Industry news

Facebook has floated 400 million shares on the Nasdaq at €38 each which could provide as much as $16 billion in revenue and the third-largest IPO in US history.

A report by the Wall Street Journal has reported that the planned share price will see the validation of Facebook between $93 billion and $104 billion.

Facebook has also been hit by setbacks including the announcement by General Motors last week that the company was withdrawing $10 million in revue from advertising on Facebook after claiming that the site advertising failed to warrant the investment.

Mike Lawrie the new CEO of CSC has directly taken control of protracted negotiations with the NHS in a bid to draw the line under the failed patent records contract.

Mike Lawrie took over as chief executive of CSC in March and has rapidly moved to turn around the company after publishing heavy losses, in part stemming from $1.5 billion in losses from tendering the NHS contract.

Mr Lawrie commented that “"There's no question both parties want to get to an agreement. Now on a weekly basis the head of the NHS and myself are getting together. We are hopeful the NHS agreement will get completed in the not too distant future".

HP is planning to cut their workforce by as many as 25,000-30,000 in the coming months attributed to a source close to the company according to the Financial Times.

The move would rank as one of the biggest mass lay-offs from a US company in the last decade and would take the form in part from an early retirement offer focused within service divisions.

The cuts would represent one of the largest measures by the company to achieve savings and reverse the companies falling value from increased competition.

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.