• Aegis Australia has appointed a new CEO with 20-year customer contact executive Andrew Hume taking over the reins.
• Datacentre Africa, the premier regional event for IT infrastructure, will take place in Johannesburg 26-27 June 2013. Thinking differently about data centres provides the focus for this year’s Datacentre Africa (http://www.datacentreafrica.com)

By Matthew Hall

Businesses and customers are looking for each other in the wrong way.

Is the traditional call centre finished as a customer service platform now that social media and crowd help are the new fashion?

Strutting the floor at a promotional event for Salesforce.com in New York earlier this year Marc Benioff, the cloud computing company’s founder and chief executive, declared landline call centres antiquated, if not entirely deceased.

Benioff would say that – Salesforce sells products enabled by social and mobile technology. That aside, he also has a point. As communication technology rapidly develops, Benioff said businesses must rethink how they approach servicing customers.

Significant numbers of customers today will turn to online FAQs, email, instant messaging, online forums, and virtual agents rather than pick up a phone.

Research from industry analyst Forrester suggested that while a majority of customers in the US at least still use the telephone for customer service, that number is declining. Forrester’s research indicated Twitter was the least-used but fastest-growing channel for customer service.

“There is so much change, there is so much happening today in the world, that the ability to listen to customers, empathise with them and understand them, is the single most important thing that we can do,” Benioff said.

More than 4.5 billion people are connected on social networks, according to Forrester, and each is connecting through social media with friends and colleagues both at home and at work. That’s not only a big audience for enterprise customer service it is a huge platform for customer relations. The market is also growing – more than 1.7 billion touch devices were shipped in 2012.

Research in Australia, however, suggests that while businesses are trying to use social media for customer service, consumers are slower to use those channels for their own benefit.

A report on Australian customer service trends by Fifth Quadrant found that businesses and customers were looking for each other in the wrong places.

Australian consumers consider Facebook to be their number one choice for customer service engagement, followed by online forums and communities, and YouTube.

Networks like Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs were the least popular options. Tweet this – according to Fifth Quadrant, more than seven in ten consumers claimed they “rarely” or “never” turn to Twitter, LinkedIn, or blogs for customer service.

Yet Twitter is used by more than three quarters of Australian organisations and businesses, perhaps tweeting at themselves rather than customers. Company blogs, websites, and online communities were ahead of Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn as preferred tools for businesses.

“Simply creating a new service channel then standing back and waiting for the customers to come won’t work,” said Chris Kirby, Fifth Quadrant’s head of research. “If organisations want to offer customer service through social media, they need to go to the networks that their customers use.”

Anecdotal evidence is inconclusive for the merits of social media over a traditional telephone. For every customer that says an issue was resolved through Twitter, another claims their tweet to a company was ignored.

There may, however, be some firmer evidence that call centres have a short-term future. Reaching out to the Philippines, US and Australia, no call centres or industry organisations, including the ATA (previously known as the Australian Teleservices Association), responded to requests for comment on this story.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/business-it/pulling-the-plug-on-call-centres-20130508-2j6m6.html#ixzz2T4LCDlUa

By Nicole Hasham, Jason Dowling

Creating highly skilled “knowledge” jobs in Sydney’s outer suburbs is likely to fail and governments should bring people closer to existing jobs, a new report says.

It calls into question decades of government policies designed to shift so-called “knowledge-intensive” jobs such as engineers, scientists and financial analysts outside central Sydney, including a $13.5 million federal government grant for the University of Western Sydney’s new health and education jobs hub.

The Productive Cities report by public policy think tank the Grattan Institute argues that knowledge-intensive companies often cluster in central locations where they can collaborate and reach the right workers. This leads to increased productivity.

But there is little evidence that creating knowledge-intensive jobs in outer suburbs is cost-effective or leads to significant numbers of long-term jobs, the report said.

“When people say we need to move the knowledge-intensive jobs from the CBD to the suburbs, that just doesn’t work, it is not how the economy works,” Grattan Cities’ program director Jane-Frances Kelly said.

“You just can’t subsidise [businesses] enough to compensate for the disadvantage they would have not being in the CBD.”

The report says cheap rents, land availability and less road congestion in outer suburbs can benefit some firms, such as those in transport and manufacturing.

But knowledge-intensive firms may lose the benefits of clustering, which can “harm our cities’ productivity and employment growth overall”.

The report also downplayed the benefits of relocating government offices, as local workers do not always fill the jobs.

It questioned policies such as the federal government’s $45 million Suburban Jobs Program, which last year provided $13.5 million to support a new University of Western Sydney jobs precinct at Werrington Park. It aims to generate 6000 jobs in areas such as health, engineering, digital communications and education.

UWS economic geography professor Phillip O’Neill said a growing number of western Sydney residents had tertiary qualifications and sought jobs closer to home. The Norwest Business Park at Baulkham Hills and the Macquarie Park Corridor at Ryde showed that “high end” job centres outside central Sydney do work, he said.

A spokeswoman for Population and Communities Minister Tony Burke said high-skilled workers also lived in the outer suburbs and “if we keep putting homes at one end of our cities and jobs at the other then the only future is gridlock”.

Ms Kelly said governments should focus on increasing access to all jobs through better transport connections and housing choices in established suburbs. In some outer suburbs only 11 per cent of jobs are within reasonable public transport travel times, compared to 53 per cent from the city centre, which risks locking many residents out of job opportunities, the report said.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/cbd-location-is-best-for-knowledge-jobs-20130505-2j14k.html#ixzz2SSeBy500

(In Photo: Ian Walker, Queensland IT Minister)

By Sylvia Pennington

Technology outsourcing ‘will continue to increase’

Hundreds of technology workers in the Queensland public sector face an uncertain future after the government reaffirmed on Thursday its intention to outsource an array of services currently delivered in-house.

The news comes in the wake of the Costello Commission of Audit into the state’s finances, which recommends the government look to outsourcing and asset sales to balance its books.

The government’s commercial service delivery vehicle CITEC and its Shared Services division employ about 500 and 250 staff respectively.

CITEC’s remit includes data centre, network and internet service provision, while Shared Services manages and supports the majority of the state’s finance and human resources systems and processes.

Queensland Minister for Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts Ian Walker, who oversees both units, told IT Pro the private sector would be given the opportunity to compete for this work as soon as possible.

The move would “ensure service meets up to external standards”, Mr Walker said.

Agencies needed to stop providing services and become procurement managers, Mr Walker said.

Details on how the state will move from one model to another, including whether departments will chose their own suppliers or be herded into whole-of-government arrangements, are yet to be determined.

Mr Walker said his department wanted to proceed quickly but cautiously with the transformation process and would formulate “a proper plan to move from one model to another”.

The government was keen to avoid further costly Queensland Health payroll-type debacles, Walker said.

Affected staff would be kept informed, he added: “We will talk it through with them and work out the detail”.

Nitty gritty has been conspicuous by its absence in the government’s ICT strategy to date, although motherhood statements and hyperbole have been in ready supply.

It’s been a year since Walker’s predecessor Ros Bates announced a $5.2 million audit into the state’s aging ICT systems. Originally due to be handed down last October, the audit report has yet to make it to Cabinet and may never be released publicly. Mr Walker took on the job in February promising to ring in changes.

Last September, Ms Bates described the state’s ICT infrastructure as a “1972 Ford Falcon clunker” with a $6 billion repair bill. Edited highlights of the audit report revealed the government runs 1730 applications, most of them bespoke and at least 10 years old, and a slew of duplicated systems.

The prospect of an upcoming outsourcing bonanza comes as welcome news to the local ICT sector, which has seen public sector work dry to a trickle in the past 12 months.

Slow times have compounded the woes of hundreds of local ICT workers who found themselves on the jobs queue after the government slashed hundreds of contract roles shortly after coming to power.

The managing director of the listed IT services company Data 3, John Grant, said the government faced the difficult agenda of reinvigorating the local economy and cutting costs within government.

Pushing more revenue into the private sector could help achieve both goals, Mr Grant argued.

“It’s good to give the industry the opportunity to see some positive future,” he said.

“I don’t want to advocate public sector jobs to be lost but people have to find their place in the transformation.”

While some ICT workers might fear the changes, they needed to “look out the windscreen, not in the rear-view mirror”, Mr Grant said.

Whether the government will require ICT work to be conducted in Queensland remains to be seen.

Offshoring has become a favourite means of containing costs for many large private sector organisations including big banks. The practice has drawn the ire of many in the ICT sector who say it erodes wages and prospects for local technology workers.

In February, Brisbane City Council workers took to the streets to protest against the outsourcing of 55 IT jobs to HCL, a company based in India, to save $7.9 million.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/government-it/uncertainty-as-government-vows-to-outsource-more-tech-services-20130502-2iuzo.html#ixzz2SHPzPwdb

Forget zombies. The data crunchers are invading Hollywood.

The same kind of numbers analysis that has reshaped areas like politics and online marketing is increasingly being used by the entertainment industry.

Netflix tells customers what to rent based on algorithms that analyse previous selections. Pandora does the same with music, and studios have started using Facebook “likes” and online trailer views to mould advertising and even films.

Now, the slicing and dicing is seeping into one of the last corners of Hollywood where creativity and old-fashioned instinct still hold sway: the screenplay.

A chain-smoking former statistics professor named Vinny Bruzzese – “the reigning mad scientist of Hollywood”, in the words of one studio customer – has started to aggressively pitch a service he calls “script new evaluation”. For as much as $US20,000 per script, Bruzzese and a team of analysts compare the story structure and genre of a draft script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success. His company, Worldwide Motion Picture Group, also digs into an extensive database of focus-group results for similar films and surveys 1500 potential moviegoers. What do you like? What should be changed?

“Demons in horror movies can target people or be summoned,” Bruzzese says in a gravelly voice, by way of example.

“If it’s a targeting demon, you are likely to have much higher opening-weekend sales than if it’s summoned. So get rid of that Ouija board scene.”

Bowling scenes tend to pop up in films that fizzle, Bruzzese, 39, continues. Therefore it is statistically unwise to include one in your script. “A cursed superhero never sells as well as a guardian superhero,” one like Superman who acts as a protector, he adds.

His recommendations, delivered in a 20-to 30-page report, might range from minor tightening to substantial rewrites: More people would relate to this character if she had a sympathetic sidekick, for instance.

Script “doctors”, as Hollywood refers to writing consultants, have long worked quietly on movie assembly lines. But many top screenwriters – the kind who attain exalted status in the industry, even if they remain largely unknown to the multiplex masses – reject Bruzzese’s statistical intrusion into their craft.

“This is my worst nightmare” says Ol Parker, a writer whose film credits include The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. “It’s the enemy of creativity, nothing more than an attempt to mimic that which has worked before. It can only result in an increasingly bland homogenisation, a pell-mell rush for the middle of the road.”

Parker draws a breath. “Look, I’d take a suggestion from my grandmother if I thought it would improve a film I was writing,” he says. “But this feels like the studio would listen to my grandmother before me, and that is terrifying.”

But a lot of producers, studio executives and major film financiers disagree. Already they have quietly hired Bruzzese’s company to analyse about 100 scripts, including an early treatment for Oz the Great and Powerful, which has taken in $US484.8 million worldwide.

Bruzzese, who is one of very few, if not the only entrepreneur to use this form of script analysis, is plotting to take it to Broadway and television now that he has success in movies.

“It takes a lot of the risk out of what I do,” says Scott Steindorff, a producer who used Bruzzese to evaluate the script for The Lincoln Lawyer, a hit 2011 crime drama. “Everyone is going to be doing this soon. The only people who are resistant are the writers: ‘I’m making art, I can’t possibly do this’.”

Audience research has been known to save a movie, but it has also famously missed the mark. Opinion surveys – “idiot cards”, as some unimpressed directors call them – indicated that Fight Club would be the flop of the century. It took in more than $US100 million worldwide.

But as the stakes of making movies become ever higher, Hollywood leans ever harder on research to minimise guesswork. Moreover, studios have trimmed spending on internal script development. Bruzzese is also pitching script analysis to studios as a duck-and-cover technique – for “when the inevitable argument of ‘I am not going to take the blame if this movie doesn’t work’ comes up,” his website says.

Bruzzese, who taught statistics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook on Long Island before moving into movie research about a decade ago, motivated by a desire for more money and a childhood love of movies.

He acknowledges that many writers are “skittish” about his service. But he counters that it is not as threatening as it may sound.

“This is just advice, and you can use all of it, some of it or none of it,” he says.

But ignore it at your peril, according to one production executive. Motion Picture Group analysed the script for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, said the executive, who worked on the film, but the production companies that supplied it to 20th Century Fox did not heed all of the advice. The movie flopped. Bruzzese declines to comment.

Bruzzese emphasises that his script analysis is not done by machines. His reports rely on statistics and survey results, but before evaluating a script he meets the writer or writers to “hear and understand the creative vision, so our analysis can be contextualised,” he says.

But he is also unapologetic about his focus on financial outcomes. “I understand that writing is an art, and I deeply respect that,” he says. “But the earlier you get in with testing and research, the more successful movies you will make.”

The service actually gives writers more control over their work, says Mark Gill, president of Millennium Films and a client. In traditional testing, the kind done when a film is almost complete, the writer is typically no longer involved. With script testing, the writer can still control changes.

One Oscar-winning writer who, at the insistence of a producer, had a script analysed by Bruzzese, said his initial concerns proved unfounded.

“It was a complete shock, the best notes on a draft that I have ever received,” said the writer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing his reputation.

Script analysis is new enough to remain a bit of a Hollywood taboo. Major film financiers and advisers such as Houlihan Lokey confirmed that they had used the service, but declined to speak on the record about it. The six major Hollywood movie studios declined to comment.

But doors are opening for Bruzzese nonetheless, in part because he is such a character. For instance, he bills himself as a distant relative of Einstein’s, a claim that is unverifiable but never fails to impress studio executives.

Bruzzese, a movie enthusiast with a seemingly encyclopaedic memory of screenplays, also speaks bluntly, a rarity in Hollywood.

“All screenwriters think their babies are beautiful,” he said, taking a chug of Diet Dr Pepper followed by a gulp of Diet Coke and a drag on a Camel.

“I’m here to tell it like it is: Some babies are ugly.”

New York Times

Robot recruiters

THE problem with human-resource managers is that they are human. They have biases; they make mistakes. But with better tools, they can make better hiring decisions, say advocates of “big data”. Software that crunches piles of information can spot things that may not be apparent to the naked eye. In the case of hiring American workers who toil by the hour, number-crunching has uncovered some surprising correlations.

For instance, people who fill out online job applications using browsers that did not come with the computer (such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on a Windows PC) but had to be deliberately installed (like Firefox or Google’s Chrome) perform better and change jobs less often.

It could just be coincidence, but some analysts think that people who bother to install a new browser may be the sort who take the time to reach informed decisions. Such people should be better employees. Evolv, a company that monitors recruitment and workplace data, pored over nearly 3m data points from more than 30,000 employees to find this nugget.

Some 60% of American workers earn hourly wages. Of these, about half change jobs each year. So firms that employ lots of unskilled workers, such as supermarkets and fast-food chains, have to vet heaps—sometimes millions—of applications every year. Making the process more efficient could yield big payoffs.

Evolv mines mountains of data. If a client operates call centres, for example, Evolv keeps daily tabs on such things as how long each employee takes to answer a customer’s query. It then relates actual performance to traits that were visible during recruitment.

Some insights are counter-intuitive. For instance, firms routinely cull job candidates with a criminal record. Yet the data suggest that for certain jobs there is no correlation with work performance. Indeed, for customer-support calls, people with a criminal background actually perform a bit better. Likewise, many HR departments automatically eliminate candidates who have hopped from job to job. But a recent analysis of 100,000 call-centre workers showed that those who had job-hopped in the past were no more likely to quit quickly than those who had not.

Working with Xerox, a maker of printers, Evolv found that one of the best predictors that a customer-service employee will stick with a job is that he lives nearby and can get to work easily. These and other findings helped Xerox cut attrition by a fifth in a pilot programme that has since been extended. It also found that workers who had joined one or two social networks tended to stay in a job for longer. Those who belonged to four or more social networks did not.

There is no point asking jobseekers if they are honest. But surveys can measure honesty indirectly, by asking questions like “How good at computers are you?” and later: “What does control-V do on a word-processing programme?” A study of 20,000 workers showed that more honest people tend to perform better and stay at the job longer. For some reason, however, they make less effective salespeople.

Algorithms and big data are powerful tools. Wisely used, they can help match the right people with the right jobs. But they must be designed and used by humans, so they can go horribly wrong. Peter Cappelli of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business recalls a case where the software rejected every one of many good applicants for a job because the firm in question had specified that they must have held a particular job title—one that existed at no other company.

From the Economist -Business

By Robert De Neufville

Where did America’s workers go? The future of the American economy may hinge on the answer.

The US economy added 165,000 new jobs in April and the unemployment rate fell to 7.5%. But labour force participation remained low. In fact, the labour force participation rate fell three points since the end of 2008. In April, just 63.6% of Americans 16 and over were working or looking for work. Although the unemployment rate fell steadily over the last three years, people who have given up looking for work aren’t counted among the unemployed. The fact is that a smaller percentage of Americans are working now than at any time since the 1970s.

Labour force participation rose in America—and in other advanced economies—more or less steadily from the end of the 1960s to the early 2000s as more and more women began to work. The percent of men in the workforce dropped over the same period, but not as quickly as percent of women in the workforce rose. That net increase in labour force participation is one of the major reasons the US economy grew so much over that period, since more workers means more production. But in the early 2000s the participation rate of women levelled off around 60%, and total participation began to go back down.

In other words, the influx of new workers that helped make America rich in the last century has begun to reverse. There were always limits to how much the labour force could grow. You can’t have more than 100% of the population working, after all. And in general labour force participation tends to be lower in rich countries, where more people can afford not to work if they choose. But the drop in labour force participation in America is part of a troubling long-term trend, which has been only been amplified by recent economic problems.

Part of the explanation for the drop in labour force participation is demographic. Baby Boomers began to reach retirement age right around the start of the recession. The recession probably led many of Americans to retire earlier than they planned (Why look for a new job when you were planning to retire in a few years?), but the truth is that many of them were planning to leave the workforce soon anyway. For many Americans, it wasn’t that they couldn’t find work, but they were ready not to work anymore.

Labour force participation has also dropped among Americans in their prime working years. It declined most sharply during the recession. But for reasons that are unclear it has been falling steadily since the end of the 1990s. The drop in labour force participation among Americans 25-54 means there are roughly 3 million fewer workers today than there would be if it had stayed at peak levels.

The problem is that fewer workers means a smaller economy. It means—roughly speaking—fewer people producing goods and services for the population as a whole. Some Americans of prime working age are likely to return to work if the economy improves and better, higher-paying jobs become available. But with Americans living longer and birth rates staying low, the workers lost to retirement probably aren’t coming back. As Americans age, demands on the social security and health care systems will increase while the tax base shrinks. To avoid deficits, the country will probably have either to raise taxes on those are working or cut benefits for those who have retired or can’t find work.

America might still be able to maintain its historical rate of growth. But it will be hard. A 2011 McKinsey Global Institute report estimated that productivity would have to increase 34%—to a level we haven’t since the 1960s—just to compensate for the aging of the population. Barring some dramatic industrial breakthrough it’s not clear where that much new productivity could come from. In other words, the recession may be over, but that doesn’t mean the boom times are coming back.

Follow me on Twitter: @rdeneufville

Video 

As people are increasingly overloaded with information, the trend is for B2B websites and presentations to contain short, sharp, high-impact videos, which conveys the seller’s key messages and entices prospects to find out more. Sometimes this is in the form of a “why us” message from the CEO, a testimonial from a key customer, or a fun intro to your business. Videos aren’t always expensive to produce, yet when made well they go a long way to convey the image of a professional company moving with the times. Stand out from the crowd and think about including a link to your video clip in introductory emails to new prospects.

Media releases
If a company’s doing their homework on you, it may be a cause of concern to them if the latest press release on your website is dated 2010! Companies take confidence in regular good news stories, as a sign that your company is doing well, and here to stay! Parade your success in the market with media releases, where new clients are agreeable, and consider attaching the latest release as a PS on emails to new prospects. PR is an essential ingredient to the marketing mix and can be implemented with modest budgets if not in-house.

Case studies
If your company can reference similar experience to the needs of your prospect, then capture this in the form of a one page, easy-to-digest case study. Avoid just describing the services you provided, focus also on the benefits you delivered. Have a library of case studies at your fingertips to wheel out to appropriate leads.

Checklist
While each new lead requires a custom approach, have a checklist of common questions which will enable you to get to the next step – whether a proposal or meeting – as quickly as possible. Minimise situations where you have to go back with questions in a piecemeal fashion. Companies often appreciate if you can email them a checklist of everything you need to know to be able to formulate a proposal.

Proofreader
One of the greatest pitfalls when contacting a new business lead is an email riddled with spelling or grammatical errors. Take the time to re-read your email before clicking send! The same goes for responses to requests for information and proposals – it pays to proofread thoroughly. While spelling may not be a stated evaluation criterion, a poorly written document can leave an indelible, negative impression.

• South Africa has won the National Outsourcing Association (UK) – Offshoring Destination of the Year in 2013, for the second year in a row.  Congratulations South Africa!

  See: http://thesauce.net.au/south-africa-nominated-for-european-outsourcing-award

• Avalon Airport which is 56 kilometres south-west of Melbourne is poised to become Melbourne’s second international airport after the Australian and Philippines governments cleared the way for direct flights in and out of there. Australia and the Philippines signed a memorandum of understanding on Friday that a Philippines airline could fly directly between Manila and Avalon airports once a day. Justin Giddings, Avalon airport’s chief executive, said the next step in achieving international status was locking in an agreement with a Philippines airline, then establish customs and quarantine facilities. He said this would pave the way to attract airlines from other countries. “We are also seeking air rights to Hong Kong, Malaysia and India.”
• Australia – Hits 23 Million – Australia’s population is about to tick past the 23 million mark as the country continues to grow at the fastest rate in the developed world.
• For the fourth consecutive year, IDC ranked IBM number one in worldwide market share for enterprise social software. Social networking adoption continues to soar as businesses look to transform their organization into a smarter enterprise that is capable of empowering a global workforce and transforming client experiences.  According to IDC, the worldwide enterprise social market segment reached 1.0 billion in 2012, representing growth of 25 percent over 2011.
• A Deutsche Bank report illustrated what many suspect – whether catching public transport, ordering a beer or buying medicine to battle a cold, Australians pay among the highest prices on the planet. The Deutsche report uses prices in New York as a baseline, and converts all prices to $US. It echoes the findings of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual Worldwide Cost of Living survey, which ranked Sydney and Melbourne as the third- and equal-fourth most expensive cities in the world to live. Labour costs on average, three times more than in Britain. Wages in Australia are about 50 per cent higher than in the US or New Zealand, and average weekly earnings have risen roughly 3.5 per cent a year for the past five years. Australian wages have outstripped inflation for more than a decade.

(In photo: Benedict Hernandez, Executive Committee Chairman of the Information Technology and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP))

The Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP) announced the formal change of its name to Information Technology and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP) to accurately reflect the range of information technology and business process management (IT-BPM) services provided from the Philippines.

“This move represents the association’s strong commitment to the entire outsourcing sector, where buyers are looking increasingly at bundled IT-BPM services options. We recognize that IT is an important component of these options,” said Benedict Hernandez, outgoing IBPAP president and CEO.

According to Hernandez, who will officially assume the role of IBPAP chairman of the Executive Committee this month, the name change aims to represent the association in the global IT market since members serve customers for both business process services and information technology. “Changing our name to IBPAP will help preserve as well as expand the Philippine industry’s brand. The new name also emphasizes the less-known fact that we provide the whole spectrum of world-class services from here including corporate and complex services, creative processes and products, customer relations and health care information management, and software product development,” he said.

IBPAP also elected a new board of trustees in its recent annual meeting. The newly elected IBPAP trustees representing industry players are Alfredo Ayala, president and CEO of LiveIt Investments Ltd; Rainerio Borja, president of Expert Global Solutions Philippines and lead operations at the NCO Group; Carlo José, president and head of GSC Operations-Philippines of the HSBC Global Resourcing; Danilo Reyes, country manager of Genpact; and Manolito Tayag, country managing director of Accenture Philippines. Trustees elected to represent the support industry were Gil Genio, head of Business and International Markets of Globe; Juan Victor Hernandez, vice president of PLDT and head of Alpha Enterprise; and David Leechiu, regional director and country manager of Jones Lang LaSalle.

“With approximately 300 industry and support industry members and five partner associations, IBPAP has played a pivotal role in sustaining rapid growth of the IT-BPM and GIC industry,” said Hernandez. “With a new board of trustees, IBPAP will continue to work to drive favorable outcomes across multiple areas to achieve the US$25 billion revenue goal by 2016.”

Hernandez also encouraged industry members and stakeholders to work together to ensure an enduring supply of high-quality labor, support service innovation, and country visibility.

“Guided by our industry road map, there were a lot of things we accomplished in 2012. We now have a breadth of IT-BPM voice and non-voice services that continue to grow year in, year out. For 2013, we must keep building our momentum and continue to provide the right business environment,” said Hernandez.

Alfredo Ayala, current IBPAP chairman and newly elected trustee, said that it has been a privilege to be part of the impressive growth of the industry. “The team has always done a commendable job in making sure that the industry is up to speed on securing more employment opportunities and in maintaining the lead in global voice and non-voice services,” said Ayala.

About the Information Technology and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP)

The Information Technology and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP) is the enabling association for the information technology and business process management (IT-BPM) and global in-house center (GIC) industry in the Philippines. IBPAP serves as the one-stop information and advocacy gateway for the industry. With approximately 300 industry and support-industry members, including five associations—the Animation Council of the Philippines, Inc., Contact Center Association of the Philippines, Game Developers Association of the Philippines, Healthcare Information Management Outsourcing Association of the Philippines, and Philippine Software Industry Association—IBPAP plays a pivotal role in sustaining rapid growth of the IT-BPM and GIC industry by working to ensure an enduring supply of high-quality labor, supporting service innovation, and providing country visibility.

IBPAP assists investors in setting up operations easily and quickly in the Philippines. Relevant research, introductions to key government and industry officials, and a series of briefings at each step of the investment process ensure a seamless development process. On-going support is provided through a wide variety of initiatives, including programs for HR development, business development, and on-going knowledge sharing and networking opportunities.

By Martin Conboy

Dr. Thomas Frey, a futurist and Executive Director at the DaVinci Institute and Google’s top rated futurist speaker, has a theory around the secret language of the future. His theory is about how the future gets created. He claims that we could influence the future by using social media and other unusual techniques for both understanding and gaining control of our own futures.

Frey puts forward a proposition that in the future, workgroups would come together in much the same way that Hollywood comes together to make a movie and then break up after the project is over. “The future gets created in the minds of everyone around us. Virtually everyone has a hand in it, but not all contributions are equal. As you might imagine, a small group of people armed with powerful ideas can make a disproportionately large impact.”

“But creating the future needs to involve much more than just ideas. The ideas create a starting point but need to be put into a visual context, massaged, enhanced, and somehow made to spring to life.”
Frey speaks about ‘Business Colonies’. Business colonies are an evolving, new kind of organisational structure designed around matching talent with pending work projects. The colonies will revolve around some combination of resident people based in a physical facility and a non-resident virtual workforce. Some will forego the cost of the physical facility completely, opting instead to form around an entirely virtual communications structure.

In an increasingly mobile world-where work is outsourced and international partnerships form quickly and easily-workers need to be able to collaborate with colleagues, share information, and access programs just as easily from a distant continent as from the cubicle next door.

Most will be organised around a topical area best suited for the talent base of the core team. As an example, a team of photonics engineers will attract projects best suited for that kind of talent. Likewise, a working group of programmers specialising in computer gaming applications will serve as a magnet for new gaming projects. Its not a leap of faith to think of specialist BPO skills like animation, web development, F&A organized around skills located in a distinct geographical location that will attract projects and on going work.

In some instances, large corporations will launch their own business colonies as a way to expand capability without adding to their headcount. Staffed with a few project managers, the company will use the colony as a proving ground for experimental assignments best performed outside of the cultural bounds of existing workflow.

The future of work will be different, in fact it already is, People are leveraging technology to work in new ways and want the flexibility to work when they want, where they want and with whom they want. There will always be more talent and more ideas outside your organization and this new work ‘hubs’ are springing up in cities all over the world. Individuals can participate in a globally connected local community via online platforms like Yamma. They can collaborate and network and contribute ideas with others who have similar interests, passions or hobbies. In the future work will go to where the skills are and notion of humans going to CBD hubs will seem old fashioned and quaint.

Mathematicians and neuroscientists!

BIG Data starting to come into mainstream

Big data. There’s no agreement on exactly what it is; yet companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on it and claiming good returns. And when it comes to spend, a handful of Australian companies are up there with the leaders.

Those are some of the conclusions from a study into big data by Tata Consulting Services for which it surveyed 1217 companies in eight countries in four regions of the world.

Big data loosely defines the collection and analysis of myriad unrelated data sources with the aim of drawing meaningful business insights.

TCS vice-president and chief technology officer K. Ananth Krishnan told IT Pro: ”Australia turns out to be the highest in terms of median spending per company, $50 million.” The median spending in the US was $9 million a company.

However, Krishnan said that, overall, Australia had one of the lowest rates of big data usage. ”The way I would interpret this is that those companies that have started have really dived in with both feet to the extent that they are way ahead of everybody else in the world.”

According to the report, only 32 per cent of Australian respondents said they had undertaken big data initiatives in 2012. The overall figure for the 1217 companies surveyed globally was 53 per cent. India led with 70 per cent, followed by Mexico and the US with 68 per cent. One US company alone, General Electric, has pledged $US1 billion to big data over the next four years.

Frost & Sullivan research analyst Vu Anh Tien agreed that a number of large companies in Australia were making substantial use of big data analytics but the relatively low uptake was the result of skepticism and uncertainty.

Hiring practices, training, and management will draw from a deeper understanding of neuroscience and complex behavioural algorithms. Already, start-ups have emerged that promise to train individuals to increase their mental acuity, focus, and efficiency based on brain science. Company- specific algorithms will be developed for software that vets new applicants based on detailed questionnaires. As science comes to work, human resource managers will need to become versed in these new sciences. While most HR personnel will likely not be scientists, they will need to be able to understand the language of these disciplines and collaborate with scientists in order to assess and implement some of the new tools. A manager may not know how to design Monte Carlo simulations to optimise workflow, but he must be able to speak the language of mathematicians to understand the theory behind suggested methods.

See next story about Big Data and BPO

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/spending-big-on-big-data-20130422-2iaho.html#ixzz2RhE1iRyd