Halcyon In Business

Please see below selected recent  intelligence about Grant Thornton.

June 2016

• In South Korea, Daejoo Accounting joined the Grant Thornton network, moving from BDO. The addition of Daejoo‘s 70 partners and 500 staff will make Grant Thornton the largest mid-tier firm in South Korea.

Please see below selected intelligence about Capgemini.

June 2016

• Capgemini announced an alliance with German blockchain specialist, Ascribe, to develop a blockchain database solution, enabling bank customers to combine loyalty points from various programs & redeem in real time.

Please see below selected intelligence about Boston Consulting Group.

June 2016

• Boston Consulting Group announced a partnership with startup accelerator, MassChallenge. The two firms will collaborate to connect BCG's clients with leading startups in the US, the UK, and Israel. MassChallenge will help BCG support the digital transformations of its clients across industries and give insights into the latest trends and innovations. BCG staff will take part in judging and mentoring MassChallenge startups and will participate in MassChallenge innovation workshops, its Global Bridge Summit, and other events with startups throughout the year.

Please see below selected intelligence about BDO.

June 2016

• BDO USA announced an expansion into the Utah market through the addition of 64 staff, including 10 partners, from Mantyla McReynolds, LLC.  Founded in 1989, Mantyla McReynolds provides a full range of accounting and consulting services to a diversified client base of public and private businesses.

June 2016

• Debra A. Polishook has been appointed Group Chief Executive, Accenture Operations. She succeeds Michael J. Salvino, who will retire and join Carrick Capital Partners, an investment firm focused on technology-enabled businesses. Accenture has also named Manish Sharma as Group Operating Officer, Accenture Operations, succeeding Polishook. The changes are effective 1 September 2016. Polishook, is currently Group Operating Officer for Accenture Operations, one of the firm’s five businesses with more than $7 billion in annual revenues and 100,000 staff globally. Polishook will also join the company’s Global Management Committee. Sharma, based in Bangalore, India, is currently Senior Managing Director, Global Delivery & Solution Development for Accenture Operations. Sharma will continue as a member of Accenture’s Global Leadership Council.

• Accenture opened a new centre in Málaga, Spain, to help its European clients develop quality digital marketing content at speed and scale, and in a multitude of digital formats and languages. Over the next two years, the Accenture Interactive Centre of Excellence is expected to create 150 new jobs. The new facility specialises in accelerating the production of digital marketing content from banner ads and social media posts to websites and videos for marketing organisations. A growing team of front-end developers, designers, copywriters, and content managers, supported by industrialised production and quality management processes, will help clients move faster from digital marketing content vision to execution.

June 2016 　

KPMG appointed Darren Burton as Vice Chair, Human Resources. Burton succeeds Bruce Pfau, who is retiring from the Vice Chair role after 12 years. Pfau will join the firm’s Advisory practice in a senior consulting role. Burton joins KPMG from Raytheon Company, where he most recently served as Vice President, Human Resources and Security for Raytheon Intelligence, Information and Services Company. Prior to Raytheon, Burton held senior HR positions at Williams Lea, IBM, the Campbell Soup and DuPont.　

The union representing more than 4,500 government financial officers has lodged two formal complaints of professional misconduct against KPMG over its work in setting up offshore tax structures on the Isle of Man. The Association of Canadian Financial Officers wants the Ontario and Quebec chapters of the self-regulating Chartered Professional Accountants, or CPA, to assess KPMG's behaviour against the profession's code of conduct, bylaws and regulations. 　

• A rare problem - The Economist
• Analysis shows nuclear energy competitive with other baseload power sources - International Energy Agency
• Arctic melting will cost the global economy £33 trillion by end of next century, scientists calculate - Futurology
• CEO pulse on climate change - PwC

• 10 ways 3D printing can change the world - The World Economic Forum 
• Empire of the geeks - The Economist  

• A greener China - and what it might mean for the rest of the world - PwC
• Africa's dry forests key to food security - Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)

Please see below selected recent intelligence about technology. Please contact Dominic Kelleher with any questions.  

June 2015

• MIT Technology Review published its lists of the 50 Smartest Companies in 2015. Massive solar panel factories, fertility treatments and friendly robots are among the companies reshaping the technology business.

• The majority of organisations fail to have a uniform process for archiving data types, according to analysis by the Computer Business Review. Businesses are failing to capture potential revenues due to poorly managed data archives. Large volumes of data are resulting in many organisations being unable to successfully leverage the value in their data archives. However, a subset of organisations which are successfully leveraging the data are making as much as $10m more in revenue due to streamlined IT and customer service operations. Research published by Iron Mountain, "Mining for Insight: Rediscovering the Data Archive", an IDC white paper, showed that organisations with a well-defined data archive process stand to realise value from cost savings and added revenue from monetising the archives.

• The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) is demanding new initiatives toward enterprise architecture, data services and integration, according to a survey of 675 application developers, which finds broad support for IoT initiatives, but a lot of work ahead. The study, conducted by Harbor Research and underwritten by Progress, found that at least 45% of developers are working on IoT initiatives, and 75% felt IoT is going to deliver positive results. However, at this point, only 50% of developers say they have the skills, resources and technological tools to deliver on IoT expectations, the survey finds. That's because there are many new moving parts that will need to be added to already complex IT infrastructures.In fact, nearly a third experience data overload and feel overwhelmed trying to manage it all when managing data sets for contextualised IoT apps,

• The Era of Living Services report from Accenture and Fjord, described how brands will use the Internet of Things and powerful data analytics to create services that come to life; predicting and reacting to consumers’ changing needs and circumstances. In other words, branded services that are personalised and change in real-time for every individual wherever they are and whatever they are doing. It looked at the effect Living Services will have on most aspects of our lives – from our homes, finances and work; to our health, shopping and the future of travel.

• By 2020, 62% of organisations will be running 100% of their information technology in the cloud. But younger startup companies are already close to that point. That’s the prediction from BetterCloud, which surveyed 1,500 of its customers to determine what direction they will be taking cloud in the next few years. Currently, 12% of companies run all of their IT in the cloud, so it looks like this number will quintuple over the next five years.

• London is the technology capital of Europe, with more than 1,000 “tech investment projects” started between 2005 and 2014 based in London, while only 281 are in Paris, the next most popular city in Europe, the data from professional services firm EY2 reveals. Below Paris were Dublin with 162, Madrid with 139 and Amsterdam with 126 start-ups. According to a report by Oxford Economics, London's digital technology sector has grown by 46 per cent since the Tech City UK programme was launched, with tech companies based in the capital now employing almost 200,000 people.

• Deloitte predicts that in 2015 one billion wireless Internet of Things (IoT) devices will be shipped, up 60% from 2014, and leading to an installed base of 2.8 billion devices. The IoT-specific hardware (which could be a more expensive cellular modem, or a much cheaper Wi-Fi chip) is likely to be worth $10 billion, and the associated services enabled by the devices worth about $70 billion. Services include all of the data plans that may be necessary to connect a device over a network, the professional services (consulting, implementation, or analysing the data) and then things like an insurance policy discount for a telematics device in a car or a wearable device for health purposes.

• Ventana Research recently completed what it claims is the most comprehensive evaluation of analytics and business intelligence products and vendors available anywhere. Analytics and business intelligence is now a fast-changing market and Ventana scrutinised 15 top vendors and their product offerings in seven key categories: usability, manageability, reliability, capability, adaptability, vendor validation and return on investment.

• The Internet of Things is rapidly building connections between devices, starting with wearables, cars and appliances. A recent report from Gartner forecast that, “4.9 billion connected things will be in use in 2015, up 30 percent from 2014, and will reach 25 billion by 2020.” Breakthroughs have been made with regard to processing chips and internet speed that are making IoT a reality. 20 years ago, the cloud technology that is current driving these changes did not exist, but today the Internet of Things is being compared to the Industrial Revolution.

Please see below selected 2014 knowledge-related good practices across a range of industries:

All industries

Harvard Business Review asked this question, suggesting that while knowledge is generally a good thing, there is a point at which it may be bad: we can only comprehend so much; our minds have limits in our ability to digest information, just as shelves are only meant to hold so many books and too much knowledge can undermine the greatest insights, the deepest conjectures.

As ever, Dilbert distills perfectly the essence of an increasingly serious issue, i.e. how much privacy are we willingly and unknowingly trading away in our rush towards ever more "intelligent" devices.

Despite much hype, it is claimed that tools used for measuring wellbeing are still pretty immature. One UK economist thinks it' will be 20 years until they are safe for public policy prescriptions.

A recent report found that many employees age 50 and older have a strong drive to make continued contributions in their field.  Most of the individuals interviewed had a firm sense of who they are, what their purpose is, and how they can make a difference.  And, many of these individuals were willing to share their knowledge and to help develop others.