The number one risk of greatest concern for executives in 2018? Workers being displaced by robots..

Michelle Peluso’s office is located in a small non-descript building in Greenwich Village. It belies the fact that, despite its humble appearance, this is actually the hub of global tech powerhouse IBM’s marketing activity, where Michelle is CMO..

Northern NSW startup Nuonic has today announced it has received strategic investment from, and launched an alliance with, KPMG Australia..

Across the NHS leaders are grappling with how to make the care system sustainable. Without significant change it will not be..

CLOUD WARS — In a striking example of just how big the enterprise cloud has become and how rapidly it`s growing, Google Cloud Platform`s disclosure of an impressive $4-billion forward-looking annualised revenue run rate leaves GCP about $15 billion behind the parallel metrics for Cloud Wars leaders Microsoft, Amazon and IBM..

London, 2nd February 2018-The Management Consultancies Association (MCA) last week announced the finalists for its 2018 MCA Awards.London-based strategy and transformation consultancy, Curzon & Company, has been shortlisted for the fourth consecutive year.

Forbes contributor and business leadership journalist Roger Trapp interviews Andrew Hooke, who is the head of consulting sectors at PA Consulting Group and has also recently taken over as head of the firm in the U.S...

Christian Norris has joined PA Consulting Group (PA) to lead PA’s Economic Modelling team, working across all major industry sectors.

Before joining PA, Christian led a large team of economists and was head of health analytics at Deloitte, where he developed the largest health economics consulting practice in the UK.
Christian has a proven track record of offering high-level advice that has helped shape economic policy and strategy for public sector clients and blue chip companies. He has worked extensively in the UK and internationally.

Peter Lumley, who leads the Business Intelligence capability team at PA Consulting Group, said: “We are delighted to welcome Christian to our consulting business. Christian’s expertise in Economic Modelling is underpinned by his excellent experience in pricing, policy development, performance improvement and forecasting.”

Christian said: “Increasingly economics and analytics need to come together to answer some of the most challenging questions for policy makers and companies. This is an exciting opportunity to blend some of PA’s existing excellence in analytics with the latest in economics. I am delighted to be joining PA.” To read the PA article click here.

PwC has managed to reduce its carbon footprint by 29% over the past decade and is aiming to reach 40% by 2022, the firm has revealed

Much of the reduction since 2007 has come from cutting energy consumption in its UK offices but the Big Four firm also revealed that it has reduced business travel by 4%, and its recycling policy means it now sends 86% of its waste to reuse or recycling.
Over the same timescale it has increased its business revenues by 44%.
The firm is now keen to pass on its experience to other businesses that are interested in decarbonising their operations. It has published a report, Acting on Carbon: Our 10-year Journey, which explains what initiatives it has taken – including those that failed – to reduce its footprint.
“Along our 10-year journey we’ve learnt a lot and have been able to pioneer new, environmentally-friendly technologies, which are now used more widely across the industry,” said PwC chairman and senior partner Kevin Ellis.
“Reducing our carbon footprint has also had financial benefits, showing that economic success and doing the right thing can go hand-in-hand.”
PwC says that it has halved its energy consumption since 2007, thanks to simple policies of switching lights off out of hours and changing to renewable electricity contracts. The firm has also redesigned and refurbished offices and invested in new low carbon technology, including the use of tri-generators that run on used cooking oil. It has also achieved zero waste to landfill for the past five years.
As a result, PwC has succeeded in cutting its associated greenhouse gas emissions by 77% since 2007.
On the back of its success, the firm has now announced a new series of targets over the next five years. As well as cutting total carbon by 40%, it intends to procure 100% renewable electricity by then and continue to reduce the level of business travel.
PwC’s head of corporate sustainability Bridget Jackson says that the firm does not have all the answers. “But,” she adds, “we hope that our journey helps and inspires other businesses to accelerate their own carbon emissions reduction programmes.”
The report reveals that when the firm first set the original targets in 2007 it was hoping to reduce carbon emission by 25%, hold carbon emission from business travel flat and reduce energy consumption by half. To read the original press release click here.

Top Employers Institute Recognises Cognizant for Excellence in Workforce Planning, Talent Strategy, and Career and Succession Management...

Equiteq, the knowledge economy M&A specialist, is pleased to announce that it has advised Insight Strategy Advisors (ISA), a premier life sciences strategy consultancy, on its sale to Precision Value & Health, a part of Precision Medicine Group. ISA will become part of Precision Xtract, the global market access consultancy within Precision Value & Health.

It`s been just over a year since Microsoft swallowed the career networking site LinkedIn. That`s long enough to start asking: Was the $27 billion deal worth it?.

Meet Tanmay Bakshi. Computer programmer, artificial intelligence expert and all-around tech extraordinaire. He`s developed multiple apps, published a book, hosted a TEDx Talk and spoken at IBM Watson summits around the world. But there`s something surprising about him: He`s only 14 years old..

Fraud, cyber, and security risks are at an all-time high, according to senior corporate executives surveyed worldwide for the 2017/18 Kroll Annual Global Fraud & Risk Report..

AI is a hot healthcare topic but still needs to be translated into reality, especially in an industry as complex as healthcare..

A report has warned that ransom ware, Internet of Things hacks, and industrial attacks could be almost as big a problem as natural disasters and extreme weather..

Artificial Intelligence is in widespread use across enterprises, driving tangible benefits while creating new opportunities and challenges for business leaders and the workforce.

Many companies have a corporate bias against people based on their gender, background or culture without even realising it. But the organizations that are most likely to thrive in the future are the ones that can overcome this corporate mindset and embrace diversity..

The payments industry is going through a period of unprecedented change, across the retail, corporate and wholesale segments. The financial crisis of 2008 famously brought payments “out of the cellar and into the boardroom” and the ensuing tranche of regulation has brought great challenges – and great opportunities – to payments players..

The Year of Disruption follows on from our very successful Years of Digital (shortlisted for an Association Excellence Award), Growth and Diversity. It will be wide-ranging. Indeed as its name implies, it will be a little different from the previous Years of – . It’s a Year of, Jim, but not as we know it..

Wipro is acquiring a $9.9 million minority stake in omnichannel marketing services firm Harte Hanks.The two firms will jointly market the Opera Solutions’ Signal Hub platform – a big data analytics and machine learning solution for providing customers with a relevant, personalised user experience..

Consultants are supposed to tell clients what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. If a client wants to grow into a new market, but isn’t investing enough in its infrastructure there to succeed, the role of the consultant is to make that clear. Likewise, if a client thinks a flashy new digital system will solve all his woes when it actually won’t, the consultant who puts her clients’ interests first tells him to stop. Trusted advisors tell it like it is, Writes Alison Huntington of Source Global Research...

What’s keeping leaders from adopting machine learning? Well, tools are still evolving, practitioners are scarce, and the technology is a bit inscrutable for comfort. But five vectors of progress are making it easier, faster, and cheaper to deploy machine learning and could bring it into the mainstream..

Optimism in the financial services sector fell for the third consecutive quarter in 2017 in the three months to December, rounding off two years of continuous flat or worsening sentiment, but business conditions saw moderate improvement, according to the latest CBI/PwC Financial Services Survey..

CenturyLink has received the Frost & Sullivan 2018 Product Leadership Award for its innovative Cloud Application Manager hybrid cloud management platform, whose dynamic capabilities deliver added value by aligning IT teams around workloads and business initiatives as they pursue their digital transformation goals.

Frost & Sullivan recognizes KPMG with its Global New Product Innovation Award for the firm`s innovative KPMG Digital Responder, an automated forensic collection, analysis, and reporting solution..

As the economy continues to come to terms with the collapse of Carillion, the latest figures suggest that on the day of liquidation, the industry giant was the main contractor on 57 construction projects worth a total of £5.7 billion, including a £1.3 billion HS2 contract.

Our latest quarterly review of global M&A and equity market trends within the consulting industry is out now!...

Mason Advisory, independent IT consultancy, has been announced as a finalist in five categories at the prestigious Management Consultancies Association (MCA) Awards 2018.

Intelligent Operations key to keeping pace with customer expectations and driving superior business outcomes. Organizations that leverage Intelligent Operations to make decisions and act in real-time will be best placed to thrive in the future, according to a new report from HfS Research and Accenture.

Many of us are familiar with the idea that artificial intelligence systems are regularly making benign decisions, like recommendations on Netflix or Amazon. What about decisions that have a significant impact on someone’s life though? Should AI systems be used in life-changing situations, like criminal sentencing?.

Belfast-headquartered tech firm Kainos has been named ‘Vendor of the Year’ at the prestigious UK IT Industry Awards, fending off stiff competition from other global companies. The award reinforces the company’s reputation as a world-leading provider of digital services and platforms; offering professional, agile and creative IT services, consulting and software..

Artificial Intelligence is advancing and the media is flooded with stories of AI exceeding human capabilities. Google’s Deepmind beating the Go world champion, Oxford University’s LipNet lip-reading with 93.4% accuracy (where humans can only manage 20% - 60%) and AI detecting cancer on scans quickly and more accurately than doctors. But with all the investment and interest in AI, is it living up to expectations and meeting its potential?.

Critical Thinking: Machine learning promises to usher in a new era of advanced data centre management, but many facilities still have a long way to go from arcane, spreadsheet-based management habits to the automation Promised Land..

There’s little question AI-driven automation is poised to disrupt enterprises worldwide. The question is what you, as a CIO, are doing to prepare for a world where man and machines work together..

Biometric and artificial intelligence technologies will have a big year in the financial services sector, and will help smaller banks to offer cutting-edge solutions to their customers, predicts Unisys. The company says that this is the year that “biometric authentication will go mainstream”, according to a statement announcing its predictions..

The management and technology consultancy BearingPoint leverages its existing compliance expertise and creates a new standalone firm-wide compliance function Management and technology consultancy BearingPoint has named Berlin based Judith Sasse as new Group Compliance Officer. By leveraging its existing compliance expertise and creating a new standalone firm-wide compliance function, BearingPoint aims to address compliance issues before they arise and provide continuous trust towards its clients. Judith brings with her more than 15 years of professional experience in the legal, compliance and corporate governance field. She has a strong international background having held senior compliance related positions at major global companies including British Telecommunications PLC and Ernst & Young Global in London, and she was most recently at Louis Dreyfus Company, one of the leading global merchants and processors of commodities, based in Paris. Wolf Frenkel, Group General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer at BearingPoint, states: “Judith comes to us with a highly successful track record in compliance management. We are convinced that our future success and our ability to leverage new and existing opportunities in a sustainable way depend on how consistently we live up to our values and addressing these challenges. Together with Judith, we will maintain and ensure consistent and systematic compliance with our legal, ethical and moral standards and requirements, keeping a uniformly high quality of ethical performance, results, and decisions. I am truly delighted that Judith will enrich the BearingPoint team in this key role with her unique expertise and I look forward to working closely with her.” “BearingPoint is a management and technology consultancy whose ambitious growth strategy is fully supported by its strong business ethics and integrity and by being a trusted corporate partner. We are living in turbulent times, where unprecedented global challenges and changing regulations can have a significant impact on financial performance. It is therefore a great pleasure to support BearingPoint on its journey of sustainable success through a robust and integrated compliance function,” said Judith Sasse. About BearingPoint
BearingPoint is an independent management and technology consultancy with European roots and a global reach. The company operates in three units: Consulting, Solutions and Ventures. Consulting covers the advisory business; Solutions provides the tools for successful digital transformation, regulatory technology and advanced analytics; Ventures drives the financing and development of start-ups. BearingPoint’s clients include many of the world’s leading companies and organizations. The firm has a global consulting network with more than 10,000 people and supports clients in over 75 countries, engaging with them to achieve measurable and sustainable success..

How security practitioners can incorporate expert knowledge into machine learning algorithms that reveal security insights, safeguard data, and keep attackers out..

With NRF 2018 in full swing there are countless streams of insight emanating from seemingly innumerable sources all recounting the latest trends and technologies.

Time Warner-AOL, Sprint-Nextel, eBay-Skype. What do these have in common? They are all examples of M&A deals gone wrong. They are all integrations that failed to deliver the benefits identified in the pre-deal phase....

2017 saw big changes, a lot of investment, and some regulatory challenges in fintech. What will 2018 bring? Here’s what we’ll be watching in the coming year..

The UK government is undertaking a digital transformation, helped in part by the formation of Government Digital Services six years ago. Data and transactional services were traditionally held on old technology like mainframes – and the Conservative-led government has been keen to change that..

Accenture has been positioned as the overall leader in procurement outsourcing services, leading the industry in “innovation and execution,” according to the latest HfS Blueprint Report Procurement As-a-Service...

Fourth-quarter combined ACV rises 27 percent sequentially to €3 billion, though flat compared with prior year
Region’s as-a-service ACV climbs to record €1.1 billion in 4Q
Full-year combined EMEA ACV reaches €12.2 billion, up 3 percent on prior year.
The EMEA sourcing market rebounded in the final quarter of 2017, with double-digit growth in both traditional and as-a-service contracting values over the previous quarter, according to the findings of the 4Q17 EMEA ISG Index™ released by Information Services Group (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), a leading global technology research and advisory firm. Data from the EMEA ISG Index™, which measures commercial outsourcing contracts with annual contract value (ACV) of €4 million or more, reveal the EMEA market, which fell sharply in the third quarter after starting the year strongly, rebounded in the fourth quarter, up 27 percent sequentially. Year-over-year, however, EMEA, was flat with the prior year, with combined fourth-quarter ACV of €3 billion in 2017. Traditional sourcing, at €1.9 billion, was down 11 percent versus the prior year, while as-a-service sourcing, at a record €1.1 billion for the region, was up 27 percent. For the full year, EMEA generated €12.2 billion in ACV, up 3 percent against 2016. Traditional sourcing ACV of €8.3 billion was down 8 percent, but as-a-service sourcing soared 41 percent, to €3.9 billion, as demand for cloud-based services accelerated across the region. The rise of as-a-service sourcing was driven by demand for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). While Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) ACV of €900 million was flat for the year, IaaS ACV soared 58 percent versus the prior year, reaching €3 billion. In contrast, traditional sourcing ACV declined for the fourth consecutive year, despite a slight increase in the number of contracts. Although ITO values, at €6.5 billion, remained steady, BPO ACV in the region fell to €1.8 billion, its lowest level in a decade. Globally, the market also saw a strong final quarter, with ACV for the combined market establishing a new record at €34.6 billion. Global trends reflect those in EMEA, with newer technologies continuing to gain momentum. As-a-service continued to reach new highs on a global scale, overtaking traditional sourcing in the Americas and Asia Pacific in the fourth quarter, as businesses spend more on cloud-based technology to drive digital transformation. Market Insights
Looking at traditional sourcing by geography, 2017 saw a mix of performance across the region. Despite uncertainty around Brexit, the UK saw sourcing activity and ACV grow in 2017. This follows the broader trend of organizations entering into higher numbers of smaller-value contracts, as they look to take a more agile approach to sourcing. The 206 contracts and €3.2 billion in ACV were both up 18 percent year on year, albeit on a soft compare with 2016, the UK’s weakest year in a decade. France, despite a dip in the fourth quarter of 2017, posted annual ACV growth of 8 percent. The number of contract awards, although down very slightly on the previous year, remains strong, at 62. In contrast, Southern Europe ACV plummeted more than 70 percent to its lowest level in five years. With fewer large deal awards, ACV in DACH fell 16 percent in 2017. The 165 contracts signed was also down compared with the previous year, by 13 percent. The continuing uncertainty following the elections in Germany pulled the market down in the second half of 2017. An absence of large deals in the Nordics region resulted in a decline in ACV of 18 percent, despite contract numbers remaining steady.

Popular culture tends to pit humans against machines. Think of the cyborgs in the “Terminator” films.

The velocity of political and technological change is compelling organizations to strengthen their resilience against shocks and surprises.

The latest controversy at the BBC around gender pay highlights ongoing issues facing UK employers on gender pay equality.

In the depths of the financial crisis, organisations looked at their consulting expenditure and started asking the obvious question: What, exactly, are we getting for our money? Writes Edward Haigh of Source Global Research...

KPMG has bought out Silicon-Valley based identity and access management (IAM) provider Cyberinc as part of its move to expand its cybersecurity solutions worldwide. KPMG also says the acquisition will help strengthen its abilities in IAM and will also boost both its talent and resources in the fast-growing areas of digital consumer identity and privileged user management..