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.

Subscribe

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.

Subscribe

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.

Subscribe

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.

Subscribe

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.

Subscribe

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.

Subscribe

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.