Business leaders now accept that their organizations’ future success is bound up with their ability to keep pace with technology. CIOs have to play a key role in helping these business leaders recognize and seize the opportunities enabled by new trends—but the price of progress will have to be paid, along with new risks assumed.
This week Accenture published its Technology Vision 2012, an annual outlook of the most important emerging technology trends that are predicted to have a critical impact on businesses; a distillation from the experiences of our research teams and the input of our clients. The emerging technology trends are outlined so forward-thinking CIOs will use these to position their organizations to drive growth and high performance, rather than just focusing on cost-cutting and efficiency improvements.
Information technology has become increasingly more integrated into maintenance. But the advantages are not yet visible. Most often, it is seen as an administrative burden. Yet, further integration of information technology will be necessary in the future to deliver visible results.
Research by the US Department of Energy has shown that the shift from preventive and corrective maintenance to predictive maintenance offers a number of advantages, such as lower maintenance costs, downtime reduction and increased production. However, it requires quite an investment in time and money to realize vertical integration of the current systems.
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.
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.
Accenture has been selected by the Dutch Ministry of Internal Affairs to design and deliver automated border control systems at Schiphol Airport. Accenture initially provides 36 electronic border crossing systems for use at the airport. To validate the identity and passports of passengers by facial recognition, the new systems use the latest in biometric technologies. Border passage-based biometrics enhances security, increases efficiency, improves travel experience and reduces the waiting time of travelers at one of the world’s busiest airports.
In partnership with Vision-Box, Accenture already has successfully implemented similar automated border crossing programs at airports in the UK, Portugal and Finland. By deploying self-service systems, it is possible to limit the large amounts of travelers in a fast, secure and customer-oriented manner. For this project in the Netherlands, Accenture is supported by Vision-Box and Capgemini to develop and implement the solution. This partnership is also responsible for trainings, support and maintenance of the electronic systems.
Since June, ChromeBooks have become available to the general public with Samsung and Acer selling them. ChromeBooks are netbooks or ultraportables that run Google ChromeOS. And it’s this OS that makes these ChromeBooks interesting.
ChromeOS is an custom built version of Linux that basically is nothing more that the Chrome browser we use on our desktops. Even thought the ChromeBooks have internal storage there is no filesystem, actually there is no local anything. Local storage is used for caching only. The concept behind ChromeBooks and ChromeOS is that everything happens in the Google cloud. The applications you use, the music you want to listen to, the files you store, everything. Even though Google has a decent set of applications available and an application store to get more this concept does provide some limitations. Because not everything you may want to use is available (yet). So where is the appeal? Read more…
Over the last year you may have heard of HTML 5. Within the IT community there is a lot of buzz surrounding it. The most prominent is probably Apple no longer wanting to support Flash on their mobile devices in favor of HTML 5. So what is it and why should you care?
Let’s start with the boring background. HTML (the HyperText Markup Language) is the language that is used for webpages. It’s a fairly simple and limited text markup language. The hypertext name comes from the ability to use hyperlinks to jump to other parts in the text or other pages. The HTML ‘code’ is parsed by the browser and that results in the webpages we all know and love. HTML originated in 1993 and has been the de-facto standard for pages on the web. While initially the standard developed quite frequently, the latest version (4.01) was released in 1999. So the last update was 12 years ago. An update seemed long overdue.
How many of you actually know someone who doesn’t have a mobile phone? I know one person, and he is back in Canada and he ‘refuses to join society in this over exaggerate wave of convenience’ (his words). He is so off the grid. While I truly admire his passion for keeping it ‘old school’, I really can’t imagine a day without one of my mobile phones? It is 2011, and I use my mobile phone as a mini computer more than a phone. Occasionally I may actually ‘call’ someone with it; but the majority of its’ usage is for checking my mails, checking my bank balance, and checking out what is going on in the world via various news and/or social media sites. Read more…
Onderstaand artikel is 4 februari 2011 op Computable geplaatst. Het volledige artikel op Computable is hier te lezen.
Ik was deze week in Dubai op een conferentie van chief information security officers (ciso’s) uit het Midden Oosten. Wat me daar als eerste opviel was de volwassenheid van Informatie Beveiliging in die regio. Als wij in West Europa de beelden op tv zien bekruipt ons al snel een superioriteitsgevoel: ‘ze lopen daar toch best wel achter’. Nou dat doen ze dus niet!
Maar ze willen wel graag leren. En dan zijn er natuurlijk altijd diverse West Europeanen bereid hun goede ideeën te delen. Vooral de aanwezige Britten begonnen natuurlijk direct over ‘best practices’ zoals onder andere verwoord in de ISO 27000 standaarden. Maar om aan te komen met een standaard van meer dan twintig jaar oud als antwoord op vragen over cyber-, cloud- en mobile-security is misschien wel ‘practice’ maar waarschijnlijk niet ‘best’. Read more…
Accenture’s yearly High Performance IT research for this year’s program, involved the assessment by the most senior IT executives in 226 of the world’s largest private- and public-sector organizations.
In an interview with Accenture Netherlands director technology, Bas Telgenkamp, the results were summed up. “Our research inidicates that CIOs of High Performance IT organizations are involved directly with the business output and that they tune their activitites to the current and future business demands of the entire organization. They have succesfully phased out their legacy systems and are embracing new technologies. The push for the right balance between cost optimalization and budget availability, knowledge and resources is an important condition for growth.” For more on the High Performance IT research study, have a look at the video below:
Leslie: I will have to agree with Wouter…Too many companies do take their customer’s loyalty for granted…Hopefully this will change...Read the full comment
Wouter: Nice story, Angela! Unfortunately there are still too many companies that take the loyalty of their customers for granted. I hope Roy’s story...Read the full comment
Business leaders now accept that their organizations’ future success is bound up with their ability to keep pace with technology. CIOs have to play a key role in helping these business leaders recognize and seize the opportunities enabled by new trends—but the price of progress will have to be paid, along with new risks assumed.
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Information technology has become increasingly more integrated into maintenance. But the advantages are not yet visible. Most often, it is seen as an administrative burden. Yet, further integration of information technology will be necessary in the future to deliver visible results.
Test data includes all information in an information system needed to test this system to be successful. According to the 
Since June, 
