Industry news

International companies are failing to gain the full potential from social media and exploit the business opportunities presented. Research carried out by software maker Satmetrix pointed at the B2B sector as being particularly poor in identifying the advantages of social media as well as the risks in using the medium.

The research showed that over half of B2B businesses had no means of identifying conservations about their business on social media while 75 percent did not analyse social media activity surrounding their brand. B2C performed only slightly better with 55 percent failing to respond back to customer feedback on social platforms.

Richard Owen, CEO at Satmetrix, said “companies running the risk of losing customers by not addressing their issues shared online, but they are also walking past the opportunity to capitalise on positive comments made on the social web.”

UK SMEs are looking to Cloud services and software because of the flexibility that the platforms offer rather than cost-savings, according to YouGov research.The low cost application of the Cloud is no longer the major reason for the adoption of Cloud services by SMEs, the focus has shifted to increasing strategic value.

The research showed that Cloud services were being adopted at a rapid rate with 67 percent of UK SMEs having already employed cloud services or plan to do so in the future.

Simon Porter, vice president for mid market sales at IBM, said “Businesses are beginning to realise that the full potential of cloud goes far beyond a cost-focused ROI model.”

Female talent in the IT industry has continued to stay at low levels with male dominance of top positions remaining at the same high levels seen five years ago.

The Harvey Nash CIO survey found that more than 30 percent of respondents had no women in either technology or leadership roles within their company, while 81 percent responded that women held less than a quarter of management roles.

Chief executive officer of Harvey Nash Group, Albert Ellis, said “In the past, female graduates have not aspired to be tech geeks and a career in IT has not been seen as attractive. Technology companies and groups will miss out in the future and this makes the skills shortage even more acute.”

Reductions in Cisco’s growth plans have impacted through the Cloud services market as the technology sector reacts to comments from CEO John Chambers. Chambers downgraded revenue growth expectations to between two and five percent , this comes after Cisco had previously revised growth expectations from 12 to 17 percent to 5 and 7.

Cisco is a major provider of the key components of Cloud services and the announcement saw concern from Cloud businesses as more than 70 percent of Cloud providers currently use Cisco technology in providing services.

Chambers commented “We continue to see the impact of the areas of concern we have discussed for the last few quarters,-Those were Europe and the global economy, public sector, India and conservative IT spend as reflected in the commentary of our peers. Each of these areas has proven to be a challenge as we anticipated, and several, Europe and customer conservatism, have gotten worse."

CSC has released a statement pointing to losses from NHS write-offs as being partly due for a full year-revenue of $15.88 billion, down from $16.04 billion last year.

CSC announced in December of 2011 that the Lorenzo patient record system was expected to cost the company $1.5 billion. The company has announced over 1,000 job cuts in Britian earlier this year, with about half coming from within the NHS team in order to provide cost-savings.

CSC chief executive Mike Lawrie, said "We consider these results to be very poor as the company is executing well below an acceptable level for CSC and its investors,"

The ever accelerating pace of change, combined with the need for sustainability, has pushed gender diversity and the women in leadership issue up the agenda for outsourced recruitment and talent management processes.

Yet in one of Ochre Houses’ recent HR Network think tanks with some of the key global and local organisations in the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey region (MENAT) we found there are still barriers in place for females at higher levels. Discussions at the event indicated that the majority of organisations have a real lack of women in leadership roles and are finding it difficult to make this shift. There are a number of external and internal barriers that have been identified which prevent women from reaching top roles. However, with current cultural and socio economic shifts, many organisations in the MENAT region feel there is now a real opportunity to make a difference.

Research carried out in the lead up to the think tank suggested that there are a number of reasons as to why women are prevented from reaching the top jobs. Taking the external factors, there are two key barriers to change; government practice and policy, and family and societal culture – both of which have long been recognised as inhibitors to the progression of women into leadership roles. Examples of the internal factors include: absence of role models, lack of opportunities for women and traditional male oriented social norms.

However, what was strikingly clear from the research was the recognition by senior managers of the importance for organisations in MENAT to collectively collaborate and explore how to remove some of the internal and external barriers to women’s progress to the top roles. Every single interviewee we spoke to said they believed that woman in leadership is an important issue to tackle for at least one of the following reasons:

• Organisational success is increasingly being linked to a diverse leadership group

• Some leadership behaviours more often applied by women than men have proven to enhance company performance and will be key to meet tomorrow’s business challenges

• Around half the population is female – with increasing skills gaps in the MENAT region organisations cannot afford to ignore the female talent pool

• Organisations want the best possible talent at the top and by excluding female talent pools they will not achieve this

• Women often perform better – many organisations had proof that women were outperforming some of their male colleagues, a trait attributed to their motivation to prove themselves.

• It’s important that there is the desire to tackle the issue, we just need to look at how to do this. The majority of delegates involved in the event maintained that they were committed to instituting some form of change in the next 12 months, and we’ll be helping them to develop a working group to share best practice and innovation.

It’s important that there is the desire to tackle the issue, but we now need to look at how to do this. The majority of delegates involved in the event maintained that they were committed to instituting some form of change in the next 12 months, and we’ll be helping them to develop a working group to share best practice and innovation.

Meeting deadlines and managing project workflows when working with people from different nationalities across the world can be one of the most challenging aspects of managing intercultural business relationships. This is because alternative cultures have very different perspectives of time.

For example, across Asia, building good relationships is valued and prioritised over time keeping. A training workshop was arranged for an Indian-British outsourcing partnership. The British company had planned the schedule meticulously down to the last detail but the Indian team announced that they would be arriving one week later than planned. On arrival, when questioned about the delay, the Indian team manager told their British colleagues ‘we came late only by a week not a month!’

In fact, Indian time keeping is often better known for its lack of punctuality. Indian Standard Time (IST) or better known as Indian S t r e t c h a b l e Time means that deadlines are not always strictly adhered to in the work environment. Hence strict guidelines and enforcement may be necessary to adhere to western style fixed deadlines. Alternatively, business executives may need to adapt to this pace and educate their colleagues back home to thrive.

In addition, the importance placed on hierarchy in non-western society can often cause misunderstandings with regard to timing, if not understood properly. In hierarchical cultures, employees would not want to lose face in front of their boss and so may appear to agree to complete a task by a particular deadline. When it is not complete, the Western manager understandably feels frustrated, but in fact, the employee will also feel frustrated and unsupported as they were not asked additional questions, such as: “Do you have the resources to finish the task by tomorrow? Do you have the template? Do you have the licenced software to run the project?

The level of micro-management in these regions needs to be much higher to ensure successful delivery of any task. One way to achieve this is to take time to learn how a manager working in a hierarchical culture would manage his or her staff.

In addition, because of the importance of relationships in the Asian, Arab and Southern European cultures, more emphasis is often placed on good will and good faith than on the western priorities of performance and practicalities. Anyone wishing to develop an effective business relationship in these areas also needs to have a clear idea about how trust will be built and how it will be nurtured once it is established. A greater willingness to talk directly about differences helps build trust, facilitate decision making and open the way to a better way of working together.

The Olympics are coming, every day news articles relating to the 2012 Olympic appear in the media at an ever increasing rate as the games draw nearer. Many of these stories feature outsourcing companies that are either playing a dominant role in the running of the London Olympics or expect to gain increased business from the arrival of the Games.

With private security company G4S providing security, technology services provider Atos providing supporting systems, Acer providing technology hardware, Panasonic providing display equipment and many other companies in the by-lines including BT and cisco to name a few, the Olympic Games is an event that outsources almost its entire production and represent a huge business opportunity for those involved.

The Games have also impacted on outsourcing businesses that have not been contracted to the Games. The attention that the Olympic Games brings to the UK, and the need to capitalise commercially in order to offset the economic costs of the Games has massively increased the level of business going to outsourcing companies.

An example of the 2012 Olympics impacting on in-direct business includes the expansion of contact centres to meet the increased demand. A contract centre operated by Journeycall based in Scotland announced that it was hiring new staff in order to meet massive demand on its services from clients in the transportation industry including rail and bus. Journerycall MD, Trisha Pirie, said “We’re gearing up for an exceptionally busy few months when many of our rail and bus clients may experience unprecedented demand both before, during and after the Olympics and Paralympics events.”

The public sector has offered up an increasing number of contracts for tender in preparation for a global focus on the UK during the 2012 Games. Telecommunications projects including Underground station wireless access and rolling out superfast broadband in rural areas are just some of the areas that the government have focused on in preparation for the Games.

The sale of the task in hand has seen huge deployments of staff and resources. Acer has supplied over 12,000 PCs, 900 servers and more than 1,000 notebooks to the Olympic organising committee. A total of 3,500 staff will be employed by the IT suppliers in order to meet service requirements.

G4S is in the process of hiring 10,000 workers to provide security over the Olympics as part of £200 million contract to train and evaluate security staff. The Olympic contract is expected to bolster the FTSE 100 Company which has seen growth revenues of 6.7 percent in the first quarter of 2012. A G4S spokesman commented that: "based on recent contract awards, outsourcing trends and the group's bid pipeline, the organic growth rate is expected to continue to improve during 2012."

The Games has proven to be unique opportunity for Outsourcing companies in gaining business and winning large contracts that extend many years beyond the summer of 2012.

We discussed in my last blog post that a correctly implemented electronic data interchange (EDI) system can be more effective than digital signatures at securing the confidentiality of data contained within e-Invoices. Digital signatures, on the other hand, can be transmitted by various means and consequently, it is harder to guarantee a secure document exchange. In this blog, I will be looking at how both methods compare in their data processing and integration capabilities.

According to the current EC VAT Directive, an invoice is defined by its contents, and these contents require a specific minimum set of data to allow a document to be classed as an invoice. The challenge lies in the fact that there are variations from country to country on what is specifically required as minimum invoice data fields. All countries require the details pertaining to VAT to be included, but discrepancies lie in the extra pieces of information that certain countries require. For example, France requires additional commercial fields that are not needed elsewhere.

This variation also extends to electronic invoice formats, where different countries and indeed different industry verticals all have unique cultural or industry preferences, and even legally mandated requirements. For example, issuing an e-Invoice to the Spanish government requires an XML Facturae format, but to do the same in Denmark requires the OIOUBL XML format. Sending an invoice within the Petro-Chemical industry requires the ChemXML format, but to do the same within the Auto industry will soon require the new VDA EDI format. Because of these differences, a supplier in Belgium trading with a buyer in Spain may find that while an invoice may comply with Belgian laws and legislation, it may have to be converted into a different format to meet the cultural/legal/industrial requirements of the Spanish buyer.

This complexity applies to both EDI and digital signatures, but what sets them apart is the flexibility to convert the originating file from the supplier’s preferred format to the destination file in the buyer’s preferred format, ensuring that all data fields are preserved.

When digital signatures are used on EDI/XML documents the originating file is ‘locked’. This means that after mapping to the destination format, the new document must also be digitally signed. Contrast this to EDI processes without the use of digital signatures where data processing and integration is part and parcel of the standard end-to-end process. The EDI process facilitates format conversion as there are fewer restrictions hindering the process. Additionally, EDI solutions maintain comprehensive audit trails of mid-term conversion so that tax requirements for long-term auditability can be met.

You can learn more about e-Invoicing at:

http://www.einvoicingbasics.co.uk/

If you’re reading this blog post you’re probably a social media convert – like most British adults you’ve probably got a Facebook account to keep up with friends and family, you might even do some tweeting, and as a professional you’ve almost certainly got a LinkedIn profile.

Your activity on these sites creates what’s known as social data – evidence of your hobbies and what you like and dislike, as well as more basic information about you like your name, age, gender, marital status, where you live, what job you have, and so on.

Given the explosion in social media in the last five or six years, it’s not surprising that social data is the area of marketing with the highest growth in investment – the ability to reach people and find out useful information about them is unparalleled. But it’s also the channel marketers struggle most to measure in terms of its impact.

So here are a few simple tips that should hopefully make the world of social data less overwhelming – and more valuable – to your marketing efforts.

1. Relevance is what counts…

Just because you’re able to get hold of data, it doesn’t mean you should. For many businesses, the danger with using social channels is the tendency to collect too much data such as measuring every tweet that someone does. This often contributes to a data headache rather than easing it so it’s vital that businesses take a practical approach to measuring the impact of the data they have.

2. …And size is overrated

Businesses typically and wrongly perceive size, more than relevance, to be the fundamental factor to successfully gathering data through social channels. Unless users are actively engaging with a brand then they’re not delivering value. Driving conversation and engagement is key to measuring social data and in that sense, size becomes irrelevant.

3. Social data is only part of the picture

Data is most powerful when you have the bigger picture. One of the challenges companies typically face is being able to understand social data within the framework of existing customer data. This is particularly important when dealing with crisis communications. If a customer makes a complaint via Twitter for example, it’s very tempting to reply immediately. However, it’s more effective to consider the whole picture and look at the customer’s interaction through other channels. Different behaviours inform different areas and makes managing the customer a much easier process in the long run.

4. It’s not all about sales

Many social networks are being used very skilfully by a number of companies to harbour brand loyalty and associations, and no business would turn its nose up at positive interaction with consumers. The true benefit of utilising Facebook and its peers lies in connecting with people and guiding them one step along the purchasing process rather than trying to rush them to the checkout.

However, to understand the impact that social data has on sales across a business, it must be considered in conjunction with all other measurements– even if the customer doesn’t click straight from social to sale.