Archive for 2012

Vertrokken naar Argentinië voor Wereldkampioenschappen Zweefvliegen

Het is zover; na afronding van mijn project vorige week nu vakantie! Na een vlucht van 14 uur afgelopen zondag inmiddels alweer een paar dagen in Argentinië. Na een overnachting in Buenos Aires en een busreis van 8 uur aangekomen op het vliegveld waar de WK gaan plaatsvinden. De zeecontainer met mijn vliegtuig stond er perfect bij, dus met een paar uurtjes was alles uitgepakt en had ik mijn tent op de camping geïnstalleerd.

Zowel de eerste en tweede kerstdag kon er helaas niet gevlogen worden in verband met heftige regenval. Er was ruim 20cm regen gevallen, waardoor het veld te nat was en er niet op het veld gestart kon worden. Read more…

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Blogpodium top stories 2012

As we approach the end of 2012, it’s a good time to look back and review all of the great content that’s been published the past 12 months. It’s been a busy time in the world of Innovation, Analytics and Digital, considering everything from different ideas about the key ingredients for successful innovation to shifts in the way consumers engage with social networks and mobile devices.

Below are a few of the best articles we’ve seen published this year.


Top 10 Challenges for Investment Banks 2012
Investment banks are increasingly operating in a volatile, resource constrained and highly regulated environment. Rigorous focus on strategic and operational priorities provides the key to high performance. Complying with new and impending regulations presents major challenges for investment banks.

To help investment banks plan and execute with success as macro trends reshape the industry, Accenture has developed a list of the top 10 challenges to address in 2012.

Different key ingredients for successful Innovation

The responses to a poll Accenture ran on LinkedIn revealed that people have very different ideas about the key ingredients for successful innovation. A full half of the respondents believe that understanding customer challenges is the key, while another third believe it is essential to embed innovation in an organisation.

The truth is that all of these play a role in successful innovation. But is there one element that is so crucial that without it successful innovation would be impossible?

The importance of Data Governance
Does your company consider its data to be a strategic asset? More important, do you not only consider it to be an asset, but are you also treating it as any other asset?

In my 20 years of experience in Data and Information Management, I worked for companies, who claimed to understand the importance and potential value of their data, but struggled to live up to this understanding. And, up to today, many companies I visit are still not taking full benefit of the wealth of information that is stored in their systems.

Are you moving fast enough in Digital?
As the world is changing rapidly, organizations need to stay in the game by investing in digital capabilities. But many organizations find it difficult to predict the expected ROI, resulting in little investments and lack of innovation.

Digital is radically changing the traditional ways organizations interact with customers. Customers are willing to interact with organizations via social media, and expecting them to be out there too! Therefore the question is no longer how fast things are moving, but: are you moving fast enough?

High Performing Business in changing economic times
In this volatile, uncertain and increasingly complex world, many businesses and governments have an urgent need to reassess current strategies and vital capabilities to achieve high performance.

Companies that want to stay in business need to make concrete plans for the future, with little room for errors. After all, companies will need to keep launching successful business concepts or products to outperform their rivals in these challenging times.

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High Performance. Delivered…. Maar hoe?

Een organisatie als Accenture draait natuurlijk vooral op mensen. Collega’s die dag in en dag uit proberen om het beste uit zichzelf te halen en waarde te leveren aan de klanten waar we voor werken. Als nieuwe of aspirant-collega vraagt men zich vaak af hoe je dat dan doet… Waar haal je die kennis vandaan? En welke mogelijkheden heb je bij Accenture om de kennis op te doen die je nodig hebt?

Misschien is het goed om maar gelijk te beginnen bij hoe de meeste mensen binnen Accenture het meeste leren; gelijk in je projecten! Wanneer je als Junior Consultant bij ons begint, begin je ook echt gelijk; Read more…

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Eén-loketgedachte: integratie leidt tot optimalisatie

Vele gemeentelijke organisaties in Nederland implementeren de één-loketgedachte. Deze gedachte betreft het integreren van meerdere overheids- en private diensten van meerdere loketten naar één fysiek, telefonisch of virtueel loket op basis van vraagpatronen. De één-loketgedachte dient er voor te zorgen dat de burger efficiënter en klantvriendelijker geholpen kan worden. Dit door middel van het integreren van diensten van verschillende loketten naar één loket. Hierdoor kan een pro-actievere dienstverlening ontstaan waarbij kant-en-klare producten en services worden aangeboden.

De huidige dienstverlening van de overheid wordt gekenmerkt door een hoog “kastje-naar-de-muur”-gehalte. Wanneer een burger  bijvoorbeeld een bouwvergunning nodig heeft, dan moet hij naar verschillende instanties op verschillende plekken, welke allemaal een ander antwoord kunnen geven op de vraag of hij zijn bouwplannen mag realiseren. De eerste drie instanties kunnen daarbij volmondig ja zeggen, echter wanneer de vierde instantie een negatief oordeel geeft, begint het aanvraagtraject weer opnieuw, welke  aanvangt bij de eerste instantie.

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Open Source Conference 2012

ICT is developing at a breath-taking pace. From the incredible rise of smartphones, to the opportunities of cloud computing: there are ever more innovative products, services and models out there. The best thing about the Internet is that it is open. And for new technologies and new software there are huge benefits to open source and open standards.

On December 14th 2012, during the annual Open Source Conference, founded by Accenture and Red Hat, Vice-President of the European Commission Neelie Kroes had a special video message during the opening. As she stated:

“non-standard, proprietary technologies damages competition, which means extra costs and it means users can’t get maximum value from new innovations. In fact, the cost of having closed ICT systems is estimated at several hundred million Euros a year; for the public sector alone”.

Read more…

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Making spin-offs work

In our last blog post, we looked at how parent companies and the spin-offs themselves cut their own chances of success, by smothering a spin-off in cash or IP, by not listening to their market and, basically, or being in too much of a rush to generates sales. However, our study (see below) also found a lot of spin-offs that avoided these pitfalls and went on to become highly successful companies in their own right.

So what are the success factors for a profitable spin-off and a growth engine for the future? Our study identified five main guidelines:

1) Keep them hungry
Spin-offs often receive a lot of initial financial capital from their parent companies as well as from public funding programs. Both can actually hamper the successful development of a spin-off. On the other hand, limiting the amount of capital forces a spin-off to sell products at a profit. Profit that provides it with the capital necessary for further investments.

This has three motivational advantages. First of all, selling products shows that an actual need is being met and so the spin-off is listening to the market. Secondly, limited resources means time-to-market has to be as short as possible. And thirdly, the need to acquire capital for investments ensures that the focus remains on profit rather than volumes for volume’s sake.

Read more…

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Voorbereiding WK Zweefvliegen in volle gang

Mijn laatste week op het project is aangebroken. We hebben bij een middelgrote verzekeraar een succesvol kostenreductieprogramma doorgevoerd en deze week vindt de definitieve overdracht naar de lijnorganisatie van de klant plaats.

Het afgelopen weekend ben ik daarnaast druk bezig geweest met de laatste voorbereidingen voor het WK Zweefvliegen. Aanstaand weekend vertrek ik naar Argentinië, om eerst anderhalve week te trainen, waarna het wereldkampioenschap zal plaatsvinden van 6 t/m 19 januari. Read more…

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Big Data: What news does it bring?

In my previous blog posts I have paid a lot of attention to the importance of managing data as a corporate asset. Up until today, the focus in most of the projects I am involved in is still on an organization’s internal, structured data, with solutions like an MDM repository for customers, vendors etc, data governance and data quality dashboards.

What I am recently asking myself, is how this traditional approach of data management will change as a result of the digital revolution we are currently going through. When I am hosting a workshop or giving a presentation I always like to show a movie that tells the story of the enormous explosion of data and information in recent years and how most organizations feel they are not in control of this.

In a relatively short time the concept of data is changing dramatically. Not just in volumes, which become bigger and bigger, but also in the number and type of sources this data is coming from. In todays world, most machines, tools, cars, websites, buildings etc.  store and even transmit data. And, to add to the complexity, this data is not by definition formatted in a way most of us are used to. In summary, we face higher volumes of data, coming from a higher number of sources both in a structured and unstructured way.

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European banks out of the woods?

The European Banking Authority (EBA, the European System of Financial Supervision) recently published its final report on the so-called “capital exercise”. The primary objective of the report was to measure to what extent European banks had complied with EBA December 2011 requirement to:

“Set up a buffer of capital so that their Core Tier 1 ratio was above the 9% threshold, after establishing a buffer related to prudent valuation of their sovereign debt holdings so as to reassure that they have a much improved capacity to absorb losses”.

I had been on the lookout for this report for several weeks as it had been originally promised for early September. However with no news at that time on their website, I decided to contact them directly. Within just over an hour I had received a reply from the [London based] Communications Officer indicating that the final report on the capital exercise would be discussed at the EBA’s Board of Supervisors meeting and would be published the following week. What I found particularly interesting about this response was the speed with which it was sent, no doubt a reflection of the desire to restore confidence in the banking industry. Later that day, the EBA website was updated to reflect the same message.

Within a few hours of the latest publication by the EBA, each of the major participating banks had posted their response to the findings. What follows is the first in a series of commentaries on those EBA EU Capital Exercise Final Results.

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Hungry for success

In their search for sustainable and profitable innovation, many companies opt for a strategy that involves launching a spin-off to focus on undeveloped markets. These strategies have enormous potential but also carry huge risk. After all, they often involve a new technology and products for totally new and unknown markets. And sadly, many of these spin-offs fall at the first hurdle.

As we touched upon briefly in our last blog post, the reason why so many spin-offs fail is that their chances of success are undermined by the generosity of the parent company itself. The parent company’s urgency to develop a new engine for growth can have a disastrous effect. Because the spin-off is given such large quantities of capital, both intellectual and financial, it is less likely to listen closely to its potential market and the time-to-market gets longer.

This can be exacerbated by the skill of the top entrepreneur – the newly-hired CEO – to attract additional capital. This kind of spin-off will simply develop a product and/or service based on the large amount of cash and intellectual property (IP) available and put it out to market; a typical push method. This often fails, particularly in new markets, as the company has failed to listen to its market and to create any ‘pull’ demand for its product or service. And the fact that the spin-off is given so little time to develop and grow is a major limitation of its chances of success. What might have been a hit is transformed into an almost certain miss.

So what is the key to success? Our study (see below) found that most successful spin-offs had a number of things in common. The three most prevalent characteristics we found are the following:

Read more…

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