Archive for October, 2011
Posted on October 31st, 2011 at 10:56 am by Jeroen Fidder
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Theme: Careers | Tags:
Ik heb het gevoel dat ik bezig met het mooiste project dat ik ooit zal doen. Dat zou betekenen dat ik het te vroeg pieken (na 3 jaar) tot een heel nieuw niveau zou hebben gebracht, dus gebruik ik dit blog even om afstand te nemen en na te denken of dat gevoel klopt.
Ben ik inhoudelijk bezig met de materie die ik het allerleukst vind? Ja, dat ben ik. Ik ben me met raffinaderij productie, trading, sales tactieken voor olie en optimalisatie van fysiek transport aan het bemoeien. Dat zijn alle dingen tegelijk die ik in een project zoek, dus daar gaan we niet meer over heen.
Werk ik met de beste mensen? Ja, dat denk ik wel. Iedereen Read more…
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Posted on October 28th, 2011 at 11:34 am by Dirk Visser
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Theme: Careers | Tags:
Mijn naam is Dirk Visser en ik woon in Amsterdam. Ondertussen ben ik al weer vier jaar werkzaam bij Accenture. Binnen Accenture ben ik werkzaam met Oracle en dan voornamelijk gericht op Tax & Utilities. De komende tijd zal ik bloggen over mijn werkzaamheden en de andere activiteiten die ik bij Accenture doe.
Mijn eerste blog gaat over “de bank”, hiermee gaat het uiteraard niet over “De Bank”, maar over het ‘bankzitten’. Met bankzitten bedoel ik dat je tijdelijk geen project heb en in afwachting van je volgende project op kantoor of thuis bezig bent. Bankzitten wordt vaak als negatief ervaren, maar is dat wel zo? Read more…
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Posted on October 25th, 2011 at 3:25 pm by Jort Possel
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Theme: Latest Post, Marketing | Tags: Brand communities, Brand personalities, Branding, Consumer behavior, customer engagement, Social Media, Social networking
Interactive new media offer new opportunities to interact with consumers. Considering the importance of these interactions, communications taking place within this new digital space can have an important effect on the perceived brand personality. Research I am currently conducting as part of my MBA program focuses on defining important elements within interactive, social media that can contribute to the formation of brand personality and investigating those relationships.
Please help in the completion of the research by completing the survey: tinyurl.com/crossmediambathesis.
Transformation of engagement
When Howard Schultz returned to the CEO position at Starbucks in 2008, he stated rebuilding trust with the customers was the main priority for the company. At the basis of his approach: social media. “It has become paramount that brands understand that trust isn’t something you build through traditional marketing,” Schultz said. “You do that through integrating social and digital media. It is a science – as well as an art – to understand how to do this in a way that is authentic and genuine, and not just marketing. Because if it’s just marketing, (consumers) will see right through it.”
In recent years, social media has gone past the hype and became mainstream. In the U.S. for example, social networks and blogs now reach close to 80% of active internet users and represent nearly a quarter of total time spend online. Other countries follow closely, with users joining either local heroes and/or the global giants. But social media not only connects people with each other, but also with places they go, media they watch and items they like and buy. This phenomenon has great implications for business. As everybody and everything is connected and exchanges information real-time, organizations get flattened and leadership becomes more transparent. But arguably the biggest impact is that it has changed the old way of doing business forever.
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Posted on October 19th, 2011 at 12:57 pm by Geert Batterink
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Theme: High Performance IT, Innovation that works, Latest Post | Tags: Application Services, Hype Cycle, Open Source, Open Source Conference, OSC11, Portal solutions
Open Source continues to be relevant for organizations. In the last year we have seen several clients continue to work with Open Source at a large scale, and we have seen an increase in proposal work related to Open Source. The Open Source Conference 2010 indicated a tipping point in the market, and was one of the largest Enterprise IT events in the Dutch market that was attended by almost 450 people.
Looking forward now, market analysts expect this trend to continue. Enterprises will increasingly deploy Open Source solutions in mission critical scenarios, at a service level that must be equal to or even better than closed source alternatives. Additionally, these solutions are being adopted increasingly by conservative IT organizations, driven by risk mitigations and cost considerations. Typically, organizations adopt the Open Source software stack bottom-up, that is they start on the system infrastructure level (eg. LINUX) and then move up the stack to application infrastructure (think applications servers) and to business applications.
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Posted on October 19th, 2011 at 12:29 pm by AccentureNL
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Theme: High Performance IT, Latest Post | Tags: Computable, ICT business, Information systems, International Software Testing Qualifications Board, Master Data, Software testing, System configuration data, Test Data, Test data management model, Testing, Transactional data
Blog post written by Maarten Lor. Maarten is a former blogger on Blogpodium and Project manager IT at Accenture Netherlands.
Test data includes all information in an information system needed to test this system to be successful. According to the
International Software Testing Qualifications Board, the definition of test data is
: ‘Data that is present (e.g. in a database) before a test is performed and affect (or affected by) a component or system under test’. Recently Dutch ICT business magazine
Computable published an
article on the topic ‘Test data‘, in conjunction with Accenture’s Paul van den Broek and myself.
While system testing is increasingly professionalized, the subject ‘Test data’ remains often underexposed. When there is too little attention for test data during the planning phase, the need for data and administration during the preparation and execution of different tests can vary greatly, and the general description in the test plan is not sufficient enough. The lack of proper planning and approach in test plan or strategy leads to inconsistencies and errors in the data correction, with major consequences for effort and duration. In order to bridge the gap between theory and practice of test levels and data, Accenture developed a model that helps to get grip on the required test data to better control the preparation and execution of a test program. The model consists of a description of test data along two axes: data types and data-life cycle.
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Posted on October 18th, 2011 at 10:37 am by Pascal Pichel
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Theme: Careers | Tags:
De komkommertijd is officieel voorbij! Deze blog komt tot jullie vanuit een hotel net buiten New York City waar ik een week ben voor mij nieuwe klant. De uitdaging waar ik om vroeg is voorbij gekomen; ik ben afgelopen week in Zwitserland begonnen waar mijn nieuwe thuisbasis is voor deze klant. Basel is mijn nieuwe standplaats, waar ik 3 tot 4 dagen in de week zal zijn.
De inhoudelijke uitdaging is even interessant, Read more…
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Posted on October 17th, 2011 at 4:08 pm by Jort Possel
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Theme: Business Transformation, Latest Post | Tags: B2B, Business-to-business, Competitive advances, customer expectations, customer experience, Customer segmentation, Customer Service
In today’s service environment, a differentiated customer experience strategy clearly enhances the brand. It enables organizations to deliver a premium service to customers while maintaining the affordability of the overall service experience. A positive service experience provides competitive advantage due to reducing support costs, and grows the customer base with differentiated treatment in customer acquisition and retention.
Customer experience management is emerging as a critical component of success in business-to-business (B2B) industries. Despite its importance, customer experience management is just emerging as a formal program in most B2B companies. In fact, recent research reveals that half of B2B firms’ top executives say customer experience management is a competitive differentiator and influences major decision-making. The same research reports that just 28 percent of B2B executives base strategic decisions on customer experience or customer lifetime value. And, for many companies, investment in customer experience management is minimal—about half (48 percent) of B2B firms invest less than one percent of annual revenue in customer experience management.
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Posted on October 14th, 2011 at 11:57 am by Jort Possel
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Theme: Driving Growth, Latest Post | Tags: Cost reductions, Price optimization, Pricing, Profitable growth, Sustainable Growth, Volatile economy
The most recent recession was difficult for enterprises around the world and spurred an intense series of cost reductions in many developed-market countries. With the economy now improving in most parts of the world, companies want to reignite growth while continuing to make appropriate cost reductions to strengthen profitability.
According to Accenture’s comprehensive research over 1,000 executives in 12 countries, most companies are still hesitant to believe in a full-scale recovery and operate in a position of strength from a cash standpoint. The research provided us various key findings including that price optimization is one of the three most important strategic priorities in the past 18 months for seven in 10 companies: Read more…
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Posted on October 13th, 2011 at 12:15 pm by Wouter Koetzier
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Theme: Column, Innovation that works | Tags: Breakthrough Innovation, Customer insights, Incremental Innovation, Innovation death spiral, Innovation portfolio management, Innovation that works, Market foresights, Platform Innovation, Share of Market Innovation
In my opening post, I touched upon how companies that take a systematic approach to innovation manage to escape what we call “The Innovation Death Spiral”. They do so by balancing incremental-, platform-, and breakthrough innovation projects in line with their market positions, ambition and strategy. This week I will explore innovation types a bit more in-depth and zoom in on the importance of project portfolio balance.
Innovation success is either luck or it is based on a competitive advantage in foresight & insight. Companies that out-innovate competition time and again, systematically develop the market foresight and customer insight that informs them which are the most attractive future growth options and where they have the best chance of winning. Innovation most of the time does not start with an idea (something that happens to you) but with a sound understanding of a business opportunity driven by a customer need. The rigorous and systematic approach to defining business opportunities and developing ideas and solutions to meet customer needs, drives Bigger & Better innovation simultaneously. Consistent innovation success builds innovation confidence within the organization (f/e to overcome the fear to fail) and reinforces client interest in news from the company, almost as a self fulfilling prophecy. Innovative companies are also seen as more attractive to work for by top talent. So this is all why companies as diverse as Google, P&G and of course Apple generate superior value from innovation.
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Posted on October 13th, 2011 at 9:15 am by Guy Hagemans
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Theme: Careers | Tags:
Accenture heeft over het algemeen grote klanten en deze grote klanten hebben grote projecten. Dit vind ik persoonlijk interessant omdat het vaak projecten zijn die ook echt ergens over gaan. Maar hoe maak je nou het verschil op zo’n groot project? Hoe val je op?
Als Business Analist krijg je de verantwoordelijkheid om een onderdeel van het project in goede banen te leiden. Of dat nu innovatie, een aanpassing aan bestaande bedrijfsprocessen of op belangrijke IT systemen is. Read more…
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Ik heb het gevoel dat ik bezig met het mooiste project dat ik ooit zal doen. Dat zou betekenen dat ik het te vroeg pieken (na 3 jaar) tot een heel nieuw niveau zou hebben gebracht, dus gebruik ik dit blog even om afstand te nemen en na te denken of dat gevoel klopt.
