures to reduce complexity, including training, standardization, centralization, virtualization, and increased budgets. The days of doing more with less should be over for now as far as the data center is concerned: 63% consider increasing their budget to be somewhat or extremely important in dealing with data center complexity.

But the biggest initiative organizations are undertaking is to implement a comprehensive information governance strategy. Fully 90% of organizations are either discussing information governance or have implemented trials or actual programs.

While there are technology tools to assist with data center governance, this is not an issue that responds to an IT solution. Governance really requires the kind of meetings among the business and IT that a consultant is well positioned to facilitate. Here the parties will hash out the ownership and responsibility for various data, establish policies and procedures, and then lay out monitoring and enforcement. None of this is rocket science, but it needs to be facilitated and orchestrated.

Symantec goes on to make the following recommendations:

• Establish C-level ownership of information governance.
• Get visibility beyond IT platforms down to the actual business services.
• Understand what IT assets you have, how they are being consumed, and by whom.
• Reduce the number of backup applications to meet recovery SLAs.
• Deploy deduplication everywhere to help constrain the information explosion.
• Use appliances to simplify server and storage operations across physical and virtual machines.

Bringing in a consultant isn’t one of the recommendations but it should be. As a consultant versed in IT and business you can position yourself to solve this problem now because it will only get worse.

The post IT Complexity is Good for Consultants appeared first on Big4.com.

Both negative as positive experiences (e.g. (the first and final) assessments, the amount of savings) would be something to register ongoing and communicate effectively within the organization. These are the benchmark findings of your own company and extremely useful for your strategy moving forward.

You need to know where you want to go and set up a roadmap how to get there. Benchmark against trends in the market might be supportive in your aim. It provides an overview of the experiences of others and is useful for setting own priorities going forward. It is always interesting to get insight of what others have experienced for own validation purposes.

Watch ‘Benchmark Findings’ Via YouTube

Overview of the ‘Key Risk Areas of VAT paid and VAT charged’ and ‘System Set Up’

Watch an overview of the ‘Key Risk Areas of VAT paid and VAT charged’ and ‘System Set Up and Process Errors’.

Watch ‘Key Risks’, ‘System Set Up And Process Errors’ via YouTube

This material might be useful for (internal) communication, risk analysis or self assessments:

• “The European Union VAT system – high level overview“
• “Why Manage Indirect Taxes“
• “Indirect Tax Exposures others have faced“
• “Audit Defense“
• “System for Dummies“
• “Surveys and research“

The post Trends And Benchmarking – ‘Get Some Objective Evidence’ appeared first on Big4.com.

Alan Radding, Big4.com Guest Blogger

(A book is the best way to build a consulting practice: ask about ghostwriting your book)

Consultants increasingly help their clients utilize social networking in their own business as a professional service, which promises to be a growth opportunity going forward. But consultants also can adopt social business technologies to enrich their own professional practices. Or, ideally, leverage the experience as a social business practitioner to help other businesses master social business.

This is the lesson you can take from McKinsey, which transformed its own consulting engagements process using social technologies, specifically IBM Connections 4, for rapid asset reuse and access to customers in real-time. Today McKinsey’s social deployment involves 30,000 users enterprise-wide.  It allows them to better capitalize on best practices and collective intelligence by organizing communities of interest.  As a result McKinsey consultants can respond faster to their customers and gain access to them sooner, often in real time. The upshot: improved productivity along with greater reuse of intellectual property.

Social business pays off. A contractor using IBM Connections saw a 50% improvement in sales efficiency through social business. A manufacturer cut product development time to market by one-third.  IBM even drinks its own Kool-Aid when it comes to social business. The company reports over $110 million in annual savings from leveraging social capabilities in service of clients. Still others are tapping gamification, a variation on rewards and incentive programs, to spur efforts to achieve goals.

A large insurance company, for instance, found that social business could handle its demanding compliance issues even as it was facilitating better customer communications and interaction. It actually could achieve real-time compliance at the transaction level. Thousands of its financial services agents were communicating directly with clients through social networking while all the communications could be audited, archived, searched, and accessed. Compliance satisfied.

For consultants, of course, project management is a natural for social business. It combines communications, direct interaction, and information to not only manage the project in nearly real time but to enable the team to perform the work of the project at the same time.

Social business gives consultants five capabilities they have never had before, at least not at such a large scale:

1. In-context views of critical activity—see what’s happening and all the related information in ECM fashion
2. Engage with and respond to customers and prospects in near real-time—enables project to advance faster and progress more smoothly
3. Expand the scope of your interaction and activities on behalf of customers and prospects—this happens by building a 360-degree social view of the customer and the related communities of interest, both inside and outside the organization
4. Engage and interact anytime, anywhere, through any format—social encompasses all forms of mobile communications, applications, and data
5. Gain instant access—receive and deliver the expertise and content needed to resolve an issue or capture the opportunity now

Admittedly, some of this doesn’t sound appealing. Social exacerbates the blurring of boundaries between the consultant’s professional and personal life. This, however, is nothing new to consultants, at least not since the telephone and pager arrived on the scene decades ago.  You will have to learn to set limits and enforce boundaries if you haven’t already.

On the positive side, social enables you to engage and collaborate with customers and partners in richer ways that have not been practical before.  In the end, you stand to do more and do it better, which can be immensely satisfying and rewarding.

The post How Consultants Capitalize on Social Business appeared first on Big4.com.

In short, idea management is the process of finding great ideas and then making them happen.

Idea management puts a structure to the process of collecting and capturing ideas within an organisation or community. It provides a central place where ideas are stored and can then be evaluated and analysed. The best ones are then chosen to be developed further – and hopefully be implemented and become reality.

By using innovation software you can ensure that ideas don’t get lost and that the best ideas can be identified and developed. However, innovation software is only as good as your business processes and engagement with the tool. Make sure you implement processes to support the tool and set goals for what you want to achieve by using it. The overall goal should be to help foster a culture of open innovation, with all employees encouraged to contribute: where feedback is open and honest, good ideas are nurtured and talent recognised.

The post Demystifying idea management appeared first on Big4.com.

(A book is the best way to build a consulting practice: ask about ghostwriting your book.)

Consulting firms are scrambling to bring their business clients into social networking.  The first challenge is to get them to take it seriously, that it is not just Facebook fun and games.  Collaboration has emerged as a primary business driver as business embraces collaboration is a key to gaining competitive advantage.

PWC, for instance, observed that social technology offers considerable promise, but CIOs and business units are struggling to figure out how to use it effectively. A key reason is that most social media outside the enterprise is just pure communication.

At Capgemeni the Social Network Emergence Process or SNEP model has become a key device. The model explains the phases by which novel social media emerge in organizations. At Capgemini a small group of consultants started using Yammer back in August 2008. The model itself describes four stages: startup, neglect, excitement, and productivity.

In an economy where innovation has become the currency for sustained competitive advantage, it also has become a truism that when companies collaborate they will innovate more often and more effectively.  Although large enterprises have long deployed complex and sophisticated collaboration tools, popular social networking tools can and are taking on the task.

For example, P&G, discovered that Facebook could pump new life into a stable but decidedly staid product, Pepto-Bismol.  Business Week wrote about it here in March.

Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and those not so explicitly consumer oriented have found social networking success a bit more elusive.   Among midsize businesses, for instance, 38% have a company Facebook page, but less than a quarter uses it to generate new leads and sales and less than one-fifth use it for internal collaboration or customer retention, according to a recent study by the SMB Group.

The SMB 2012 study shows overall use of social media is up from 44% to 53% among small businesses (1-99 employees) and up from 52% to 63% among medium businesses (100-999 employees) year-over-year, but it also reveals a widening gap between SMBs that are using social networking in an informal, ad hoc manner and those taking a more planned, strategic approach. Here is how can you can help your clients make social strategic in your organization and avoid common pitfalls.

Start by advising your client to make a commitment to use social media strategically and link it to goals for revenue growth. Strategic users, the study found, also were more likely to have already integrated social media with existing business applications and processes. CRM, customer support, and product development are the three that most immediately come to mind.

After that, you want to steer your clients around five social networking pitfalls organizations trip on. Kevin Casey, writing for Information Week, elaborated on them, which your blogger summarizes below:

1. Not enough time. A lack of time was the clear number-one issue for small businesses, with 62% citing it as a roadblock to effective social engagement. Midsize businesses are similarly pressed.
2. Too many social networks. The time issue compounds as the number of social platforms grows. Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and others bring social networks that together complicate strategy development and execution.
3. Hard to measure. Nearly half of midsize firms report being unable to accurately measure the value of their social networking. Why define and execute a strategy if there is no effective way to evaluate progress?
4. Inappropriate tools and services. Yes, social monitoring and management tools are emerging but many are not designed for SMBs. They don’t want a comprehensive command center but something easily deployed that covers their key social activities in one simple toolset, including metrics.
5. Confusing customer sentiment. SMBs experience a deluge of social information emanating from these networks, some of it contradictory, which makes it hard to figure out what it all means. Social analysis tools are just emerging for this.

Maybe the first challenge is getting your organization to adopt of social networking at all. Corinne Sklar, marketing director at Bluewolf Group, a leading social consulting firm, has this to say on adoption: Long emails with links to “How-to” web pages tend to fall victim to the I’ll-get-to-it-later email black hole. Instead, innovate with new forms of communication, the more streamlined and concise the better. As attention spans diminish providing a mix of communication tools helps your people get the info they need in the kind of short, bite-sized chunks they can absorb immediately. When going social, instant gratification counts.

The post Driving Social Adoption: Overcoming 5 Hurdles appeared first on Big4.com.

(A book is the best way to build a consulting practice: ask about ghostwriting your book.)

No enterprise data center today runs just one platform. Typically, they have Intel/Windows or some flavor of UNIX/Linux as their main production systems but they generally run a mix of platforms and operating systems, even throwing Apple, VMware, and mainframes into the mix. They end up with this mix of platforms for perfectly understandable reasons, such as acquisitions or to meet special software requirements, but it results in a certain amount of inefficiency and added cost. For example, you need to hire and retain people with multiple skill sets.

Traditionally, large enterprises simply accepted this as an inevitable fact of life. This need not be the case going forward. Hybrid computing changes that dynamic. Three hybrid approaches have emerged that can alter this so-called fact of life:

1. Cloud computing
2. Virtual private servers (VPS)
3. Hybrid hardware servers

The consulting firms appear to be betting on cloud computing as the preferred solution.  Deloitte, for example, talks about the hyper hybrid cloud.  Here their IT or consulting firms integrate and orchestrate multiple cloud players as cloud brokers deliver bundled, composite business capabilities that meet the organizations’ needs while hiding and managing the complicated hybrid environment as a single virtualized system.

CSC is partnering with HP on its converged hybrid cloud initiative. To that end, the firm is committed to assisting its clients in capitalizing on HP’s 3-year converged Data Center Transformation initiative to gain the rewards of its hybrid data center infrastructure.

Virtual private servers (VPS) provide another way to create different logical servers running different operating systems to meet multiple business needs within the same physical server.  For example, KnownHost enables hybrid servers through custom -built enterprise hardware featuring dual CPU quad core Xeon with RAID 10 configurations and virtualization technology from Virtuozzo. Each hybrid server gets a guaranteed amount of RAM, bandwidth and disk space and is fully isolated from other servers on the machine.

Doing much the same, WiredTree uses the latest advances in server hardware combined with virtualization software, again Virtuozzo. The result: affordable, fully-managed logical servers that bring performance and reliability features normally only found in enterprise-level hardware.

IBM currently appears to be the only firm offering true hardware-based hybrid computing. It leverages blade technology to run multiple hardware platforms and operating systems on a single, physical system but manages it all as a single virtual system. To date it provides two hybrid platforms: the zEnterprise-zBX combination and IBM PureSystems appliances starting with PureFlex and PureApplication. Both are tightly integrated, highly optimized systems that accept a variety of platform blades. Although there is platform overlap the two hybrid environments do not support exactly the same operating environments.

For example, PureSystems brings the IBM System i platform to the hybrid party along with Power and System x (x86), which are supported by the zBX too, but skips the mainframe’s z/OS and z/VM operating environments. You manage the PureSystems hybrid environment with the Flex System Manager (FSM). The zEnterprise-zBX has its own hybrid management tool, the Unified Resource Manager.

IBM has a couple of potential rivals in the hybrid computing space. Oracle/Sun offers a variety of Sun servers that run either Solaris or Windows/Linux x86 operating systems but it has shown no interest in tightly integrating and optimizing them as hybrid servers as IBM has. Similarly, HP could combine HP-UX and Windows/Linux on a single hybrid x86/Itanium server, but again it has shown no intention of doing this.  Instead, both vendors direct hybrid computing discussions to the cloud, where the different systems can play together at a much higher level of abstraction. (IBM also offers a multi-platform cloud environment.)  Cisco has an offering that looks similar, FlexPod, a combination of Cisco and NetApp hardware, but it is mainly a virtualization play around VMware, not a hybrid server.

The payoff from hybrid computing is increased efficiency and lower TCO. By leveraging  a hybrid server the IT consultant can help the client reduce IT infrastructure sprawl, streamline management and operations, and lower overall costs sufficiently to pay for the hybrid investment fast.

The post Hybrid Computing—3 Ways to Deliver the Hybrid IT Efficiency Payoff appeared first on Big4.com.

(A book is the best way to build a consulting practice: ask about ghostwriting your book.)

What would be the effect on your company’s relationship with its suppliers if it was able to pay them immediately after receiving goods and services? –Capgemini on the future of procurement.

Few corporate functions have evolved more dramatically than procurement. As recently as the 1980s, it was generally regarded as a clerical, reactive position—a cost center. In a 2011 survey 66% of procurement functions reported delivering 6% or more bottom line savings to their company’s bottom line in the past 12 months, writes Accenture in its Performance through Procurement report.

Still, procurement generally is not considered strategic. Its primary mission is to acquire needed goods at the best price and terms.  It can save money, for sure, and it can secure necessary goods and materials that may be in short supply, which might be considered strategic but in general it provides an operations function, a cost-center to be minimized to whatever extent possible.

But that mindset is changing according to a recent study; Reaching New Heights: Dividends of Collaboration between Finance and Procurement, by CFO Research Services in junction with Ariba. Click here to see the study

Compared to three years ago, the study reports, the procurement function has grown more strategic in the minds of respondents. Nearly 75% see it as becoming more strategic to one degree or another.  Overall, the study results suggest “an opportunity for both finance and procurement to expect more from each other,” said Lamar Chesney, an independent finance and supply chain expert, who posed an interesting question: Should procurement work to advance enterprise goals or prevent retreat?

Chesney’s answer, spoken like a true consultant, was “it depends.” Judging from the survey responses, procurement mainly prevents retreat by ramping up its efficiency. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of the respondents reported that their procurement function is primarily or highly automated.

CFOs apparently applaud this effort and would like to see more of it from procurement. Specifically, they would like to see still more process efficiencies, improved collaboration with the supplier network, improved discount and rebate capture with suppliers, and more efforts to detect and mitigate supply risk. Of course, finance executives would like to see the strengthening of procurement’s working relationships with finance and with operations, but that wasn’t exactly high on their list.

The finance execs went on to applaud procurement’s use of technology at the tactical level, such as invoicing electronically or automating invoice-purchase reconciliation as well as streamlining the approval process. They did not, however, appear to endorse analytics—a hot strategic technology trend—or improving enterprise IT capabilities. And they gave a definite thumbs down to expanding the scope of procurement’s responsibilities.

The lack of technology enthusiasm on the part of finance execs is ironic given that technology-based automation is behind procurement’s increased efficiency and effectiveness.  That same efficiency also frees procurement to broaden its scope of activities and take on value-added roles, but again the finance execs were thinking mainly in terms of better management of inventory levels, working capital, and cash flow; none of which are particularly strategic. The greatest opportunity for procurement to increase its corporate contribution, according to the finance execs, is by finding opportunities to reduce costs.

Despite the finance execs’ decidedly lukewarm enthusiasm for an expanded procurement role beyond what it does well today the report encourages procurement to get more proactive. That includes forging a closer alliance with finance, further automating key processes, and reaching into the cloud to tap digital networks to connect and collaborate with customers, suppliers, and trading partners across the globe. This means reaching beyond the enterprise to a broader extraprise where procurement can interact across the entire value chain by tapping global intelligence networks. In the end, it is not sufficient just to be efficient, to simply prevent retreat, as Chesney noted above.  Instead procurement must advance strategic enterprise goals by becoming connected, informed, and collaborative with all players in the supply value chain.

The way you make procurement more strategic for your clients are through is through collaboration, business intelligence, and analytics, even real-time analytics. The tools, technologies, and methodologies are readily available.

The post Making Procurement Strategic appeared first on Big4.com.

By Tim Reed, Big4.com Guest Blogger

You’ve just walked out of an operations review, only to hear that another project has not delivered as expected. The team lead had been called on the carpet, having to explain what has gone wrong with deployment and what actions are going to be taken.  The team lead has just completed a lackluster review of the project’s current status and most of the meeting was a critique of actions taken and the directive to fix the current problems and then report back to leadership.  You have now witnessed so many of these meetings, that aside from the specific crisis at hand, you have the gut feeling that ‘there has to be a better way’!

It is likely that your  team and organization has become overwhelmed and  too focused on remediating  current issues. The same issues continue, happen repeatedly  and the result is that there is little or no change to the conditions that created the problems in the first place.

There is a better way and a solution. I’m calling it “Precision Transformation’ .  My definition of Precision Transformation includes the specific activities, metrics, measures and change management required to deliver results with precision.

My premise is that although IT organizations are well known for gearing up a project plan and project team to deliver a solution, there is limited focus on delivering with precision. Given the complexity of delivering results, the focus needs to change.

Driving precision transformation will change IT delivery, whether it is in the execution of the software delivery life cycle or  in IT operations.  To make this happen consider the following:

Defining Need : Are your customers able to accurately describe what is needed ?  (This goes beyond the classic use of business analysts to refine customer requirements)  If the customer cannot define the need with some level of detail, then why are we doing the project to begin with ?  Three simple questions to ask when defining the need include: 1)  Is the need defined in detail  ?  2) What is the expected impact to the end customer ?  3) What will this new functionality do to  current state operations ?

Quick Hint: If you cannot define the need with some detail, then why are you doing the project ?

Defining Delivery:  Ask your customer to close their eyes and define the perfect delivery..aka ‘nirvana’.  3 simple questions to ask include: 1) What does best in class delivery of the solution look like ?  2) What does delivery look like for operations and IT ? 3) What would be their worst nightmare …things that could go wrong ?

Quick  Hint: If the customer cannot answer all of these questions, then go back to the drawing board !

Defining Operations :  Pull out your current documented operational and IT models, all the metrics, all the reporting and examples of  the operational reports that are created today.  Or if you don’t want to collect this data, draw it on the white board.  Ask you team these three simple questions: 1) What are we going to eliminate / improve / change with the rollout of the new initiative ?  2) What is the impact to our architecture and infrastructure when rollout happens ? 3) What steps were taken throughout each phase of the SDLC to make sure operations are going to be robust ?

Quick Hint:  Ask these questions as the start of project and ask them at the end !

Tim Reed, CEO at ReedITC worked at E&Y , focusing on Global Fortune 50 Firms. ReedITC is a strategic IT & Operations consulting firm focused on Cost (Ability to operate efficiently at scale ), Growth (Ability to drive top line growth) and Compliance (Ability to provide services securely). For more information, please visit www.reeditc.com or contact tim.reed@reeditc.com

The post Delivering Transformation with Precision appeared first on Big4.com.

(A book is the best way to build a consulting practice: ask about ghostwriting your book.)

Every organization that uses technology carries what often is referred to as a technology or application debt. This refers to the burden of unproductive and inefficient technology.  For a consultant looking to grow his or her practice, finding the biggest components of the prospects technology debt and offering to streamline it can lead to a nice relationship.

At Capgemini, technology debt is directly related to quality. The consulting firm defines is as “the cost of fixing application quality problems that, if left unfixed, put the business at serious risk.” To Capgemini not every system clunker adds to the technical debt, only those that are highly likely to cause business disruption. In short, the firm does not include all problems, just the serious ones.

It is not unusual for enterprises to have 1000 applications and many more servers. Large enterprises can even have 10,000 or more applications. This portfolio of technology and applications is the source of the organization’s technology or application debt.

Technology can be an asset too, but when the debt gets too high it can become an impediment to business agility, says Accenture’s Adam Burden, executive director of the firm’s Cloud Application and Platform Service and a keynoter at Red Hat’s annual user conference in Boston last week. Watch the video of his presentation here.

An overbearing technology debt is not an unavoidable byproduct of using technology. Here are six ways you can help your clients reduce their technology/application debt.

1. Maybe they don’t need all these applications and the servers required to run them in the first place. Stop to rationalize your applications. Look at their usage metrics. Assess what they are used for. You will find that some aren’t needed at all or haven’t been used for years. Others may duplicate what different applications do better. Get rid of them.
2. Eliminate shelfware. This is software that was purchased with the best intentions but never was adopted. Maybe the software is too difficult to use; maybe it doesn’t serve your particular business process. For some reason, your people don’t want it and have said so by voting with their feet. Get rid of it and find something they actually will use that does the job. Shelfware represents a problem with your client’s software acquisition process or with its change management process or both.
3. Virtualize the server and storage environment. This will effectively increase the overall level of technology utilization while reducing the amount of servers and storage your client needs. The result: a boost in the technology ROI and a corresponding reduction in the technology/application debt. No quibbling with that.
4. Look at open source software options. Open source will lower your client’s software costs while giving at least equally good functionality and quality. Have no doubt; open source software is generally enterprise-class  and widely accepted.
5. Check out the cloud options. Many applications can be delivered more effectively and more efficiently via the cloud. With a SaaS solution, your client’s get the latest, most up-to-date functionality while paying only for what they use when they use it. If you don’t know what’s out there check the SaaS Showplace (now Cloud Computing Showplace), which has a searchable comprehensive directory of SaaS software options.
6. Transform and modernize the applications that are critical to your client’s business. There are numerous ways to modernize applications, from adopting a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to adding a graphical user interface. Or, consider platform migration, which reduces the cost of running the applications by moving them to a less expensive, more efficient technology platform.

To lower your client’s technology/application debt and keep it low implement a process to regularly audit the technology/application environment. A rigorous annual review should be sufficient.  Lowering your client’s technology debt frees money to invest in new initiatives that enable business agility or flow down to the bottom line while getting better systems in the process.

The post Six Ways to Help Clients Lower their Technology/Application Debt appeared first on Big4.com.

Simon Hill, Big4.com, Guest Blogger

In a conversation with a client recently we found ourselves talking at length about what the proliferation of specialist, cloud-based applications has meant for small and medium sized businesses. They were a 50 person development shop, but the conversation spanned the SME spectrum. I reflected on that conversation that evening and felt it was worth encapsulating it in a post to share as the issues and challenges are certainly not unique to that one business:

The emergence of specialist, low-cost cloud solutions is both a blessing and a challenge:

The boom in web-based IT means that there are a host of specialist solutions available as apps, SaaS, on-demand and cross device. SMEs are now able to buy services that previously would have, even if they had been available, been far too expensive for them. They can now license access to tools for small amounts of operational expense and on monthly commitments, the benefits are unquestionable and without doubt these services make our business lives much easier.

But (we went on to discuss) there are challenges, I didn’t take notes at the time as we were just talking, but here are the things I remember us talking over:

Which tools should we be using, differentiating and selecting them is time consuming and complex?

Before we knew we couldn’t afford the time or cost to deploy most of these services. Now we can afford them and the time to deploy is minutes or less, but we don’t know which to choose and differentiating between service a, b or c is complex.

This is a really interesting dilemma, but I don’t think this really gets to the heart of the issue. Ultimately choosing the tools and services comes down to a few key criteria – are they fit for purpose, are they user friendly, is it secure and accessible cross-device etc etc. What we actually got on to was what I think is the really interesting challenge with specialist apps, they are all, primarily, stand-alone and don’t really work that well together. So let’s explore that a bit more….

Why can’t my apps and services integrate and work together?

The strategy for specialist applications has to be customer centric and has to therefore look to integrate within the value-chain (i.e. other applications along that value chain) if they are going to be successful in the longer term. The focus is therefore on two key areas – the API for pushing and pulling info between services, and the platforms from which to centralise these integrations. Integrations with leading product management tools (Basecamp, Pivotal Tracker, Huddle) are a good example. Using an idea software tool as an example: ideas come in, are evaluated and socialised amongst the organisational crowd, decision makers approve the best ideas and these are then passed along the value-chain to the next specialist tool for delivery of these ideas. The tool has done its job and the baton is passed. Now the SME has a suite of affordable and integrated specialist, best-of-breed services, who needs a big expensive enterprise deployment!

There is a lot of cross-over of functionality, do I need specialist tools or will one generalist one do?

How many applications and services can you cope with? This really depends on the complexity and maturity of the value-chain and processes you are talking about. The key challenge is not complexity, its ensuring people know what tools are for what purpose and understanding where they fit in terms of organisational process. Select the tools that work for your business, if that is one or many across a process, but as you scale the specialist tools do all you can to ensure they can sing and dance together. The last thing you want are multiple versions of documents, IP or any other key business in several disparate systems and try and centralise on one service per use case i.e. one idea management tool, one project management tool, one instant messaging service etc.

We didn’t solve all the problems, but it was a refreshing chat and shows where we are now along the maturity cycle for SaaS for SMEs and also I suspect larger companies as well.
Simon Hill is CEO and co-founder of Wazoku, an idea software company, an Associate Director with the Venture Capital Firm FindInvestGrow and an active member of the London technology and entrepreneurial community. Simon is an alumni of PWC, Deloitte and Cap Gemini.

The post The Innovation Value Chain – An SME Perspective appeared first on Big4.com.

(A book is the best way to build a consulting practice: ask about ghostwriting your book.)

Business forecasting is part of the basic blocking and tackling expected of every consultant involved in business, finance, and financial systems. Leading consulting firms keep white papers and web pages handy to show prospective clients how they address the forecasting challenge.

KPMG, for example, emphasizes its 3-D (Decisions, Data, Discipline) approach. BearingPoint calls it demand management and planning. At Accenture its CIO organization teamed with the Finance and Human Resources organizations to create the Integrated Forecasting Solution that promises to link revenue and contract cost information to supply and demand data.

To help you get your clients’ forecasts in gear, IBM suggests avoiding what it calls The Seven Sins that undermine forecasts.  This paper by Steve Player and Steve Morlidge is summarized below.

Seven to avoid:

1. Semantic confusion—difficult to cope with unexpected or unwelcomed forecast outcomes, usually the result of managers under pressure to conform their forecasts to that of their peers or top management.  The problem results from semantic confusion, mistaking a goal (what management really wants) with a fact-based forecast.
2. Visual impairment –unexpected developments, especially early in the fiscal year—maybe an unusually slow start to the yea—impair or confuse your vision and lead you to skew your forecast,.  This results from a lack of flexibility and adaptability to changing conditions in the external marketplace.
3. Delusions of accuracy—obsession with the accuracy of its forecasts. It’s nice when your forecasts are on target but hitting them 100% of the time is unrealistic. Failure to acknowledge or take into account normal variations in the marketplace in its quest for extreme forecast accuracy prevents the company from managing risks and hinders it from capitalizing on unexpected opportunities. Encourage your client allow for some healthy flexibility.
4. Systemic overload—pressure to provide ever greater detail and additional analyses increases the workload without necessarily increasing the accuracy of the forecast or, more importantly, the quality of the analysis and insights that result. To the contrary, the volume of detail can obscure things like identifying key drivers. The underlying fallacy here is that more data is always better, which, when it comes to forecasting, is not the case.
5. Prosperity syndrome –where forecasts always trend upward to reflect optimistic growth regardless of your client’s industry or underlying economic conditions. This can be another facet of shaping a forecast to please management’s expectations. The need here is for managers and their consultants to recognize a built-in and natural growth bias. It also requires an honest assessment—this is where you as the consultant come in—of your client’s key differentiators and how they will play going forward. An overly optimistic forecast could cloud executives to potential shortcomings in their product.
6. Lack of coordination—this occurs when the forecast is compromised by various corporate functions engaged in conflict and one-upmanship. Again, this is where the outside consultant can play an effective peacemaker and honest broker role. One symptom of this is the dueling spreadsheets syndrome, when each group brings a spreadsheet presenting similar data differently for the purpose of promoting their agenda. This results from the failure of management to rally the organization around a single vision and strategy and to build and integrate a forecasting system that the entire company believes in and accepts.
7.  Asocial behavior—here analysts routinely manipulate and distort their forecasts even when doing so clearly is not in the best long-term interest of the company.  This is also known as sand-bagging, stretching, and playing the game.  Again, this results from a management that creates incentives ranging from kudos to bonus compensation, which rewards cagey game-players while punishing top performers. The solution is to create a culture that rewards people for the value they actually create rather than for pleasing forecasts that may or may not pan out.

As the outside consultant the most valuable role you might bring is that of the honest observer who can identify these sins and the underlying situations before they get out of hand.

The post 7 Sins that Undermine Your Clients’ Forecasts appeared first on Big4.com.

(A book is the best way to build a consulting practice: ask about ghostwriting your book.)

Consulting practices are turning to supercomputing with an eye to bringing it to the masses.  Supercomputing itself, no longer relying only on massively parallel hardware, is gravitating to the cloud in the form of high performance computing (HPC).  The cloud brings the ability to harness massive numbers of processors and apply them to a single task.

To that end, Accenture/Avanade is partnering with Microsoft to help deliver a wide range of advanced capabilities through the Azure cloud.  Similarly, Capgemini clearly has been brushing up on supercomputing trends for the future

Supercomputing, with its ability to grapple with the most complex problems and extremely large volumes of data fast, is no longer only for large organizations in scientific and technical fields. You don’t have to be unable to run a Monte Carlo simulation or two before you think a supercomputer might not be a bad thing if you could only get the use of one. The latest generation of high performance computing (HPC) systems promises to put supercomputing capabilities in the hands of even midsize and non-technical organizations.

Not coincidentally, the technology to perform HPC-style computing now is coming within the reach of conventional businesses. HPC is being delivered through compute clusters, compute grids, and increasingly via the cloud. And the compute clusters or grids can be nothing more than connected Windows servers, not much different from the machines running throughout the organization.

Long-time HPC players like IBM, HP, SGI, and Dell are revamping their offerings. They are being joined by a new breed of compute-intensive, analytics-driven, cloud-based HPC players including Amazon’s Cluster Compute Instances, Appistry, and Microsoft’s Project Daytona, beyond whatever it does with Azure.

Not surprising, IBM has taken the lead in bringing what it calls technical computing solutions within reach. It is doing this mainly by bringing Platform Computing, a recent acquisition, to the HPC party.

With a choice of HPC platforms almost any organization can attack the same complex, multi-dimensional analytic problems that took way too long or were not even feasible with the usual corporate systems. And they do it in ways that don’t require big investments in more technology and or the need to recruit a cadre of hardcore compute geeks. Where once supercomputing focused primarily on delivering megaflops (millions of floating point operations per second), petaflops, or even exaflops, now companies are looking to leverage affordable technical computing tools for problems that are less complicated than, say, intergalactic navigation yet still deliver important business results .

Initially HPC or supercomputing was considered the realm of large government research being conducted by secretive agencies,esoteric think tanks, automotive, and aerospace/defense. Now  more industries, such as financial services, media, telecommunication, and life sciences are adopting HPC for modeling, simulations, and predictive analyses of various types. Specifically financial services firms want real time analytics to deliver improved risk management, faster and more accurate credit valuation assessments, multi-dimensional pricing, and actuarial analyses. Life sciences firms are seeking faster time to discovery, more effective collaboration, and cost reductions.

While some of work performed with HPC has a distinct scientific flavor, like next-generation genomics or 3D computer modeling, others HPC activities seem like conventional business application processing. These include financial data analysis, real-time CRM, social media analysis, data mining/unstructured data, information analysis, and retail commerce/ merchandising analysis and planning.

The role of the consultant remains the same: identifying the need, building the business case, selecting among the wide range of technology choices, assisting with deployment, and measuring the results.  The only difference—and it is a big difference—is that you can frame much more complex solutions to previously unsolvable problems and the tools will be there to handle it.

The post Supercomputing Comes to Midsize and Non-Technical Enterprises appeared first on Big4.com.

The last mile of finance is an idea that has been popularized by Gartner. It addresses the business processes at the end of the financial close. This includes helping the CFO communicate with publishers, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and board members on financial and operational results. Included are reconciliation, close, and disclosure applications.

Deloitte, too, picked up on the idea noting that companies face many challenges with the financial close and reporting process. For Deloitte the last mile covers the processes and activities in between the trial balance and a company’s 10K.  In this last mile organizations can experience management reporting and governance issues—including financial and internal control failures—resulting not only in significant inefficiencies but also financial errors and internal control failures.

The solution, according to Deloitte, calls for a holistic approach, which entails developing  a road map for improvement to address the process, the policy, the people, and the technology issues, and how they successfully work together to improve the efficiency, governance, and quality of your financial reporting and close.  Technology plays a key role. If your practice covers finance or technology you should be working the last mile of finance too.

Even for companies that don’t publish financial statements, and therefore can avoid trudging that last mile, there still are important financial processes that follow the accounting close, according to Ventana Research. These include internal reporting and tax statement preparation.

Finance departments have long needed to automate the assembly of periodic documents that combine words and numbers, essentially eliminating the need to perform repetitive, mechanical functions and reducing the time needed to ensure accuracy and manage the process.  These activities, according to Trintech, consume disproportionate amounts of time and resources due to manual, disjointed and complex processes, high-risk activities, and increasing regulatory demands. As a result, organizations are exposed to myriad risks, including delays in data availability, reporting inaccuracy, material errors, restatements, and reduced transparency. This is where financial statement reporting (FSR) technologies can help.

As Ventana explains, FSR automates the document creation process. Manually assembling this information into a document has always been a chore, even after word processing and spreadsheets were adapted to this purpose decades ago.  In addition, FSR brings informed workflow that automates the process by facilitating handoffs and reminding participants who haven’t completed their required steps.  It also enables managers to track the state of the process and alerts them to hold-ups.

eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) advanced the state of FSR for companies that must do public reporting, especially when it comes to tagging footnotes. Today, a number of companies offer FSR products, including Trintech, SAP, Oracle, IBM, Fiserv and a host of point solution vendors. There also are hosted SaaS products. Trintech, for example, can be licensed on premise, hosted, or delivered as a SaaS/Cloud service. Consultants should be right in the middle of this by helping clients with product selection, planning, deployment, and more.

 (A book is the best way to build a consulting practice: ask about ghostwriting your book.)

The post Paving the Last Mile of Finance appeared first on Big4.com.

At a recent briefing IBM raised the idea that in any number of ways online computing badly needs refreshing.  Many company websites do seem stale. That’s an opening for consultants.

Consider this: the online experience now encompasses mobile, cloud, big data, social networking, and gamification. Companies probably didn’t have to deal with any of that when they initially got online. Then consider the devices connecting today—15 billion mobile devices alone expected by 2015, estimates Cisco, plus the usual array of laptops, netbooks, desktops, thin devices. And who is connecting: Hispanics spent 5.15 billion through mobile devices this past holiday shopping season, according to Zpryme, a research firm.  This market probably wasn’t even on their radar screen when they first developed their online strategy.

Here are two more reasons C-level exec should refresh the online experience: 1) $44.6B in retail losses in 2010 due to online customer experience problems, according to Harris Interactive and 2) as much as $350 billion a year lost due to disengaged workers, reports Gallup Research.  Good reasons to revitalize the online experience for both customers and workers.

Deloitte quickly picked up on this. Earlier this week it introduced Deloitte Digital, a network of digital studios that provides clients with a full suite of digital services covering strategy, user experience, content, creative, engineering, and implementation across mobile, web, social and digital channels. It plans to roll this out worldwide.

Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group recently addressed this in a paper about the changing online experience titled My Shopping My Way. Check it out here.

Refreshing a client or prospect’s online experience starts with a fresh strategy. Walk your clients and prospects through the strategy basics: business objectives, target audiences, current processes, proposed new processes and new capabilities. The recent trend is to do as much as possible online and do it through multiple channels, such as mobile devices, social media, and online application services. Encourage them to think beyond customers and workers to partners, suppliers, and other stakeholders.

Then broaden the scope of the engagement.  Bring in marketing; it will need to upgrade its strategy, messaging, and creative. Talk with IT, which must open up their systems to make selective business logic and capabilities accessible to new users running a much broader range of devices. Of course, this will entail rethinking and bolstering security.

Don’t leave out finance. Can they extend billing and payment to different devices? Can they accept mobile payment and orders? Can they process orders through Facebook or respond to issues through Twitter?

To create exceptional overall customer and worker online experiences IBM recommends bringing together a range of capabilities and services to create, manage, and deliver engaging multi-channel web experiences. To that end, it assembled two sets of tools dubbed the IBM Customer Experience Tool Suite and the Intranet Experience Tool Suite. You might want to do something similar; that’s what Deloitte is doing with Deloitte Digital.

The Internet has moved into the age of hybrid computing, public/private/hybrid clouds, constant mobility, and social networking. If that’s not reason enough for your clients and prospects to revamp their online experience try this: organizations that have optimized engagement, according to Gallup Research, outperformed their competitors by 26% in gross margin and experienced 85% sales growth. That should more than justify your engagement.

(A book is the best way to build a consulting practice: ask about ghostwriting your book.)

The post Refreshing the Online Experience Makes Good Consulting Business appeared first on Big4.com.

Drive Process Optimization

 A common approach is to seek the optimization of processes such that quality improves and cycle time is reduced. The simple steps of mapping the current state Operational and IT processes, breaking each process down into three levels of delivery will identify opportunities for improvement. Key items to look for include: repeatable actions or processes, actions that results in defects, and actions that result in mis-information.

For example, take a look at your current processes for Level 0 to Level 3 IT support. What are the handoff’s and processes that occur once the call is taken initially or the issue becomes known? Mapping each process, each handoff, who is involved, the amount of time, the amount of effort, the number of manual and automated tracking systems will identify the opportunities. The team should be looking for waste (e.g.: steps that can be removed from the process, areas to apply standardization for repeatability of process, removal of bottlenecks to achieve more productivity in the same time period). The objective is to make the changes without compromising the quality of the product or service delivered.

Conduct a Lean Operations and IT Walkthrough

 There are four common areas of focus when conducting a Lean Operations and IT walkthrough, namely; operating practices, management systems, organization and capabilities, and mindset and behavior. Conducting a Lean Operations and IT walkthrough of these four areas will provide some unique opportunities and items to consider.

The post Lean Operations and IT – A great challenge ! appeared first on Big4.com.

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is a hot technology topic that has proven benefits for many industries, writes CSC’s Jeff Eagan, Chris Hutcherson, and Fran Turisco. It also is the latest stage in the march to virtualize all of IT and a long-term strategy for many organizations. Significant financial savings and other benefits have been documented for server and storage virtualization. Is the desktop next?

Gartner seems convinced that is, estimating 60% of enterprises will employ some form of desktop virtualization by 2012, compared to less than 10% in 2008. And Capgemini apparently agrees: it rolled out a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to enable its development team to provision and repair test environments much more quickly, at the touch of button.

The benefit of desktop virtualization is the ability to more efficiently deliver desktop computing to individual workers faster. In effect, it eliminates the overhead of delivering computing desktop by individual desktop. IDC has become bullish on VDI in the last year. A new approach to VDI, however, promises to do even better and make VDI attractive to large enterprises.

The challenge for very large enterprises is the need to virtualize enough desktops on each physical server.  If you can only run 20 desktops on each server you end up replacing desktop sprawl with desktop server sprawl. An improvement, but not a big enough gain to undertake a massive changeover required to virtualize not 200 but, say, 10,000 or 20,000 desktops.

To do that, you would need servers capable of virtualizing at least hundreds but more likely thousands of individual desktops. Even the beefiest Intel servers can’t handle that. But a mainframe can.

Jim Porell, Distinguished Engineer, Deputy CTO, at IBM Federal Sales, calculates that an entry-level mainframe, the z114 (base price $75,000), a zBX device populated with Hx5 blades, z/VM, and a handful of other components including the Raytheon Trusted Thin Client desktop device along with advanced management and storage can deliver tens of thousands of virtualized desktops for as little as $600 per desktop depending on the mix of user workloads. The user workloads range from minimal browser web surfing to basic MS Office functionality to power users. This is the amortized cost of ALL the hardware (thin desktop client, z114, zBX, blades, storage), middleware, software, and management across all desktops. You can’t go to Best Buy and get a desktop system with all the software and deploy it at that price.

Porell is referring to a system dubbed Smart Terminal Architecture with Secure Hosts (STASH) and it recently has been attracting attention, here and a video here. IBM refers to STASH as VDI on steroids and describes it as a new computing environment offering military-grade security from the desktop to the back end.

The mainframe brings massive scalability, reliability, and security. Even the entry level z114 can easily handle the dozens of management servers needed for thousands of desktops. The zBX packed with 16-core Hx5 blades can handle up to 16 x86 desktops per core and with 28 16-core blades per zBX. When multiplied by four zBX machines per zEnterprise the number of desktops supported surpasses 28,000!

By comparison, VMware running View on even the largest Intel servers will have trouble matching that number. Then figure for the reliability and security of the mainframe with its various STASH piece parts; you would need to purchase and engineer in a lot of redundancy just to start.

If the price of the mainframe turns your client off, IBM offers the Solution Edition program for new workloads like VDI that enables the organization to buy the mainframe at a deep discount and pick up a zBX at a discount too. That should drive down Porell’s cost per desktop even more.

At this scale, a consultant should be able to effectively pitch VDI to even large enterprises with thousands or tens of thousands of desktops.

(A book is the best way to build a consulting practice: ask me about ghostwriting your book.)

The post VDI as the Next Enterprise Consulting Practice Area appeared first on Big4.com.

With Linux reportedly the fastest growing operating system in the world and 99% of Global 2000 enterprises intending to include open source software in their portfolios by 2015 (up from 73% in 2012), clearly open source Linux has long crossed the adoption chasm and has achieved enterprise acceptance. This makes it an ideal time for IBM to introduce its new PowerLinux servers, which promise to deliver the performance of IBM Power Systems at x86 prices.

Not everyone, however, is on the Linux bandwagon. In this piece, click here, Capgemini identifies five reasons why Linux is still behind Windows. Of course, that isn’t stopping the consulting firm from listing a slew of Linux job openings as recently as early this month. And the other big consulting firms regularly list similar openings. In part, that’s because Linux systems are playing in hot technology areas, such as Big Data and analytics.

The new IBM PowerLinux introduction includes two Linux-only models, a 2-socket, 2U rack server (7R2) and a 2-socket compute node (p24L) intended to plug into IBM’s newly introduced PureFlex appliance. Each socket contains 8 POWER7 cores and 256GB of memory, and IBM has tuned the machines for key tasks, like Big Data. PureFlex is a hybrid computing appliance that accepts a variety of nodes in the form of blades, including PowerLinux as a compute node. This blogger covered these systems recently here, looking at how they might disintermediate consultants.

As Capgemini noted in its paper, Windows is still ahead of Linux but IBM’s goal is to even the playing field by delivering PowerLinux at a cost of acquisition competitive with x86 systems. For example, the PowerLinux system including POWER7, virtualization (PowerVM), and the Linux open source OS (either Red Hat or SUSE) runs $21,282 (USD). By comparison, a comparable Dell/Intel system (able to handle the same workloads and running VMware vSphere Enterprise 5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription and support comes in at $22,650 (USD). Similarly, a comparable HP/Intel system running VMware vSphere Enterprise 5 and Red Hat subscription and support costs $24,838 (USD).  If you don’t want the PowerVM hypervisor, there is the free open source KVM option. (Comparative cost data provided by IBM.)

Both the Dell and HP systems run 2-socket, 16-core 2.4GHz ER-2665 Sandy Bridge processors with32GB of memory, two 300GB SAS drives (15k), a 4x1GbE network controller, and a SAS, DVD, RAID storage controller. The PowerLinux system brings a faster 16-core processor (3.55 GHz) while matching all the other specifications.

So, in terms of speeds, feeds, and cost, PowerLinux not only meets but exceeds the leading x86 systems for use running virtualized workloads. When you look at PowerVM for PowerLinux compared to VMware vSphere 5.0, PowerLinux looks even better. PowerLinux handles 16 virtual CPUs per virtual machine vs. 8 for VMware and 4 CPU threads per core vs. 2 for VMware. Throw in the secure hardware-based hypervisor for PowerLinux (PowerVM) vs. VMware’s software-based hypervisor and the PowerLinux machine is the clear winner. Of course, Intel just came out with its successor to the Sandy Bridge processor, called Ivy Bridge, so some of these specs may change.

In terms of workloads, one beta user, the University of Hamburg (Germany), compared two PowerLinux machines with ten x86 Linux servers for a large file serving workload. The result: PowerLinux delivered a 50% performance gain and a 30% lower cost of virtual file server acquisition.

If you look at a Big Data analytics workload—another increasingly important workload—the PowerLinux server with 4 threads per core has an immediate advantage over the Intel Sandy Bridge’s 2 threads per core. PowerLinux also can handle parallel file systems across multiple servers using HDFS or the highly optimized IBM GPFS. In short, PowerLinux servers can natively exploit massively parallel processing across Linux clusters, which is what you want for Big Data.

PowerLinux already has been highly tuned by IBM. Should you deploy it as a compute node in the PureFlex appliance, you get the added integration, optimization, and automated expertise (patterns) IBM has packed into that device too.

The appeal of the PowerLinux system is that IBM streamlined it to match or exceed x86 cost and performance objectives. It, indeed, can beat comparable x86 machines running Linux virtualized workloads and do it at less than x86/VMware prices. The question is whether that is enough to impact the Linux-Windows adoption gap Capgemini noted.

The post IBM PowerLinux Changes the x86 Windows Calculus appeared first on Big4.com.

Integrated hardware/software appliances are a common piece of vendor product lines, but IBM’s new family of appliances may be a game changer, especially for system integrators and consultants who profit from deploying these devices for their clients.

Appliances pre-integrate and configure everything an organization needs in terms of server, storage, network, and software for easy deployment out-of-the-box. Consulting firms have even gotten into the appliance business. Capgemini offers an SAP appliance, and Deloitte and EMC have teamed to offer an appliance as a hardware/services deal.

The new IBM PureSystems appliances, however, take it even further. IBM calls these expert systems because it has baked into the system large amounts of automated best practices around the majority of the processes for which most organizations need systems, whether web applications, database applications, or almost anything else a company might do. With all the expertise and automation built in IBM estimates that a PureSystems machine can be set up and running in four hours. IBM further calculates that PureSystems requires 47% less deployment labor hours and 73% fewer management hours versus conventional systems. Where does that leave system integrators and consultants?

 Right now the product family consists of PureFlex, an IaaS offering, and PureApplication, a PaaS offering. IBM even avoids its typical premium pricing. An entry PureFlex System starts at $100,000 while a recent report put competing integrated hardware/software appliances at $750,000. The entry level PureFlex can still handle a midsize organization, and it painlessly scales as the organization grows.

The most innovative part of PureSystems is not the price but the idea of expert patterns. Patterns are built-in software that encapsulates the expertise enabling the systems can automatically handle basic, time-consuming tasks such as configuration, upgrades, and application requirements. The systems also come with cloud computing built in, allowing it to be a private cloud out of the box. Organizations can automatically create a private, self-service, multi-platform cloud that can scale up and down. So, what is left for the systems integrator or consultant?

When asked by this blogger, Steve Mills, IBM senior vice president of software and systems, insisted that systems integrators and consultants “absolutely have a role connecting the business side, the business process to the technology.”  IBM also provides a customization opportunity in the form of specialized expert patterns developed with a toolkit that’s part of PureSystems. A consultant might even sell the expert patterns for various niches, much as people do with Salesforce.com.

At this point the idea of a PureSystems market is at the most nascent stage. Still, it is an opportunity to watch as your clients consider the devices. Eventually, the PureSystem Centre will become the hub for patterns from IBM and others.

Other vendors offer specialized combo hardware and software bundles that reduce the need for consultants and integrators:  Oracle has Exadata and Exalogic; NetApp and Cisco offer FlexPod; EMC, Cisco, and VMware collaborated to create VCE, which offers VBlock; and HP offers its converged infrastructure. Each vendor has its supporters. Only PureSystems, however, offers the customized expert pattern opportunity.

The post Does IBM’s New PureSystems Reduce the Consultant Role appeared first on Big4.com.

By Richard Cornelisse

In the last decade, companies have increasingly automated their business processes. The most common method is by using an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Such a set up can be hugely complex. This is definitely the case where it relates to European based indirect tax. As manual processes are subject to human error, automation could – under circumstances – result in performance improvements and savings.

A third party tax engine might be a better solution than improving the indirect tax functionality of its own ERP systems when the organization uses multiple ERP systems. Interfacing via a bolt-on could be a better alternative.  Outsourcing is a topic for a next blog.

ERP Systems

ERP systems such as SAP and Oracle either determine the VAT treatment (liability and VAT recovery) of businesses’ transactions automatically or this is a (semi) manual process.

Multinationals run often various versions of ERP systems or legacy systems without harmonization. The ERP set-up is often per business unit and thus multiple set ups per country are possible.

This could be the root cause that:

1. running of system’s exception reports to look for missed opportunities, under claimed VAT and potential fraudulent transactions is still a challenging exercise
2. a lot of manual (re)work is often needed to file the VAT reporting and reconcile the VAT numbers due to the use of multiple spreadsheets and various data sources (divisions, different systems)

The latter is interesting as spreadsheets are usually found at critical points in the audit trail
 and are designed by non-specialists with no system expertise
.

An ERP system is not just an accounting system but also provides information about planning and production as well as being able to produce invoices and various reports.

Tax Controversy Strategy

The advantage of these systems is that management information is readily accessible and that should give some food for thought for tax auditors as well. Transactions from various business units can be monitored and managed on time. Is this something to take in consideration during updating or setting up your ‘Tax Controversy Strategy‘?

A ‘Material weakness’ Audit Item

The decision to adopt a particular ERP system is usually made for business reasons whereby the VAT administration is only a minor consideration or not considered at all.

Despite that according to Sarbanes Oxley the configuration of the VAT rules in an ERP system is a ‘material weakness’ audit item (a 1% mistake or less often impacts shareholders value), in practice, it is often still overlooked. The Global Survey of ‘KPMG Benchmark 2012′ confirms again that indirect tax policies are either not documented or monitored properly.

VAT as a transaction tax is an essential element within the ERP system.  The impact of the ‘VAT Throughput‘ should be understood and managed properly within the organization (See also ‘Managing The Perception Of C-Level‘).

Performance Improvement

The advantage is that Indirect Tax functionality can be automated (full or to a certain extend) in a company’s own ERP system especially if SAP or Oracle is used. It is about mitigating of risks and reduce the amount of manual work and rework (the ‘hidden factory’).

Is the functionality of the ERP system used at full VAT capacity? What are the gaps and consequences?

The perception of Plug and Play

If you provide goods and/or services locally subject to the standard VAT rate it might be ‘Plug and Play’. That is the most simple VAT business model I could come up with.

In practice, configuration (the amount depends) is needed when companies deal cross border and/or complex business models are set up such as a centralized principal structure with for example a “Limited Risk Distributor” or a “Commissionaire”.

VAT Automation of Complex Business Models

There are all kinds of business reasons for centralizing supply chains and set up models like “Limited Risk Distributor” or “Commissionaire”. The challenge from an implementation perspective is indirect tax.

What makes it complex

Lets take LRDs/Commissionaires as an example.

LRDs/Commissionaires have neither legal ownership to the inventory during storage nor during transport as the Principal is at that stage still the legal owner. It is often the case that the Principal delivers the goods physically and directly to the final customer. This creates only one physical departure of goods (`goods issue’) in the ERP system. However, two invoices should be raised (one from Principal to LRDs/Commissionaires and one from the LRD/Commissionaire to the final customer.

In the ERP system, the correct ‘ship from’ information at the LRD/Commissionaire level might be missing so that the VAT treatment by the system is determined based on the ‘ship from’ and ‘ship to’ information present at the Principal level. In principle, for cross-border transactions this results in an incorrect VAT treatment.

Therefore, in practice, it is time consuming to correctly configure the ‘Tax determination logic’ set up. You need to know your practical workarounds, preferable in the design stage.

Even More Bottlenecks In Case of a Commissionaire Structure

A “Commissionaire model” has some more bottlenecks. A “commissionaire” is never the legal owner of the goods. From a VAT perspective, the commissionaire acts as though he were the owner and a fictitious supply takes place to and subsequently by the commissionaire.

Since according to civil law, the commissionaire does not have ownership, the commissionaire does not own any inventory not even temporarily.

That is different with the LRD as normally LRD gets ownership via flash title for a very short period. Tax technical risk analysis about e.g. “flash titles and transfer of economic ownership” is outside scope of this blog.

Based on the above the commissionaire has to issue invoices in his own name which can create problems if there are no bookings with respect to inventory.

There are all practically workarounds of course but that needs planning in time again preferably in the design phase.

For what can go wrong see “Indirect Tax Exposures Others Have Faced“.

General Overview VAT and Systems

If you like to know more about where VAT impacts the systems watch ‘Systems For Dummies‘.

Richard’s other Big4 publications

• How to Execute A Tax Strategic Plan And Be Successful
• About Market Leadership And Non Traditional Competitors
• How To Manage The Perception Of C-level And Realize Tax Objectives
• The Conflict Between ‘Actual To Budget’ Controls And ‘Budget-based Compensation Targets’
• Tax Controversy Strategy: ‘Proactively Managing The Changing Landscape’
• About ‘Business Integrity And ‘Being Inspired’
• The Indirect Tax Profession Is Evolving From An Individual To A Team Sport
• Would European Value Added Tax Work For The United States?
• US VAT Introduction Versus The Proposed Changes Of The ‘European Union’ VAT System

Richard Cornelisse is CEO of the KEY Group and worked previously as Big4 Partner in the Tax Performance Advisory and Indirect Tax Practice and blogs on Tax Function Effectiveness and Tax Control Framework developments.

The post Centralized Business Models And ‘Indirect Tax Automation’ appeared first on Big4.com.

This is the right time to start a private cloud practice if you haven’t already. The private cloud market―built around a set of virtualized IT resources behind the organization’s firewall―is growing rapidly. Private cloud vendors have been citing the latest Forrester prediction  of the private cloud market to grow to more than $15 billion in 2020. Looking at a closer horizon, IDC estimates  the private cloud market will grow to $5.8 billion by 2015.

The appeal of the private cloud comes from its residing on-premise and its ability to leverage existing IT resources wherever possible. The promise of private clouds is straightforward:  more flexibility and agility from their systems, lower total costs, higher utilization of the hardware, and better utilization of the IT staff. Most importantly, the private cloud addresses concerns about cloud security and control.

Private clouds are not simple, entailing sophisticated management automation and self-service provisioning. For starters they require thorough virtualization and automation. “Up-front costs are real, and choosing the right vendor to manage or deploy an environment is equally important,” says senior IDC analyst Katie Broderick. That’s a cue for Big4 alums to jump in.

IBM, however, may change the private cloud financial equation with its newest SmartCloud Entry offering based on IBM System x (x86 servers) and VMware.  The starting price is under $60,000.

The IBM SmartCloud Entry starts with a flexible, modular design that can be installed quickly. It also can handle integrated management; automated provisioning through a service request catalog, approvals, metering, and billing; and do it all through a consolidated management console. The result: the delivery of standardized IT services on the fly and at a lower cost through automation. A business person, according to IBM, can self-provision services through SmartCloud Entry in four mouse clicks, something even a VP can handle.

The prerequisite for any private cloud is virtualized systems. Here again is an opportunity for a Big4 alum to jump in. A remarkable number of organizations are only just starting to virtualize their systems.  A private cloud starts by consolidating and virtualizing servers, storage, and networking to reduce operating and capital expenses and streamline systems management. Virtualization is essential to achieve the flexibility and efficiency organizations want from their private cloud.

From there you can move to private cloud capabilities like automated service deployment, portal-based self-service provisioning, and simplified administration.  This involves creating master images of the desired software, converting the images for use with inexpensive tools like the open source KVM hypervisor, and tracking the images to ensure compliance and minimize security risks. Finally you can gain efficiency by reducing both the number of images and the storage required for them by intelligently culling the images to what is truly essential and through techniques like compression and deduplication. Then just deploy the software images on request through end user self-service combined with virtual machine isolation capabilities and project-level user access controls for security.

By doing this―deploying and maintaining the application images, delegating and automating the provisioning, standardizing deployment, and simplifying administration―the organization can cut the time to deliver IT capabilities from months to 2-3 days, actually to just hours in some cases. This is what enables business agility.

At $60k the IBM x86 SmartCloud Entry offering is a good place to start. But all major IT vendors are targeting private clouds though few can deliver as much of the stack as IBM. Microsoft offers a number of private cloud solutions here . HP provides a private cloud solution for Oracle here while Oracle has an advanced cluster file system for private cloud storage here.  NetApp, primarily a storage vendor, has partnered with others to deliver a variety of NetApp private cloud solutions  for VMware, Hyper-V, SAP, and more.

With vendors scrambling to deliver private clouds, what’s left for a Big4 alum to do? Here are five immediate opportunities:

1–Educating clients to the benefits of private clouds
2–Planning a phased deployment
3–Helping the client virtualize and consolidate their systems
4–Identifying and refining the applications, workloads, and images
5–Managing and guiding the entire private cloud journey

You can probably come up with more.

Copyright 2012 Alan Radding

The post Time to Build a Private Cloud Practice appeared first on Big4.com.

This blog dots all the postings to the building blocks of the Indirect Tax Strategic Plan (by Richard Cornelisse) and shows what a best practice should look like. It not only about the plan to be produced, but also gives my view about implementation. That could mean that some bottlenecks have to be conquered first.

I start with the “Company’s Culture and Code of Conduct” as it is a top down approach.

This blog includes the highlights of the various postings tagged to these building blocks. More detail about how I see things can be read via clicking on the links.

Company’s Culture and Code of Conduct

From ‘Business Integrity And ‘Being Inspired’ (by Richard Cornelisse): If integrity is an important part of your organizations values, you should always act accordingly and proactively manage as leadership. It is always about doing the right thing and never bargain these values.

Leadership, Integrity, Trust…and Ski-Racing: “Without integrity, an organization is eventually doomed to failure–karma”

Greg Smith: “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs: “The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for…. To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money…I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.”

Maureen Broderick: ”In a profession that sells a promise of performance versus a tangible product or service, a firm’s vision, values, and culture lie at the heart of that promise. Vision is where the firm is headed. Values are the behaviors the firm holds important, and culture is the feel, the energy, the society within the organization. Collectively, they form the core around which the business is built.”

From ’The Conflict Between ‘Actual To Budget’ Controls And ‘Budget-based Compensation Targets’’ (by Richard Cornelisse):

“A Ferrari is a beautiful, very fast and a state of the art car, but we should not put Stevie Wonder in the driver seat. He is an excellent song writer and performer but he never ever will be the next Michael Schumacher. It will be risky business if he controls the throttle”

The above might be considered a ridiculous example, but strangely enough happens often in our daily practice. The downturn might even make it worse. Why? It is because of budget-based incentive targets.

Everybody feels now the pressure and the focus is on making personal budget first. We might know the best driver, understand that he is the best option, but that does not mean we want Michael actually in the driver seat. It does not matter if Michael works for the same company or that it is in the best interest of the client. Stevie, wants to make his own comfort zone first. It is in his personal interest.

• Should we be surprised?
• Is this not part of our human nature?
• Is that not the reason we have our company culture?

Exactly, the reason why proactive management of common values is needed.

Business Strategy

The Tax Function has to contribute value to the company’s business strategy. What is the impact on business strategy of social media and technology developments and the market entry of non traditional competitors.   Are new business priorities needed?

From ”About Market Leadership And Non Traditional Competitors“ (by Richard Cornelisse): The current impact of Google and Wikipedia is already huge as much content has become less valuable or even worthless from a pricing perspective. Will search engine functionality develop further? Will more content be available and contributed on the Internet?

Adrienne Graham: “With the Internet being so widely available loaded with free information, people automatically assume that you too have to provide information for free. My response to that is go ahead and read the free stuff. But when you still find yourself lacking answers, then apparently the FREE stuff doesn’t work. You can’t come to a professional and ask them to work for free. In essence, that is what you’re doing when you ask to pick someone’s brain. How would you feel if your boss came to you and said, Hey since we can get this done from information from the Internet, I won’t be paying you today. Go ahead, let it sink in. Got that visual yet? Good. That’s exactly how I feel whenever someone wants to take me to lunch or call me to pick my brain”

Benchmarking

From A Spotlight On “Management”: About Being Ambitious And Realizing Goals (by Richard Cornelisse): Negative experiences but also positive experiences (e.g. (the first and final) assessments, the amount of savings) would be something to register ongoing and communicate effectively within the organization. These are the benchmark findings of your own company and extremely useful for your strategy moving forward.

You need to know where you want to go and set up a roadmap how to get there. Benchmark against trends in the market might be supportive in your aim. It provides an overview of the experiences of others and is useful for setting own priorities going forward. It is always interesting to get insight of what others have experienced for own validation purposes.

Watch ‘Benchmark Findings’ Via YouTube

Overview of the ‘Key Risk Areas of VAT paid and VAT charged’ and ‘System Set Up’

From ‘The Value of Benchmarking: Get Some Objective Evidence” (by Richard Cornelisse): Watch an overview of the ‘Key Risk Areas of VAT paid and VAT charged’ and ‘System Set Up and Process Errors’.

Watch ‘Key Risks’, ‘System Set Up And Process Errors’ Via YouTube

This material might be useful for (internal) communication, risk analysis or self assessments:

• “The European Union VAT system – High Level Overview” (by Richard Cornelisse)
• “Why Manage Indirect Taxes” (by Richard Cornelisse)
• “Indirect Tax Exposures Others Have Faced” (by Richard Cornelisse)
• “Audit Defense“
• “System For Dummies“
• “Surveys And research“

Setting the objectives

From Setting The Objectives Of The Indirect Function (by Richard Cornelisse):

• Tax Planning: identify, recommend and successfully implement indirect tax projects that assist in achieving the objectives of the indirect tax department part of the business objectives.
• Tax Accounting: proactively anticipate on changes in the business and outside the business and successfully communicate these changes to the concerning departments. Furthermore look after a correct implementation of these changes.
• Tax Compliance: look after a correct, complete and timely Indirect Tax reporting of all entities. This includes that additional reporting relating to these Indirect Tax returns is taken into account.
• Tax Governance: all corporate departments are well informed and/or have the availability of a VAT work instruction so it is clear when to consult the indirect tax department.
• Support Other Departments: activities of departments that are being affected by VAT risks have been successfully identified and these departments have been well instructed to reduce these risks.
• Audit Defense: roles and responsibilities have been determined who deals with the tax authorities during an audit (announcement) and tax authorities questions and procedures “how to act” (e.g. never provide documents without first making copies) have been documented and rolled out.

From A Spotlight on “Management”: About Being Ambitious And Realizing Goals (by Richard Cornelisse): At the moment that these objectives are validated,  specific goals have to be set within these boundaries. The goals have to be specific, measurable, acceptable, realistic and timely (SMART goals).

Getting support and the tools to make it happen

From ”How To Manage the Perception of C-level And Realize Tax Objectives“ (by Richard Cornelisse): In order to allocate resources to risk and reward areas that matter, the maximum level of risk appetite of the company in the worst case scenarios need to be determined. This facilitates such prioritization as defined acceptable levels of risk means that resources do not spend time on further reducing risks that are already at an acceptable level.

If you know the risk appetite, you have to identify the lowest performing indirect tax processes that have the most direct impact on the company’s business objectives (e.g. benchmark and measure). Short problem statements for the gaps found should be written. It should include an estimate of savings or the amount of hours currently lost due to rework. These statements can subsequently be prioritized and validated with top management. Various solutions are presented with cost benefit analysis, so a constructive discussion with top management can be held about what is needed to close these gaps (e.g. budget and/or resources needed or necessary change of systems, processes and controls etc).

In the worse case the gap(s) will not be closed, but at least you have achieved mutual awareness and hopefully responsibility. However, if the problem is material and addressed in the right way it more than likely it will be dealt accordingly. Why? It has become now a mutual responsibility.

From ”VAT Throughput – Calculating The Taxes“ (by Richard Cornelisse and Kelvin Hulsebos): Insight in the amount of VAT that globally has to be paid or recovered is important for creating proper internal awareness (top down, peers and bottom up), determining the risk appetite of the company and monitor as indirect tax function trends and changes. Throughput gives some insight where the scarce resources of the tax function should focus on.

Change Management:  legislative change

Tracking relevant changes across the globe can be realized via regularly monitoring these Website links (e.g. latest country updates, Global VAT rates and VIES validation, etc). Check this Blog’s Indirect Tax Newsreader often.

Richard’s postings about management of legislative change:

• “VAT Rate Increase Results In Extra Saving“ (by Richard Cornelisse)
• “European Commission – Greenpaper On The Future Of VAT – Towards A Simpler, More Robust And Efficient VAT System“ (by Richard Cornelisse)
• “Would Europe’s Value Added Tax Work For The United States” (by Richard Cornelisse and Kelvin Hulsebos)
• “My Own View” ((by Richard Cornelisse)
• “About US Tax Reform – Larry Lindsey, Former Fed Governor: “A Value Added Tax Should Be On The Table” (by Richard Cornelisse)
• “US VAT introduction: Any Lessons To Be Learned From European VAT Fraud?“ (by Richard Cornelisse and Kelvin Hulsebos)

Change Management:  business change

From a tax perspective the difference between future firefighting or being in control has to do with being involved and the timing of that involvement. A tight connection to the business units and their decision-making process is essential. Leading practice example re non routine transactions by Richard Cornelisse:

• Merger And Acquisition – Integration And Indirect Tax: Managing The Moving Parts Before, During And After A Transaction (by Richard Cornelisse )
• The intersection Of VAT And Shared Service Centers. A Site For Global Savings Or A Source For Worldwide Risk? (by Richard Cornelisse and Katie Downs)

Structure the tax function and people development

From ”The Indirect Tax Profession Is Evolving From An Individual To A Team Sport“ (by Richard Cornelisse): Due to all technological developments it is already part of our present and future. A tax technical advice has to be implemented in systems, processes and controls.  Instructions have to be given to people outside the tax function.  Alignment with the business is key for the tax function to plan in time and avoid future firefighting.

In order to challenge and support a client in his mission an adviser should besides excellent technical skills have a good understanding of communication and collaboration, project management, change management, information technology, negotiation and leadership.

These competences overall are needed to be successful. This is not only applicable for the individual adviser, but as well for an organization with the aim to achieve or maintain market leadership. It is simply no longer possible to excel in everything re global indirect tax management. That means that certain people excel in certain areas of indirect tax and the outcome of the overall team effort will make the real difference from a quality standard perspective.

Jack Welch: ”Break down barriers and improve teamwork up, down, and across organizational lines.  A considerable amount of money is lost due to disconnects or competition between groups that should be working for a common cause: providing value to customers”

Richard Cornelisse is CEO of the KEY Group and worked previously as Big4 Partner in the Tax Performance Advisory and Indirect Tax Practice and blogs on Tax Function Effectiveness and Tax Control Framework developments.

The post How to Execute A Tax Strategic Plan And Be Successful appeared first on Big4.com.

Is there a consultant out there who hasn’t heard of Big Data? Most probably can’t program map/reduce, the code behind Hadoop, but that’s not the point.  The vendors will take care of that.  Still, there is much left for consultants to do. The big action will be helping clients capitalize on the analytics possibilities, recognizing worthwhile insights, and putting them into action.

Big Data has become the latest rage and a survey by the IBM Center for Applied Insights shows why. Organizations that make extensive use of data analytics experienced up to 1.6x the revenue growth, 2.0x EBITDA growth, and a 2.5x stock price appreciation compared to their peers.  And what they are analyzing now is Big Data, a combination of structured data found in conventional relational databases and unstructured data pouring in from widely varied sources.

How big is Big Data?  By 2015 the digital universe, as forecast by IDC, will hit 8 zettabytes (ZB). (1ZB = 10²¹ bytes, one sextillion bytes). Adding to the sheer volume is the remarkable velocity at which data is created.  Every minute 600 new blog posts are published and 34,000 Twitter tweets are sent. If some of that data is about your clients or their brand, products, customers, competitors, or employees shouldn’t they know?

Large organizations, of course, can benefit from Big Data, but midsize and small businesses can too.  A regional pizza shop chain needs to know the consumer buzz about their pizza as much as
Domino’s. In that sense, Big Data needn’t be big.

Big data encompasses both structured and unstructured data. The data comes from a variety of sources. Traditional systems contain predominantly structured data. Unstructured data comes from general files; from smart phones and mobile devices; from social media like Twitter, Facebook, and others; from RFID tags and other sensors and meters; and even from video cameras. All can be valuable to organizations in the right context.

Since you are not likely coding map/reduce you will need appropriate tools and technology to leverage Big Data. Earlier this month, IBM introduced three task-specific Smarter Analytics Signature Solutions. The first addresses anti-fraud, waste, and abuse by using sophisticated analytics to recommend the most effective remedy for each case. For example it might recommend a different letter requesting payment in one case but suggest a full investigation be opened in another.

Another Signature Solution focuses on next-best-action.  This uses real-time analytics across various data to predict customer behavior and preferences. It then recommends the next best
action to take with regard to a customer, such as to reduce churn or sell more products.

The third Signature Solution, dubbed CFO Performance Insight, works on a collection of complex and cross-referenced internal and external data sets and applies predictive analytics to achieve increased insight, visibility, and control over financial performance along with predictive insights, root-cause analyses, and more. These are delivered via an executive-style dashboard.

IBM isn’t the only IT player to jump on the Big Data bandwagon. EMC has put a stake into this market.  Oracle, which has been stalking IBM for years, also latched onto Big Data through Exalytics, its in-memory analytics product similar to IBM’s Netezza. Of course, small players like Cloudera, which early on staked out Hadoop, the key open source component of Big Data, also offer related products and services.

For consultants, it is worth getting familiar with Big Data and the resulting analytics. Expect it to continue as an important issue for some years to come.

Alan Radding researches, analyzes, and writes about business and technology. He has worked with leading research and consulting firms including Cap Gemini Ernst & Young (Center for Business Innovation).

The post Big Data Analytics Opens New Opportunities appeared first on Big4.com.