North America’s transition to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) is no longer a question of “if”, but “when” and “how.”

The discussion has intensified since the US Securities & Exchange Commission proposed a road map that would require adoption by all US publicly-held companies by 2014, 2015 or 2016, depending on the company’s size and filing status.

Governments are under pressure to bring more services to citizens at less cost. Unfortunately, many agencies are also saddled by aging IT hardware and software systems that hinder rather than enable their missions of citizen service. To address this problem, Accenture is introducing an accelerator called the Accenture Public Service Platform.

It takes some of the basic functions of government entities—whether their focus is revenue collection, customs enforcement, pensions management or human services—and packages them up in a modular way. The result is a set of pre-built tools that governments can use to manage their operations, finances and social services.

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Oracle OpenWorld is the largest global gathering of Oracle customers, partners, developers and technology enthusiasts. Some of our correspondents blog on what they heard in San Francisco the week of September 22, 2008.

It is clear that business intelligence (BI) has fast become a top priority with high-performance businesses. But as business intelligence has moved onto the business executive’s agenda, the technologies driving it have evolved too. Executives need to understand what they can expect from these new technologies and approaches in order to maximize the value from their investments. Most notably, many software vendors, including Oracle, are introducing a variety of prebuilt analytics that support or enhance operational and business processes common to most organizations, including financials, HR, order management, supply chain, sales, service, contact center and marketing. This tactical analysis—frequently called operational business intelligence—is a shift from the past when business intelligence referred to analytics that were strategic and primarily dealt with the trends found in historical data.

Only recently have business intelligence capabilities become mature enough to get the right information to the right people at the right time to support better decision making, drive enterprise performance and gain competitive advantage—although that was always the goal. Now more than ever, real-time data is closer to reality as more organizations directly integrate business intelligence into typical activities within their operational system and use it to support operational tasks. High-performance businesses look to companies like Accenture to help them extend business intelligence down to their employees who conduct business on the “front lines.”

The trend is clear, software as a service (SaaS) is here to stay. Why? Both IT and business buyers like the fact that SaaS can make IT easier and more accessible while simultaneously lowering costs. Web 2.0, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and SaaS all provide a common focus on automated Web services as well as process orchestration and workflow, which decreases cost and increases flexibility. Accenture sees SaaS as a way for businesses to accelerate productivity. In fact, Accenture High Performance Business research shows that high performance IT organizations are two to three times more likely to be implementing SaaS than their peers.

Increasingly, clients are asking Accenture’s Oracle consultants what value the SaaS option of Siebel OnDemand can bring—whether as a substitute for their existing CRM investments or an enhancement to it. Accenture's approach to OnDemand parallels its rigorous approach to delivering out-of-the-box Siebel OnPremise solutions: Focusing on business outcomes and driving high performance for its clients.

Workforce retention and productivity is top of mind for executive management these days. Accenture's own research shows that many organizations don’t feel they do a good job of managing their workforce as a strategic asset. Part of the problem is that they don’t have good methods and tools to align workforce management to business strategy. Although they have access to a great deal of workforce data in their enterprise HR management systems, they lack the ability to transform that data into useful, actionable business intelligence. As a result, they are essentially flying blind when it comes to managing the workforce from a truly strategic perspective.

To help talent managers address this gap, Accenture is combining some of the latest business intelligence (BI) tools available in the marketplace, with our own expertise in talent management to provide executives with the tools and metrics needed to manage the workforce as a competitive asset and keep it in step with organizational needs, which is key in the ongoing pursuit of high performance.

Since its December launch in the United Kingdom, the Accenture European Innovation Center for Oracle has been at the heart of our service-oriented architecture (SOA) innovation throughout Europe. That’s where we meet with clients and our own client teams to listen to their needs, share our service-oriented architecture expertise and develop solutions that will help them migrate to service-oriented architecture faster. We were hearing client feedback such as “Service-oriented architecture is too complicated” and “It takes too much effort to implement service-oriented architecture.” We acted on that feedback and created the Accenture Oracle SOA Project Accelerator.

Clearly, our clients were telling us that they want to migrate to a service-oriented architecture platform without having to develop everything from scratch. But the reality is that implementing any service-oriented architecture toolset into an organization takes time. The fact that it affects the development lifecycle, the definition of ownership and governance in the organization, as well as testing, sometimes overshadows the benefits of this emerging approach, which can play a big role in helping organizations achieve high performance. If we start going into more detail we would also cite key examples like the following: developing configuration management for Oracle BPEL, environment build and technical architecture designs for the SOA Suite, installation guides, training material for service-oriented architecture and the Oracle toolset, and the development standards across BPEL, among others. All of this takes time, and our clients know it. However, they also acknowledge that they don’t want to go through a service-oriented architecture journey without a good foundation to sustain critical projects in the organization.

I’m often asked why a company looking for a business intelligence solution should consider Oracle’s Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) rather than one of the legacy business intelligence players. Let me first state for the record that I have a natural bias towards Oracle, being the Oracle BI lead at Accenture. But here is why I believe OBIEE needs to be on everyone’s short list.

Quite simply, the market is changing: There is a clear shift among CIO’s and the analyst community from a “build” to a “buy” mentality for enterprise solutions. Oracle bet big on this shift when it acquired Siebel and Hyperion, and that bet is now paying off. For a number of years now, no one would seriously suggest buying Visual Studio and building a call center application from scratch. CIOs are just now beginning to apply that same logic to analytical applications, and are questioning the wisdom of licensing a business intelligence platform (read "development environment") and building an analytical application from scratch.