Industry news

HSBC has announced it is to cut 700 UK jobs.100 of the roles are being cut are in IT operations and back office functions such as HR, finance and compliance.

The majority of the cuts - 460 roles - will be made from the financial advice team in retail banking and wealth management. The roles represent 1% of HSBCs total UK workforce.

The bank is reorganising in light of the Retail Distribution Review at the end of 2012, which is said to “fundamentally alter” the way that financial institutions provide and are remunerated for financial advice.

Lloyds Banking Group Plc, Britain’s biggest mortgage lender, will cut 15,000 jobs and reduce costs by an additional 1.5 billion pounds ($2.4 billion) as it withdraws from overseas units and increases its U.K. focus. The shares soared the most in more than a year.

The savings will result from cuts to management functions, by centralizing some roles and by withdrawing from more than 15 of its 30 overseas units, the London-based bank said in a statement issued before its presentation to investors in London. HSBC Holdings Plc today said it would cut 700 posts.

“Lloyds must become leaner, more agile and more responsive to our customer needs,”, Chief Executive Officer Antonio Horta- Osorio, 47, said today in a conference call with journalists outlining his first strategic review since he took the job in March

Steria, a leading European IT-enabled business services provider, has announced the extension of its shared services partnership with Cleveland Police Authority which will deliver additional savings in excess of €10 (£9 million).

A number of additional support services will be delivered alongside those undertaken by Steria at the start of the ten-year contract in October 2010. Effective from 1st July 2011, Steria’s remit will include centralising Crime Management units in each of the four Force districts and merging with the control room, as well as civilianising a newly combined Risk and Operational Planning unit that will handle emergency and event planning together with risk assessment and safety. As with all services Steria provides to Cleveland, these additional services will enable officers to devote more time to operational policing, through significantly reduced paperwork.

Peter Race, Chair of Cleveland Police Authority, commented: “When we embarked on the partnership with Steria we set ourselves the key objectives of delivering better services to the public, generating €55 million (£50 million) savings over ten years and maintaining a strong front-line service. The benefits generated by this partnership have helped us weather the pressures so far and this latest development will help us extend the benefits even further.”

The UK has said that it is not interested in restricting outsourcing and would promote overseas investment in India.

"We are not interested in restricting outsourcing and there is no interest from our side to make it difficult for companies who operate here, we want to make it easier for companies to come to the market, set up their business and employ people," First Secretary and Head of UK Trade and Investment (North India) Paul Grey told reporters on the sidelines of a Ficci function in North India.

In recent times, there has been increasing criticism about outsourcing in many developed markets like the US and the UK, especially in the wake of huge job losses due to sluggish economic activities.

Promoting the UK as an investment destination, Grey said, "Indian IT companies are already promoting themselves very effectively, (offering) good quality, low cost (services) which is an excellent combination at the moment because we have our own challenges to reduce spending in the UK."

Fujitsu has enabled the University of Bath to expand the scope of its Innovation Centre by migrating its business network system to a Cloud-based solution. This move has seen the Innovation Centre increase the number of its business networks, leading to more rapid identification of new technology start-up clients and spin-outs from University research.

With a research portfolio worth over £100 million, the University of Bath is ranked tenth in the UK in the 2012 Complete University Guide league table. Its Innovation Centre provides access to expertise, skills and quality contacts in a flexible business environment in which new ventures emanating from the University work along side privately-owned start-ups in an Entrepreneur-friendly environment. It operates a number of business networks, including SiliconSouthwest.co.uk, LowCarbonSouthWest.co.uk, OpenMIC and the Assisted Living Action Network. Over the last five years, ventures from the University of Bath’s Innovation Centre have created 160 new jobs and brought £15m into the City’s economy.

Hewlett-Packard Corp, the world's largest PC maker by shipment volume, has announced its expansion plans for China on Wednesday.

Although the company declined to disclose the amount of its new investment, it announced it has assigned two executives to lead the Chinese unit.

Leo Apotheker, HP chief executive officer, told a news conference in Beijing that the company will place greater emphasis on cloud computing (using the Internet as a hard drive), software and wireless devices such as tablet PCs this year to boost its growth in China.

To help understand the concept of innovation, a definition has to be established. Simply defined, innovation is the process that takes new ideas and implements them in a way that creates value. The value that innovation brings in improving products, services and processes can be measured as increased productivity, higher quality or other worth, and may directly benefit producers, consumers or both.

In today’s business world the general connotation of “innovation” is simply something “new and improved” and is often confused with invention, with many people frequently using the two words interchangeably. However, these are distinctly different concepts. “Invention” is an event that occurs at a specific point in time and typically focuses on the development of a single product, and, unlike innovation that produces money (value), invention consumes money.

“Innovation” is the extension of invention, the act of bringing an invention to market where it creates value for the customer. This is a key difference: Invention results in financial consumption, while innovation results in financial growth. Plenty of patents have been filed and gizmos created that go unused and create no measureable value. For innovation to make a difference, it takes more than a good idea, new product or an emerging technology. The good idea must be implemented and adopted by others by including things like services. Otherwise, it is simply an idea with the potential to be innovative.

There is also less of a relationship between innovation and R&D than most people suspect. R&D is a way to turn capital into knowledge – you learn how things work, how things might work, etc. On the other hand, innovation takes that knowledge and turns it back into capital by discovering and developing ways to apply the knowledge derived from R&D, thus creating economic value.

Taking this into account, there are three ways a technology, product or service can be innovative:

· An old (existing) technology product or service can be applied in a new way, thus creating a new business model or process

· A new technology product or service can be applied to an old business model or process radically changing its results

· A new technology product or service is applied simultaneously to a new business model or process, creating a truly disruptive innovation. This is known as the “black swan” approach

Forming ideas and designing for innovative business – whether the focus is products, services, technologies, business models or business processes – must mean more than only attacking problems at the product and/or service level.

Companies such as TCS, HCL, Wipro and Infosys are suffering from attrition rates ranging from 15% to as high as 25%. This is coupled with increasing salaries in an economy where at the moment inflation rates are spiralling out of control.

Traditionally, the main issue with offshoring was the difficult processes of communicating with the teams based overseas. This resulted in long distance phone calls and work taking place across different time zones. Now the issue is managing teams where there is increasing turnover and quality of service is being negatively affected. Yes you do sometimes get a lower cost but there is always a downside.

However, by implementing an automated solution, businesses would benefit from significant cost savings, a local based (same country) solution and a tool which can look after itself and adapt to its environment - eliminating management time and workers spending unnecessary time on mundane daily tasks.

Automated technologies can learn from human behaviour, meaning that simple everyday tasks can be handed over to IT systems and solved before human intervention is required. By doing this, businesses will eliminate certain risks such as putting key operating processes in someone else’s hands and overseas. This approach will also allow businesses to reap certain financial benefits as outsourcing and management costs are reduced as the solution will effectively look after itself and be scaled up and down as necessary.

The key to a successful outsourcing process lies in evolving technologies. By using automated and industrialized solutions which take the hassle and time away from staff on a daily basis, businesses will be able develop their business and get the most out of their existing employees

London borough of Lambeth has announced a 10 year extension of its deal with Capita.

The deal – worth £60m - will see Capita provide a range of services including call centre management and ICT support services.

Lambeth councillor for finance, Paul McGlone, says that the new contract will improve the people of Lambeth’s interaction with the council, and at the same time, save money. “The service model proposed by Capita is flexible and scalable over time, meaning it is 'future proofed' for changes in the way people communicate with us."

CSC’s on-premise cloud solution – BizCloud - is being launched in the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain. It will be rolled out to Nordic countries in September or October.

Infrastructure will be provided by CSC and its partners, set up within a company and delivered as a service using a standard rate card – all within 10 weeks of ordering.

The rate card has 4 bands - bronze, silver, gold or platinum - prices depend on the configuration required. Bronze service costs £29 per month, for which customers with receive one CPU processor and 1GB of RAM.