New study by Capgemini Consulting highlights the significant progress European countries have made to elevate Open Data and its re-use to the next level...

IBM has announced a milestone in its race against Google and other big tech firms to build a powerful quantum computer. The company`s scientists have successfully built and measured a processor prototype with 50 quantum bits, known as qubits. -it`s the first time any company has built a quantum computer at this scale..

Protecting digital society from cyber shocks: how prepared are UK organisations?.

Managing data security and privacy seen as significant challenge by CFOs

lack of clarity over data ownership and governance has a significant impact on reporting effectiveness

Traditional governance and board structures challenged by geopolitical risks and technology and data environment

Managing data security and privacy is the main challenge CFOs face in today’s corporate reporting environment for more than half of respondents (56%) to the latest report by EY Financial Accounting and Advisory Services (FAAS), Can innovative corporate reporting build trust in a volatile world? When looking at findings by country, CFOs in India (68%), China (65%) and the US (63%) are the most concerned about data security and privacy.

More than 1,000 CFOs or financial controllers of large organizations with revenue greater than US$500m across 25 countries participated in annual global survey. It found that lack of clarity over data ownership and governance has a significant impact on reporting effectiveness for 64% of respondents globally.
Eighty-five percent said that they found it either “very challenging” or “somewhat challenging” to actively manage data flows based upon different jurisdictions’ privacy laws. The same percentage of respondents also said that assessing the different security standards for data centers versus cloud computing was a key challenge to data protection, privacy and compliance. The survey also found that 49% of respondents say concerns over security and compliance risks of the cloud are seen as a major barrier to technology transformation and the implementation of innovative new technologies.
Peter Wollmert, EY Global and EMEIA FAAS Leader, says:
“There is a high level of uncertainty among the finance community on how to approach the issues of data security and privacy. CFOs need to ensure that they have clear governance processes in place for how they look after financial information and ensure that data is both compliant with relevant local laws and is secure – which can be a huge challenge in large and complex organizations. Responding by using advanced data analytics and integrated technologies as well as artificial intelligence, cloud computing and robotic process automation will be key to avoiding reputational and other costs that come with a mismanagement of financial data.”
CFOs respond to technological, social and political pressures
CFOs are under increasing pressure to rethink traditional approaches to corporate governance. Forty-two percent of those surveyed say their audit committees and boards are asking for more insights and information from corporate reporting on data protection and privacy, with the same percentage of respondents also saying they are providing corporate reporting on the risks from regulatory change. This increases to 60% and 61% when looking at respondents in the Middle East and North Africa and Singapore, respectively. To combat these changes, 85% of respondents globally say they are providing automated alerts to audit committees and boards about governance, risk and compliance issues, with this increasing to 95% of US respondents and 93% of UK respondents.
Wollmert says: “It is no longer a time for reactive corporate reporting. Boards are expecting management to report issues to them in real-time. These increasing demands for more insightful corporate reporting means reporting teams need to draw on the volumes of data available, as well as technology advances, to deliver new levels of insights that board members require to fulfill their governance role.”
The changing face of the audit committee
Against the heavily scrutinized environment, the oversight role of audit committees is also significantly changing, the report finds. Eighty-two percent of respondents say audit committees and boards are putting a much stronger focus on corporate culture and its impact on compliance and fraud prevention.
This is leading to the role and responsibilities of audit committees coming into focus. The survey finds that 58% of respondents say that committee members need to develop new competencies and understanding in using analytics in identifying data risks, while 57% say an understanding of legal frameworks for data hosting is increasingly important in order to provide effective oversight..

The FA has today announced an agreement with Cognizant, one of the world’s leading professional services companies, making Cognizant The FA’s digital transformation partner, supporting the football governing body’s new digital engagement programme.

Amazon has reiterated it`s commitment to the UK by opening a new so-called Development Centre in the heart of Cambridge – three storeys of premium office space housing 400 employees dedicated to research for products from Amazon’s AI-assistant Alexa to the brave new field of Prime Air drone deliveries..

Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as the defining technology of our age, with many industries already utilising AI in some form. Unleash the full potential of AI to transform your business model by offering transformational possibilities for consumers, businesses and society as a whole..

Professional services major Deloitte claims that over 26,000 new Blockchain technology-based projects were launched on the code repository GitHub in 2016. GitHub is a development platform that houses codes for more than 86,000 Blockchain programs, including large projects such as Bitcoin..

PWC has just launched the latest edition of The Low Carbon Economy Index which tracks the progress that G20 countries are making to decarbonise their economies.

PPL is delighted to announce that, following an extensive evaluation process, the Crown Commercial Service has awarded us and our partners a framework agreement covering the areas of Health & Community (Lot 5), Education (Lot 6) and ICT & Digital (Lot 8).

An increasing reliance on artificial intelligence by banks, insurers and hedge funds could have unintended consequences and threaten the financial system`s stability, warns a report from a top global watchdog..

• Four new research hubs will develop robotic technology to
• £68m from the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund for artificial intelligence and robotics research announced
  
• Government also commits to £16m worth of funding for smart energy systems innovation

More than £68 million of investment from the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund for robotics and artificial intelligence projects aimed at improving safety in extreme environments has been announced by the Government.
This investment will develop robots and artificial intelligence able to take on jobs in the freezing depths of the North Sea, dealing with extreme environments in the process of nuclear energy production, the hostile vacuum of space, and heat of deep mining.
In her keynote speech to the Innovate UK Conference in Birmingham today (8th November), Climate Change and Industry Minister Claire Perry set out how British experts and innovators are leading the world in this new sector, receiving support from the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.
The government is working with business and academia in order to encourage investment in robotics and artificial intelligence – a priority area of the Industrial Strategy.
Almost £45 million will be used to set up four new research hubs based at the University of Manchester, University of Birmingham, University of Surrey and Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. The centres of excellence, managed by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), will be responsible for developing robotic technology to enable safer working environments in space and deep mining and the hazardous and harsh environments of nuclear energy and off-shore wind.
As well as receiving government investment, the four hubs will be supported by £52 million of industry support from commercial and international partners, and UK Space Agency is co-funding the University of Surrey hub.
Minister for Climate Change and Industry Claire Perry said:

“Britain leads the world in innovation and technology and through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, we are making £68 million available to projects in robotics and artificial intelligence with applications in clean renewable energy generation to ensure the UK is the place new technology is nurtured.

“Next week, I will be at the COP23 conference in Germany, and it will be abundantly clear there that, if we want to truly make a difference to our climate as well as take advantage of the economic opportunities of our transition to a low carbon economy, it will come down to continued innovation.”
The investment announced by the Climate Change and Industry Minister today also includes:

• £4.3 million for the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to fund five research projects at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), and the Universities of Exeter and Southampton, to develop sensors capable of working in the ocean’s extreme conditions;
  
• £16.5 million for a collaborative research and development competition, run by Innovate UK, with winners set to include more than 70 businesses, 13 universities and 10 research organisations;
  
• funding of £3 million for 17 studies which focus on demonstrating how artificial intelligence can operate in extreme environments, following a separate competition run by Innovate UK.

Professor Philip Nelson, Chief Executive of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, said:
“These new Robotics Hubs will draw on the country’s research talent to nurture new developments in the field of robotics and provide the foundations on which innovative technologies can be built.
“The resulting outcomes from this research will allow us to explore environments that are too dangerous for humans to enter without risking injury or ill-health. The Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund is helping us achieve a joined up approach to research, discovery and innovation.”
Ruth McKernan, Chief Executive of Innovate UK, said:
“These pioneering projects driven by the very best minds in UK research and industry exemplify the huge potential of what can be achieved through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund and the long-term benefits for the UK economy.
“These are just the first competitions in robotics and AI, there will be further opportunities for businesses in the coming months.”
Professor Duncan Wingham, Chief Executive of the Natural Environment Research Council, said:
“These sensors will help us to better understand our oceans, helping us to manage them sustainably for the future. The projects will develop ambitious new technologies that work in hazardous and extreme environments, maintaining the UK`s world-class status in marine robotics.
“Other industries, such as the water, aquaculture and industrial waste, are also likely to benefit from these technologies.” Today’s announcements follow the publication of the industry-led Made Smarter review, which predicted Britain’s manufacturing sector could unlock more than £450 billion over the next decade and create thousands of jobs if it successfully embraced digitisation, robotics and artificial intelligence.
Alongside the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, BEIS has also been working with Professor Dame Wendy Hall and Dr. Jerome Pesenti to establish how to grow the UK can grow and support its burgeoning artificial intelligence sector. In April, the government announced £1 billion of investment through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund for cutting-edge technologies to create jobs and raise living standards. Other areas receiving government support include cutting edge healthcare and medicine, battery storage and satellite and space technology.
Ahead of attending climate change talks at COP23 in Germany next week, the Minister also announced £16 million for research into two new smart energy innovation competitions, which build on Government’s ambition to fund over £2.5 billion in clean technology innovation, as set out in last month’s Clean Growth Strategy.
These will focus on creating technologies which will reduce demand on the electricity grid at peak periods and to increase demand at times when low-carbon generation is at its peak, saving money and cutting emissions.
These new competitions will also be used to explore ways that smart energy systems can help to reduce energy use by schools, and small hospitality businesses.
This comes following the government publishing its Smart Systems and Flexibility Plan in July this year, which set out a range of measures to reduce the regulatory burdens of making our energy system more smart.
The minister also announced the winners of the first phases of two energy innovation competitions looking into the feasibility of energy storage and non-domestic demand side response, with £400,000 awarded to nine companies across the UK..

The UK’s management consulting sector, which grew four times faster than the economy in 2016 (up 7.5 per cent to £7.3bn), could be hit by talent shortages because of Brexit.

Chartis Research, the leading provider of research and analysis on the global market for risk technology, honors BearingPoint in its new rankings report
Management and technology consultancy BearingPoint has been honored with the Chartis RiskTech100® 2018 award in the category “Regulatory Reporting” and achieved the excellent place 33 in the rankings. Two years ago, BearingPoint entered the prestigious rankings for the first time. Last year the company rose 27 places into the Top 30 in the RiskTech100® rankings, which are globally acknowledged as the most comprehensive and independent study of the world`s major players in risk and compliance technology.
With its RegTech product line, BearingPoint provides innovative regulatory and risk technology solutions (RegTech and RiskTech) and services for banks, insurance companies, supervisory authorities and central banks.
Juergen Lux, Global Leader Solutions at BearingPoint, comments: “This award makes us particularly proud, because it’s an accolade for our core business, regulatory reporting, which we have been running for 25 years now.”
Bodo Windmoeller, Partner at BearingPoint, adds: “Our excellent position in the RiskTech100® rankings among the world`s leading vendors is also a reflection of our successful international growth.”
“Regulatory reporting is steadily moving toward a more industrialized and utility-based model,” said Sidhartha Dash, Research Director at Chartis Research. “BearingPoint has demonstrated the ability to build and industrialize these types of frameworks, with strong empirical evidence of deals done, which represents a concrete realization of these trends.”
Approximately 2,500 firms in financial services rely on BearingPoint’s Abacus Solution Suite for regulatory management, analytics and reporting solutions, and over 2,500 firms rely on its tax reporting solutions FiTax and EasyTax. Additionally, more than 140 financial institutions in eight European countries trust in BearingPoint’s managed services capabilities including RaaS (Risk as a Service), regulatory utilities and private shared services platforms.
For more information about BearingPoint’s RegTech product line, please visit: http://www.reg.tech. .

Our current economic model is inefficient. With a finite level of resources, volatile commodity prices, and a growing consumer middle class, business cannot keep doing business the same way. This is more than an existential threat to businesses. Companies thinking differently, thinking circular, are finding ways of creating value now.

CLOUD WARS -- As businesses move beyond cloud experiments to deeply strategic deployments, the balance of power in the Cloud Wars Top 10 is shifting toward those tech providers that can move those business customers past the infrastructure phase and into the high-value realm of AI-driven competitive advantage..

Amazon remains ‘in a league of its own’ as a cloud provider, despite the rapid growth of key competitors Microsoft, Google and Alibaba. Third quarter data from Synergy Research Group shows Amazon Web Services ‘is still managing to nudge its market share upwards, despite increasingly intense competition’..

Employee additions at the country’s top IT firms are slowing with the quarterly increase in headcounts having come off to below 5% year-on-year at the end of September. Two years back, double-digit growth in hiring was par for the course but the pace of hiring has slackened considerably..

This project looks at how global and national trends are impacting London’s labour force, across sectors and professional levels..

When you strip back the hype, blockchain is a form of database for recording digital transactions. Once entered, records become both permanent and immutable, creating an accurate and tamperproof history of transacted values – one of the reasons it has created so much interest, given the increasing focus on security....

With many options for digital business transformation requiring significant investment, Gartner, Inc. has identified the top 10 ways to fund the shift to digital business..

American IT firm Cognizant entered into an agreement to acquire Netcentric, a digital experience and marketing solutions provider and a leading independent Adobe partner in Europe, to expand its European digital capabilities and Adobe Experience Cloud expertise..

The second annual report calls for an end to black box predictive systems in core public institutions like the criminal justice system, and outlines specific approaches needed to address bias in AI and related technologies.

The virtual reality market will be worth £72 billion by 2021, in the UK entertainment and media sector alone, according to PwC reports. With the virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) industry continuing to grow and develop across the world, keeping up with it all can be a bit of a minefield..

Cybersecurity Awareness Month is, once again, upon us. At its core is an issue that can have a massive impact on organizations in every industry, public and private, large and small: successful cyberattacks and how to prevent them from happening in the first place..

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are in a phase of rapid development, and are being adopted widely. While the concept of artificial intelligence has existed for over sixty years, real-world applications have only accelerated in the last decade due to three concurrent developments: better algorithms, increases in networked computing power and the tech industry’s ability to capture and store massive amounts of data..

Internet of Nano Things is a network of nanoscale devices, sensors, and machines integrated into everyday physical objects that are connected to the Internet for effective data communication..

Almost a third of consultancy and services professionals are put off from working from home due to slow or inadequate broadband. This is according to research from global workspace provider Regus.

2016 was a good year for Africa’s consulting market, with the continent’s 19 largest markets collectively growing 6.3 per cent to reach a total value of $2.19billion. This performance was achieved despite growth in GDP slowing in many African nations as economies continue to suffer because of low commodities prices and political uncertainty.

The age of artificial intelligence is unfolding fast. Businesses are automating functions, from ordering parts and processing insurance claims, to maintaining machines and serving customers. They`re seeing the chance to become more efficient and offer better service than the competition. For the board, it`s a world of potentially rising revenues and bigger profits. But what about the people?.

In this interview Rashmy Chatterjee, CMO of North America for IBM, generously takes the time to explain the myriad ways that AI, machine learning, chatbots and Watson will shape the advertising and marketing landscape by personalizing the customer experience..

How can companies use machine learning to efficiently understand the needs and wants of their customers, without sacrificing the insights that come from employees’ intuition and empathy?.

"Big Four"accountancy firm PWC has predicted the use of tax havens by companies and individuals to avoid paying tax will soon become "unacceptable." In an Asset & Wealth Management report released on Monday, PwC said the public was increasingly hostile towards those perceived to be not paying their "fair share" of tax, and that businesses would need to put more effort into tax transparency in future..

In the next few years, BI Intelligence, Business Insider’s premium research service, expects companies to flesh out their blockchain IoT solutions. But a few companies have already released their blockchain technology as a service..

The asset management industry is set for booming growth in the next decade, according to a new report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), but firms must be innovative and embrace technology in order to prosper during this period of "transformational change.".

Global workspace provider Regus has opened a new location in Aylesbury. This latest opening further demonstrates the increased demand for flexible workspace in Aylesbury and beyond.

NewVoiceMedia, a leading provider of cloud contact centre and inside sales technology that enables businesses to have more successful conversations, is helping Spotzer enhance its contact centre operations and global customer service experience with its ContactWorld platform.

BearingPoint takes innovative step by creating the Market Influence and Knowledge (MIK) group, consolidating BearingPoint Institute, Analyst Relations, and Knowledge Assets...

New research from Simon-Kucher & Partners, highlights an otherwise still divided country...

Will tomorrow’s cities be healthier, more comfortable and more relaxed than today’s? To accomplish this, cities will need to become much more efficient – in short: smarter..

General Electric Co and Microsoft Corp are due to announce a deeper partnership involving GE’s Predix industrial internet platform and Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform..

In today’s competitive marketplace, firms are facing more short-term pressure than ever to maintain revenue parity, let alone demonstrate growth. As a result, they are less willing to invest in fostering innovation. It is a common fear that focusing on innovation can lead to a lack of attention on current business activity and therefore have a detrimental effect on business as usual..

A culture change expert at PA Consulting Group, shares insights on ways to transform a business culture..

In the latest Strategy& Global Innovation 1,000 study a majority of respondents said a continued trend toward economic nationalism would have a significant or moderate effect on their R&D operations..

Mark Williams, property and infrastructure lead at PA Consulting Group, discusses the private finance initiative financing model..

Aiming to build a range of applications and platforms based on open-source distributed ledger frameworks, the new additions mean Hyperledger now has more than 170 member organizations from across various industries including finance, banking, Internet of Things and more..

This year’s World Mental Health Day on 10 October 2017 focused on Mental Health in the workplace - a major issue faced by employers today, but one that can start to be addressed by creating an open culture in the workplace, according to Laura Davis, Managing Director of Hampshire-based HR Consultancy, Reality HR.

Cognizant today announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Netcentric, a leading provider of digital experience and marketing solutions for some of the world`s most recognised brands, and a leading independent Adobe partner in Europe.

A new Wood Mackenzie paper looks at six energy market disruptions that are “rewriting the whole economy.”.

Data is really important. How important is it? Working, manipulating, and analysing data is now pushing forward several technologies, including AI, robotics process automation, neural networks, advanced automation and orchestration, and much more. Big data is allowing business to make better decisions impacting both the user and the overall market..