Capgemini Launches New Global Service Line to Extend Best Practices to Utility Companies Worldwide

Download the press release (pdf)

Paris, March 18, 2010 – Capgemini today announced the launch of Smart Energy Services, a new global service line that will provide the full spectrum of smart metering, smart grid, smart home solutions and smart analytics to utilities across the globe.

The offering leverages a range of proven services and best practices successfully developed by Capgemini since 2004 working with more than 20 North American and European utilities. Also central to the new Smart Energy Services offering is the company’s proprietary Managed Business Services, a usage-based pricing model designed to offer greater flexibility for the utility, which reduces risk by minimizing large upfront capital expenditure.

Growth in the IT and Telecommunication industry

The recession hit the IT and Telecommunication industry (ICT) hard, yet some products and services still saw dramatic growth in 2009. As we look to the future, will the broader ICT sector see a return to growth, and if so, where will that growth come from? This video, co-developed by the World Economic Forum and Bain & Company, summarizes the key questions ICT companies face when planning growth strategies for 2010 and beyond. Watch video Source: The World Economic Forum and Bain & Company

Wipro sets up consulting R&D arm/Sizes up its Competition

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Technology major Wipro is planning a deep plunge into the global consulting market with the idea of competing with true-blue global consulting brands and IT consulting firms.

In preparation for this move, the company has carried out an in-depth study on select consulting majors including Ernst & Young, PriceWaterhouse Coopers, McKinsey and Bain & Company to understand what made them stay different in the consulting world.

Anurag Srivastava, head of Wipro Consulting Services (WCS) said, “The objective of the study was to gather a holistic understanding of the consulting business. We want to create differentiation in the global markets through innovation-driven consulting. Consulting will be the front-end service for most of our large business deals.”

Wipro has also set up a dedicated research and development arm, Global Research Centre, to support its initiatives in the consulting space. The R&D facility will seek to enhance the business value to clients through innovation. The company believes that consulting will work as a powerful tool during times of recession to gain customer confidence.

Wipro employs over 1,200 consulting professionals and 7% of them will now be part of the R&D team. The team will track 12 industry verticals. The research activity starts with profiling the customer, moves on to analysing industrial trends, followed by providing a macro-economic snapshot and culminating in a viable business strategy.

The job of the R&D team is to lay seeds of innovation. It will play a key role in bridging the divide between ideators and front-end workers.

“The researchers will work in tandem with consulting professionals, so that customers are increasingly benefited,” Srivastava said. “Consulting will have a significant impact on our IT/BPO revenues. It will transform us from an outsourcing player to a transformational partner.”

Sourced from Indiatimes

IT Leadership is about Motivating Employees in Tough Times

Having a loyal, motivated team can make all the difference in your company’s ability to not just survive but also succeed. IT leadership plays a key role in making this happen. As the economy improves, it will be critical that your employees are satisfied because the risk of turnover will grow exponentially. In fact, in a recent survey by our firm, 31 percent of CIOs said they are worried about losing top performers to other job opportunities in the next year.

Certainly, no executive sets out to deflate morale and harm employee retention, but there are some common mistakes that can have this effect. What follows are five actions to avoid:

Withholding Information

On the surface, it may seem that not informing staff of bad news is better for morale. However, trying to hide information from your employees can be quite damaging. Chances are, word will leak out about the situation, and rumors may be inaccurate and fuel anxiety.

You may not be able to share the finer details of the closure of two company offices, for instance, but you can let people know what may be ahead from an IT perspective: Will those operations be consolidated within other sites? Who will handle any technology-related responsibilities associated with the transition? How will planned projects in the coming months be affected?

Share what you know and solicit ideas from employees on how to manage any anticipated changes. The more involved people are in developments, the less worried they’ll be about the situation.

Ignoring Signs of Burnout

Many teams are stretched thin and it’s not uncommon for employees to be asked to go full steam for extended periods of time. In these conditions, it’s particularly important to pay attention to the first indicators of burnout so you can take corrective action.

Some signs to watch out for include attendance problems, missed deadlines, irritability and incidents of staff conflict, and an increase in complaints from end users and others in the organization—particularly when the issues are with your best employees. Be willing to reorganize job responsibilities, redistribute work to other employees or provide access to necessary training that will help to alleviate stress and get people back on track. Also make sure that you’re encouraging employees to take breaks and vacation time, and then set the example by doing so yourself.

Failing to Reassess Staff Levels

Many leaders make the mistake of assuming that since they don’t have the budget to hire more employees, there is no need to re-evaluate their personnel situation. Yet, even if you don’t have pressing recruiting demands, you may not be using your staff optimally.

For example, are your employees working in positions that suit their current talents and potential? Someone who has built knowledge in project management through coursework over the past two years might be wasted in a junior role that doesn’t allow him or her to use those skills.

If you aren’t tapping into the potential of your employees, your team may not be as productive as possible. You also could be frustrating employees who long for more challenge or the opportunity to take on new assignments. Ensuring your staff members’ talents and potential align with their responsibilities is key to keeping your team motivated.

Micromanaging

Another common mistake is believing it’s good to be a “hands-on” leader who requires updates and approvals on every step of every project. While you may feel you are ensuring work gets done properly, more likely your staff believe you don’t trust them to handle the details of their jobs.

If this sounds like you, it’s critical to step back and give your employees the authority to do their work. This will prevent bottle-necking of projects and allow staff to make progress with their to-do lists. Eliminating your involvement with the finer mechanics of assignments can not only boost morale but also will give you time to focus on more important priorities.

Playing it Safe

Also, make sure that you aren’t stifling creativity and depleting morale by discouraging risk taking. You may not openly tell employees to keep new ideas to themselves, but if you are critical when recommendations fail or take no action on good suggestions, you send the same message.

It can be tempting to go with the status quo—after all, why fix what isn’t broken? However, it’s innovation that can give a firm a competitive edge. Encourage employees not just to think of new technologies that might benefit the company but also to look at processes and business strategies that could be improved. Then, follow through and implement the best ideas. If you can’t move forward with a suggestion, explain why. You’ll show respect for your staff’s expertise, which can be highly motivational.

Finally, remember that one of the easiest ways to boost morale is by offering thanks for a job well done. People want to be appreciated for their contributions, so take the time to give recognition when it’s deserved. A public thank you to the team who stayed late fixing a problem with your company’s website, for instance, can be meaningful when it comes from someone in your position. You’ll help to keep spirits high, even when faced with business challenges.

Source: CIOupdate.com

IBM hopes to make mobile devices more accessible

IBM is embarking on a research project to design mobile gadgets that are easier to use for people who have disabilities or aren't fully literate.

As part of the project, announced Wednesday, Big Blue will collaborate with India's National Institute of Design and the University of Tokyo's Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology.

The goal is to develop a common interface for mobile devices that will make them easier to use. As digital information becomes more vital, IBM said, it believes the Internet needs to be more accessible to a wider range of people, including those who are illiterate, blind, deaf, and elderly, and those in developing countries.

"Through this collaborative research initiative, we will uncover real information accessibility requirements and issues that the elderly and people in developing economies are facing today," Chieko Asakawa, an IBM Fellow and chief technology officer of IBM's accessibility research, said in a statement. "By focusing on mobile devices, which have a tremendous potential to empower them, we believe the findings will help us offer affordable services to a large population, who are still deprived of access to key information sources."

Any software created by IBM Research and the universities will be released as open source, freely available for governments and businesses to use, said IBM. Big Blue's partnership is part of its Open Collaborative Research program, which teams up the company with universities to develop new and open technologies. The Tokyo center is the first university-based research institute in Japan to join the program, while the National Institute of Design is the second university in India to do so.

IBM researchers in Tokyo and a team from the research center there will focus on making mobile technology easier for Japan's growing elderly population. In India, IBM Research and the design institute will look at ways to help that country's non- and semi-literate population find information through mobile devices.

"By bringing IBM's deep knowledge in mobile web and [the Indian institute's] interface design and ethnological expertise, this initiative is aimed to develop inclusive technologies and help the underprivileged improve their lives," Dr. Jignesh Khakhar of the National Institute of Design said in a statement.

The new research project is just the latest effort by IBM to try to bring technology to people who could be considered outside the mainstream. The company has been recognized in India for its "Spoken Web" technology, which lets people who are illiterate or have vision problems access the Internet by voice.

Source: CNET news

Wipro plans to outdo IBM

Wipro may be the third largest Indian IT company the world over, but it is eyeing the No 1 spot back at home and has got a brand new strategy to outdo the current leader in Indian market, the big blue IBM.

Anand Shankaran, business head of India and ME at Wipro Infotech, said, "There is no slowdown in India. It will be wrong to even talk about recovery."

Bullish is not quite what one expects Indian IT companies to be, given the slowdown in the west, but Wipro Infotech is banking big on the $20 billion Indian IT market.
It believes it can outgrow the current market leader IBM in a year with revenues well over billion dollars.

However, with big billion dollar deals in telecom in India drying up, IT companies are now targeting small and medium businesses, which are over 3 million in number that can add to the revenue kitty.

Wipro Infotech is approaching the SME market with renewed focus, breaking up the market into clusters, which include auto ancillary, textiles, micro finance, hospitality, toys and gems and jewellery.

"We are going to grow 15-20 per cent in India market next year, 15 per cent in products and 20 per cent in services. The idea is to aim for global operations kind of margins. We believe we can get there with critical mass in the medium term," Shankaran said.

India, Middle East and Africa are new focus areas for IT companies like Wipro and the deal pipeline company says is looking solid with 8-10 deals of over $100 million each.

Analysts believe Indian IT companies have no choice but to sharpen their strategies to tap into these growth markets.

Partha Iyengar, regional research director at Gartner India, said, “These are crucial markets. One, because there is growth and also this is where you can demonstrate transformational capabilities and finetune and then you can bag high end work in other markets."

The next big battle for growth between the global and Indian IT companies will be clearly fought in markets like India, Middle East and Africa.

No wonder Indian IT companies like Wipro, who have so far played catch up with global peers, are now putting all their might into devising strategies that will keep them ahead in the curve.

Source: NDVT Profit

Accenture No. 22 on DiversityInc Top 50 Companies List

NEW YORK, Mar 10, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Accenture /quotes/comstock/13*!acn/quotes/nls/acn (ACN 42.01, +0.00, +0.00%) has been named to the DiversityInc list of Top 50 Companies for Diversity for the fourth consecutive year, appearing at No. 22, up from No. 23 last year. DiversityInc also awarded Accenture the No. 3 position, up from No. 10 last year, on the DiversityInc Top Ten Global Diversity Companies list.

DiversityInc, the leading publication on diversity and business, annually recognizes companies that exemplify meaningful diversity management through their corporate practice. To qualify for the DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity list, participating companies must have more than 1,000 employees and must fill out a detailed questionnaire. Instrumental factors include companies' policies, diversity programs and initiatives and workforce demographics. The list, now in its 10th year, is metrics-driven and companies doing business with DiversityInc receive no advantage.

"Accenture is a very smart company run by astute people who clearly recognize how critical their diversity efforts are to their global and domestic success. When CEO and Chairman Bill Green spoke at our event last November, his real passion for the subject was inspirational for everyone," said Luke Visconti, Chief Executive Officer of DiversityInc. (Watch the video of Mr. Green's speech at http://www.diversityinc.com/article/7138/DiversityInc-Top-Company-for-Generational-Communications-VIDEO/)

According to DiversityInc, Accenture has demonstrated strength in the four areas measured: CEO Commitment, Human Capital, Corporate and Organizational Communications and Supplier Diversity.

"We are honored to be recognized once again by DiversityInc," said LaMae Allen deJongh, managing director of U.S. Human Capital & Diversity at Accenture. "We are focused on fully integrating inclusion and diversity across Accenture's approach to talent management. It is among our top priorities, no matter what the economic environment, and is essential to our people, the communities where we live and work and, ultimately, to maximizing our ability to deliver high performance to our clients."

Accenture's training programs around the globe illustrate the company's ongoing commitment to inclusion and diversity. In addition to offering a variety of live and online diversity training sessions, the company provides customized training and education programs that include "Developing High Performing Women" and "Minority Leadership Development." Additionally, more than 2,500 executives have participated in its "Leading a Diverse Workforce" program since its inception in 2005, and the company recently launched a new training program, "Developing Client Centric Women," to women in multiple locations in South America, Asia Pacific and North America.

Ms. deJongh spoke today on "Inclusion & Diversity Learning" at DiversityInc's event, "EEO to Effective Diversity Management: A Primer for Federal Agencies and Those Who do Business with Them."

About Accenture

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 176,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world's most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$21.58 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2009. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

About DiversityInc

Launched in 1997, DiversityInc is the leading business publication connecting diversity and the bottom line, with 1 million unique monthly visitors. DiversityInc.com includes the largest diversity job board in the nation. DiversityInc also produces events and conducts benchmarking, custom research and consulting.

SOURCE: Accenture

Strategy on the Morph

In 1966, Time magazine published a cover article posing the question, "Is God Dead?" Asked about the possibility, former President Eisenhower reportedly responded, "That's funny. I was just talking with Him this morning." Some of us are beginning to feel the same way about trendy assertions that strategy is dead.

You may have read one such proclamation in the Jan. 25 Wall Street Journal. "Strategy, as we knew it, is dead," argued Walt Shill, who leads Accenture's North American consulting practice. An article titled "Strategic Plans Lose Favor" goes on to quote him saying, "Corporate clients decided that increased flexibility and accelerated decision making are much more important than simply predicting the future."

If you believe strategy consists of predicting the future, or making plans, please feel free to take a chair next to Mr. Shill in the front row of mourners. On your seat you'll find a copy of Henry Mintzberg's 1994 book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, which should completely disabuse you of any residual hope you may have held out for the corporate planning process.

Meanwhile, a few of us who didn't get the sad news will be sitting around the roaring hearth, sipping wine and talking, not about strategy's death but about its future. Or so we did one evening last week in Manhattan under the auspices of the Association of Management Consulting Firms, sans hearth actually, but not sans wine. The conclusion there was that strategy was going to need to be faster of foot, smarter about picking its shots, and in general more "adaptive," to use my favorite new descriptor (which of course I cribbed from people smarter than myself, some of whom were at the event).

But it was not going to be dead. Darrell Rigby, a longtime partner at Bain & Co. and author of Winning in Turbulence, pointed out that we've gone through periods before when people said the world was moving so fast that companies didn't have the need for, or time to do, strategy. Like in the late 1990s. Something like 90% of the high-tech outfits from that era that thought they could do without the big S are no more. Rigby, who has been surveying companies on their use of management tools since 1994, also reported that strategic planning has ranked first or second on the list every year since then. (Maybe they didn't get the memo on the difference between planning and strategy, either, but it's also true that "have a strategy" isn't by itself a choice on the survey.)

As moderator of the discussion, without wine glass, let me try to distill what I heard into a few calls to action. By way of context I'd note that Accenture's Shill isn't wrong about companies wanting increased flexibility and accelerated decision making. Part of what these experts are wrestling with is how to root both of those in strategy, or, looked at from the other direction, how to rethink strategy to make it quicker and more dexterous.

1. Consider distributing the right to make strategy more widely throughout your organization. Martin Reeves, head of the Boston Consulting Group's Strategy Institute, had a wonderful phrase for what strategy will increasingly consist of: iterative empiricism. You learn something about a fast-changing market, reflect it in the actions you take, learn from how the market responds to that, boil that into your next steps, and so on. "But we've been saying that for years," partisans of the emergent, or learn-from-doing school of strategy may complain. True, but nowadays the action on the front-lines is moving so fast that you probably have to entrust the people there with decisions that heretofore would have been sent back to the company H.Q., where the great strategic wisdom supposedly was stored.

2. Understand that one process does not fit all decisions. Uta Werner, in a past life a partner at Marakon, now head of strategy at Xerox, noted that some strategy calls are of a scale that they can be left with folks out there in the organization. Others are so big, long term, and momentous in their potential implications that top management has to be involved. Knowing which is which, and having that knowledge widespread throughout the company, is critical to making strategy "adaptive." Such wisdom also does wonders for your flexibility.

3. Resources — corporate money and talent — will need to move as fast as decision making. Tom Stewart, chief marketing and knowledge officer for Booz & Co. — and a former editor of Harvard Business Review — has the banner inscription for this imperative: Fluidity. Don't think hydraulics. Think rather of the relentless, ever-morphing villains of the Terminator movies, the cinematic series where James Cameron made his bones (you should pardon the expression) as a director. Cameron may have lost out in the Oscar race this week, but his earlier creation could provide an image of what adaptive strategy — comin' at ya — will look like.

Walter Kiechel III is the former Editorial Director of Harvard Business Publishing, former Managing Editor at Fortune magazine, and author of The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World. He is based in New York City and Boston.

Source: Harvard Business Publishing

Big Think In the Boardroom

As a business journalist and former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, Walter Kiechel has had the unenviable task of spending much of his life hanging around with management theorists. These are the folks who bring out book after book of business advice that readers find unreadable and managers find unmanageable. Yet by some miracle Mr. Kiechel has remained immune to the maladies of the genre. His "The Lords of Strategy" is a clear, deft and cogent portrait of what the author calls the most powerful business idea of the past half-century: the realization that corporate leaders needed to abandon their go-it-alone focus on their company's fortunes and instead pursue policies based on a detailed study of the competitive environment and of broader business trends.

The "strategy revolution" began in the 1960s when the Boston Consulting Group upended the industry. Rather than take the usual tack of just cozying up to individual chief executives for a bit of corporate kibitzing and calling it consulting, BCG produced a series of elegant intellectual models that could be broadly applied across the business world. BCG's model for the "experience curve," for instance, taught companies that they could reduce their costs as they expanded their market share, thanks to the accumulation of know-how. The "growth share matrix" encouraged companies to view themselves not as an undifferentiated whole but as a portfolio of businesses that make different contributions to the bottom line ("cash cows" vs. "dogs," for example). Nowadays that sort of thinking might be unexceptional, but it was a radical development in the stagnant, inward-looking world of 1960s corporate America.

The 1970s and the decades that followed saw the institutionalization of the revolution. One of BCG's main competitors, McKinsey & Co., shook itself out of a complacent torpor and began enthusiastically running out its own management-strategy models. Bill Bain and several other BCG executives left the company in the 1970s and started a rival enterprise, Bain & Co. Meanwhile, Michael Porter brought strategy to the heart of the business establishment, the Harvard Business School. He added a powerful tool to the discipline's arsenal, the notion of the "value chain," which helped managers break down a business into its component parts, from raw materials to finished products, and then subject those parts to the rigors of cost-benefit analysis.

Yet success brought intense scrutiny and self-examination. In 1982, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman—McKinsey stars at the time—argued in the best-selling "In Search of Excellence" that the obsession with strategy was leading managers to ignore the human side of things. The year before, Richard Pascale, another McKinseyian, said in "The Art of Japanese Management" that the Japanese, who were then sweeping all before them, regarded the West's newfound passion for strategy as strange, much "as we might regard their enthusiasm for kabuki or sumo wrestling." And an army of young thinkers began shifting attention to more nuts-and-bolts matters, such as business processes (which could be re-engineered) and "core competencies" (which needed to be cultivated).

Today the status of strategic thinking in the business world is somewhat confused: An idea that owed its appeal to the seemingly hard truths presented by models is becoming ever more nebulous. The lords of strategy are now given to happy talk about "people"—on the grounds that people are the key to innovation and innovation is the key to long-term success. Such concerns can easily degenerate into bromides about the need to treat employees well. Perhaps it is no coincidence that, at least before the current financial crisis wreaked its havoc, young business hotshots were turning their attention to financial engineering. About a third of former McKinsey and BCG consultants currently work in the private-equity business.

"The Lords of Strategy" is at its best describing and explaining the evolution of an influential idea in American business. The book is less successful as the "secret history" it claims to be. Mr. Kiechel has the habit of pulling aside the veil on the darker side of the management business only to pull it back again. He says that management gurus are known to hire ghost-writing outfits such as Wordworks to produce their books—but he refrains from telling us the gritty ( perhaps disgraceful) details of the marketing and packaging process. He notes that a worrying number of consulting engagements end in tears—McKinsey had a long-term relationship with Enron, for example—but he skimps on evidence.

Mr. Kiechel makes up for this coyness, though, with his enthusiasm for telling the bigger story at the heart of his book: the intellectualization of business. Back in the days of the "organization man" in the 1950s, business people tended to be affable types—pleasant, easy to get along with, but hardly rocket scientists. Since then an ever greater amount of brain power has been applied to business as more and more graduate students pursue MBAs (150,000 annually in the U.S., up from 3,000 a year in 1948), and the brightest MBAs often go on to become business consultants.

The story that Mr. Kiechel tells does not have a particularly happy ending: The "quants" who would supposedly take business to a new level of intellectual sophistication designed financial tools such as the credit default swap that instead took the world economy to the brink of catastrophe. But Mr. Kiechel is surely right that we cannot begin to understand the world that we live in unless we grasp how corporate intellectuals came to have such a dramatic influence on the business world—and how old-fashioned virtues, such as judgment and common sense, were side-lined in the process.

Mr. Wooldridge is The Economist's management editor and the author of its Schumpeter column.

Source: WSJ

Accenture launches mobile money management service

Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has announced a new secure, high-speed, high-volume mobile financial transaction software solution for telecommunications service providers and large banks. The mobile money management solution allows firms to reach customers through existing mobile operator networks, web and Internet channels and mobile devices, regardless of the device their customers prefer to use.

It also allows customers to conduct traditional banking transactions, automatically adjusts to fluctuations in network traffic, such as sudden peaks of traffic at the beginning of a business day, and can facilitate thousands of simultaneous transactions. Since it uses "cloud-like" technology, the solution can be launched quickly and economically and scales easily. Customers can be segmented by brand, product or language. The solution is now available worldwide, and is a key element in Accenture's focus on mobility services.

"Mobile operators and banks are facing increasing pressure to provide mobile money services on mobile phones to all users," said Andy Zimmerman, global managing director of Mobility Services at Accenture. "If they do not provide these services they risk losing subscribers and being eliminated from the payment process. Accenture's communications industry experience uniquely positions us to support businesses that want to get into the kind of high-volume mobile money applications that can contribute significantly to their customer service and help generate new revenue streams."

The mobile money management solution makes it possible to process micropayments in real time, which helps companies take advantage of new business models, while potentially opening new streams of revenue. Micropayments are used to process small transaction amounts that would otherwise severely limit profit, or even cost more than the actual product if processed as traditional card transactions.

This type of payment is typically used by Internet merchants who sell content - or other intangible goods - that cost between a few cents and a few dollars each, such as music, pay-per-play games, newspapers, articles, reports, small computer programs, tickets and postcards.

The mobile money management solution incorporates the Fundamo Enterprise Mobile Financial Services (EMFS) platform and combines it with Accenture's Service Delivery Platform (SDP). Mobile money management is available from Accenture Mobility Operated Services, an Accenture business unit which provides services for mobile operators, financial institutions and large retailers to help enable new, revenue-generating services delivered through mobile channels, such as ticketing, loyalty, mobile marketing and mobile money.

Fundamo is the world's largest specialist mobile financial services provider. Fundamo's EMFS platform is powered by technology that already delivers secure mobile financial services to consumers around the globe.

"Mobile money management is about businesses facilitating financial services," said Zimmerman. "Because it involves elements such as financial regulations, as well as customers' money, and personal details, mobile money must meet extremely high standards in terms of performance and security.

"By installing the Fundamo solution onto our industry-leading SDP, Accenture helps provide businesses with an industry-tested way to deliver reliable, secure, mobile services to their diverse customer segments. This is an important advancement for the mobile financial services industry."

Accenture is offering the mobile money management solution as a non-branded, "white label" capability, which allows businesses to retain their brand with their customers. The solution is offered under a transaction-based pricing model, which means businesses pay only for the number of customers who use the capability.

Accenture offers mobile money management as a managed service, hosted at Accenture data centers around the world. As a result, businesses do not have to invest in additional infrastructure, which reduces start-up costs.

"In the wake of the financial crisis, mobile finance has become a critical frontier for bank industry growth," said Noel Gordon, global managing director of Accenture's banking practice. "Consumers are looking for more convenience, simplicity and manageability in their financial lives. The banks that will win customer loyalty will be those with the technologies needed to deliver world-class financial services over mobile devices."

Source: Accenture, 09 March, 2010

5 effective habits of a successful consultant

1. Time Management: Often overstated and under practiced. Many a times, consultants are so busy designing and evaluating structures & processes for a client that they forget to design a structure around their own work schedule. Working for a longer duration than your peers does not you more effective.Most successful consultants will tell you that time management can be summed into three simple tasks “organizing , prioritizing and succeeding”

2. Leadership: John Quincy Adams, 6th American US president (1825-29), once said “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader”.. I could not agree more. Most consultants get lured into thinking short term on engagements. Most successful consultants, however, work with the management to define a long term strategy to resolve an old problem. True leaders believe in their solution, for successful consultants, solving the problem is more important than merely meeting the defined scope of work.

3. Teaming: If you take a survey of 100 random consultants from different organizations and ask them if they think they are a good team player, I would not be surprised if all of the 100 respondents think that they are good team players, however, if you ask these 100 respondents whether their team members are good team players, the response, would definitely not be as simplified as above. Successful consultants value each team player; these consultants think “Team” when thinking “Me” seems more lucrative.

4. Reputation Management: Successful consultants thrive on reputation. A good reputation opens many doors to a successful career. Nothing undermines the credibility of a successful consultant as quickly as saying one thing while doing another. As a rule of thumb, if you are honest to your peers, your seniors and your client, then you don’t have to worry about your reputation.

5. Network: This one is no secret, Networking has its advantages. Networking helps you get the right engagements, get essential pointers and business leads. Effective networking skills become even more essential as one climbs the corporate ladder. As a consultant shifts from an execution role to a managerial role, a lot of emphasis is paid on getting the business. More people you know better are your chances of generating business leads.

Source: http://consultingnetwork.co.in/five-effective-habits-of-a-successful-consultant/1134/

Accenture launches cyber security office in San Antonio

Accenture has opened a threat analysis center in San Antonio to tap into the growing demand for security services.

The Accenture center will help federal, state and local government and commercial clients comply with security regulations, protect data and make informed decisions about their information security networks. Accenture will also use the center to assist clients with technology infrastructure, identity management, malmare analysis, cyber forensics, mission resilience, business continuity planning and federal desktop core configuration compliance.

Accenture opened the center inside the company's existing San Antonio Delivery Center at 7050 Fairgrounds Parkway. Of the 500 Accenture employees that work in San Antonio, the center will directly employ about 50. Currently, there are still more than 20 positions that need to be filled locally.

“In this era of elusive and determined cyber adversaries, information technology systems need to be trusted, secure and flexible enough to combat threats in an increasingly hostile environment while maintaining their functional requirements,” says Henry “Bud” Horton, chief technology officer of Accenture’s cyber security practice.

Accenture PLC (NYSE: ACN) is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. It has more than 176,000 employees worldwide and it ended fiscal year 2009 with revenues of $21.58 billion. Its U.S. headquarters are located in New York.

Source: San Antonio Business Journal