Industry news

  • 11 Jan 2017 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    An interesting article on the future of procurement and sourcing from betterbuyingconcepts.com. The digital revolution is quickly changing the objectives of a Chief Sourcing Officer as procurement must play a larger role in sourcing new solutions and service offerings. This article from betterbuyingconcepts.com looks at the changes that the profession is undergoing and the new priorities that are emerging in the sector.

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  • 10 Jan 2017 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    Jim Hemmington, Procurement Director at the BBC tells us about how sourcing and the Global Sourcing Standard has helped the BBC and saved the organisation millions.

    "With the Digital age coming, competition is growing for the BBC – we had fixed income via the Licence Fee income but big competitors with big bags of cash were coming thick and fast from places we never even expected - today Netflix is one of our most feared competitors.

    So we needed drastic action. Part of that action was this - a programme of rapid outsourcing. That started in 1996 with Finance and now includes activities like collection of the Licence fee, audience services, technology, playout of our channels, and transmission.

    Because we did so much outsourcing relatively quickly we learned quickly and now some of our contracts are 2nd even 3rd generation. We have found and, still find, incidences where we didn’t really know best practice, or how to get to it. It can be very confusing – for example we have seen suppliers in the same market telling us to measure different things and consequently some contracts having 100s of KPIs and others having just a handful. And in the same vein in the area of risk, we found some suppliers enthusiastically taking on risk, like volume risk, while others told us it would be cheaper to manage the risk itself. But while we continued to address these types of issues and thought we had become excellent at outsourcing, we didn’t really know how good we were, so I wanted to find experts that could check our work and appraise what we were doing objectively. That brought us to the NOA (now GSA).

    So first what was the process? What did we find in going through accreditation and achieving the standard?

    The benefits are compelling. For the BBC if we can achieve the improvements identified from the accreditation process, and I am confident we will, I expect to see not only better and more collaborative relationships emerging as a result, but reduced acquisition costs of between 4-7%, that could convert across our entire outsourced portfolio into annual savings of £24m (4%) or £42m (7%) for the BBC, or 5 quality dramas (Night Manager or Poldark, Happy Valley), at a time when we are having to cut services.

    But, also, I’m so pleased to have the opportunity to be a part of the Standards Advisory Group, promoting the standard and the accreditation process, to achieve it, because it would be fantastic to see it in action and help establish the obvious benefits that could be played out right across the industry for buyers and service providers alike.

    I’m already supporting Kerry Hallard in discussions with the UK’s National Audit Office, to implement the standard across the public sector. Imagine the impact of a 4-7% across the UK Government’s outsourced spend of £15b pa (£1b over in savings), plus what could be a near to equivalent saving on the supply side. But it’s not just applicable to the big organisations doing big deals, it will give equally give buyers and suppliers of all sizes, especially smaller organisations where cost is such a huge driver, a means to create value and help sustain their business relationships more efficiently and make these organisations more competitive. The impact globally of course could be breath-taking! The GSA standard is a development with which the future must reckon and reckon seriously! Why would you not take part!"

    If you want to learn more about best practice in sourcing why not attend the GSA workshop Outsourcing lifecycle and best practice.

  • 9 Jan 2017 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    Accenture and Blue Prism, a leading provider of enterprise robotic process automation (RPA) software, are working together to provide RPA solutions to help organizations across industries automate a wide range of business processes for reduced costs, improved compliance and increased productivity. More than 40 organizations have already selected Accenture and Blue Prism to help achieve this, including international retailer Circle K and Raiffeisen Bank International. The alliance combines Accenture’s global reach and cross industry expertise with Blue Prism’s RPA software robots to provide the next generation of the “digital workforce”.

    To read more, click here.

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  • 9 Jan 2017 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    The car industry is seemingly bowing to pressure from the President-Elect with Fiat-Chrysler and Ford changing investment plans, focusing on US manufacturing as oppose to factories in Mexico. Many will see this as the beginning of a more inward-looking America which could spell problems for the sourcing industry. Maybe the offshoring industry will take a hit as the US looks to focus on ‘made in the USA’ but domestic providers could see real growth. Adapting to the market is one of the sourcing industries most valuable characteristics, it may need it to face a future with Mr Trump.

    To read more, click here.

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  • 5 Jan 2017 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    2016 was a record year for new car sales according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) with sales 2% higher than in 2015, the previous high. However, the SMMT are predicting a weaker performance this year thanks in part to the falling value of the pound pushing up domestic prices. More than 85% of UK cars are imported, the loss of access to the single market could see some cars gain over £1,500 in price.

    To read the report by the SMMT, please click here.

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  • 5 Jan 2017 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    IBM has released predictions for five scientific advancements and changes that will affect our lives in the next five years. IBM have based their predictions around changing market and social trends beside research from IBM’s own research labs. The five predictions include the effects of AI in combating mental health issues, hyperimaging, macroscopes, smart sensors and medical labs “on a chip” that will serve as nanotechnology health detectives.

    To read the full report on the predictions from IBM, click here.

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  • 5 Jan 2017 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    AI has been in our homes for years but thanks to Amazon’s Alexa we can now all experience a AI that not long ago would have featured in science fiction. ComputerWeekly.com has been considering the potential for AI in our households. Although it is early days for Amazon’s push for home AI, the potential for the future is massive, with a range of potential tasks that the programme could complete if integrated into the home.

    To read the report by ComputerWeekly.com, click here.

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  • 5 Jan 2017 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    HfS (Horses for Sources) have been investigating what is in store for the world in 2017, suggesting that the digital economy will remain the focus of growth leaving the legacy of the past world behind. It rightly suggests that the best thing is to embrace the changes and tailor education and infrastructure to the new digital world. We are in a transition phase, moving towards a digital and global economy, however some will try to fight this (some notable names of 2016 come to mind) but the foundations for this change are in place.

    To read the article by HfS, click here.

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  • 4 Jan 2017 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    We invite you to read an interview that we conducted during this year’s programming hackathon on 8 October at JCommerce. Marcin Szeliga is a data philosopher and independent consultant, who for 20 years now has worked with SQL Server on a professional level. During the break between lectures and the competition for database developers, at which he served as a mentor, he agreed to answer our questions about the future of information technology, careers of the future and artificial intelligence.

    During the inauguration lecture of our hackathon, you said that over the next 20 years the world will change more than it did over the previous 200 years. If so, then for sure a lot of professions that we know today will disappear. So which do you think will carry on or will develop anew? Which profession is the best choice, for ourselves or our children?

    First, you need to have an open mind, there is no point deluding oneself that common patterns will work in the future. I think everything will change ever faster. Perhaps those young people who have come here today to take part in the workshops and competition represent the last generation for whom driving will be a common skill. For the next generation it might just be a hobby like horseback riding for us, and most people will have cars which will drive themselves to the destination point. And that means you have to be very open to change. The most valuable professions, the most prospective, will be all the jobs that are associated with data - that's for sure. So the job of a statistician, an analyst, but also an engineer. There will also be some professions which are strictly related to the humanities, such as a psychologist, who will lend us an ear, or the arts, so the professions which either cannot be or which we will not want to be computerized.

    So then which jobs will become obsolete?

    All those in which humans had to learn some rules and now apply them, such as, for example, primary care physician, lawyer and translator. These are professions in which computers have now taken over from humans. How many of us are treated by Dr. Google? In the future, instead of blindly pestering Google, we will have a computer equipped with artificial intelligence, which actually studied medicine which means that it learned on real cases - what the symptoms are, what the causes are, what happens to a person during illness, and how to treat it. And such a computer, just as it plays chess today, will someday be able to diagnose patients - perhaps even more effectively than a human doctor.

    So apart from programmers, not many of us can sleep soundly?

    Not necessarily, because on the other hand, there are also jobs that can be computerized, but have not been. Some time ago I worked on a project for a garbage truck that gets around without a garbage man or a driver. And indeed several such garbage trucks were produced. It was a pretty good prototype, actually went round in the morning without human involvement, and the computer and sensors controlled the mechanical arm which gathered up the trash, and the garbage truck continued on. But in the end the project was abandoned. The arm didn’t always manage to pick up the trash, or the garbage bins were not always in the right place, or someone had forgotten to put them out, or they were hidden somewhere. Probably it could have been figured out, but in the end it was definitely cheaper to just hire people to do the job. And it is quite distinctive. Once upon a time in fantasy books or science-fiction movies, it was machines or robots that twisted the screws and did the worst jobs, and people functioned as managers. But now it turns out that it is often quite the opposite. In shopping centers, logistics centers and loading bays, the computer tells the worker where to go, and a man with a speaker in his ear hears: six steps to the left, two steps to the right, the third shelf, raise your hands ... These roles can be completely reversed.

    It’s a bit like in the Matrix…

    It could turn out in one of many ways, as computers are very good at making decisions and, increasingly often, we let them. For example, in the recent high-profile case of driverless cars, which from time to time will have to decide, for example, whether to kill a passenger or a pedestrian who forced his way onto the road.

    So the most important roles will be played by the programmers, right?

    Well, not quite. Because artificial intelligence is not programmed. At least not in the sense that there are sets of rules that we have input, and now the machine must abide by them. No. It works like this: at the beginning we put some data into the machine. Information, figures, some content. For example, a model of artificial intelligence, which was asked to write an essay, had previously learned the content from Wikipedia. As it read, it received the command: contribute your opinion. There were no rules which would have regulated this process in advance.

    Well, but if we do not implement rules at the start, we may completely lose control of the process. As with the example of the bot which was supposed to learn how to interact with Twitter users. The result was that it turned into a racist Hitler-lover, a ‘hater’ to all around, and had to be switched off ... And this driverless car which we talked about, based purely on data, would probably sacrifice the person who was older, in worse physical condition, or of less importance to society. Because such is the logic of data. But it is socially unacceptable.

    I think that it will. Because data changes the way of thinking, the paradigm is changing. Today we have your beliefs, your views, so in science we have hypotheses. After they have been constructed we set out to verify them, we draw some conclusions and get to work. In this model which I am talking about, there is no initial hypothesis. Only data - text, a number, a picture. Then there's the model, meaning that we have learned something from the data, first came the abstraction, then the generalization, we have some rules, but the rules are derived from the data. And only with these rules are we able to draw any conclusions. And because there is so much data, everything is somehow connected to each other, this model turns out to be not so terrible. We can tell it: learn from this data, then verify it using different data. And then something arises, which was missing in the approach based on one’s belief system: it conflicts with empirical evidence. This way I can very easily judge whether I was right or not.

    I don’t know if you know, but it has been estimated that as many as 70-90% of scientific papers, especially in the field of medicine, are falsified. The conclusions drawn are simply untrue. Why? Because someone had their hypothesis, perhaps even somehow reached it objectively, for example, he had a group of patients, he found something noteworthy. On this basis, he developed a hypothesis, then generalized it to all of us. But without the support of the data. Because really the result came first, and the data was adjusted to fit later. Because the data can easily be juggled, if we already have our conclusions before we even start.

    Okay. But people have a tendency to impose rules. Just as medicine has bioethics, which prohibits certain tests and treatments, purely because of convictions, there may be a need for such regulation in computer science, the creation of infoethics ...

    I don’t know what it would look like, but it would be very interesting. Perhaps it will turn out this way, but at this stage, however, it is still science fiction.

    Well, yes, because we are talking about artificial intelligence, which is also still just science fiction. But now let's focus on something that is more real. The analysis of Big Data. Is it ethical to analyze all the data on network activity, payments, GPS positions? Theoretically we are able to connect all this data to a particular person, say, a Social Security number and know almost everything about him, even the most personal, intimate details.

    That’s true. And it actually happened some time ago. There’s a book, Dataclysm, or data cataclysm, about how much computers know about us. The book was written by an American who ran an online dating site. It’s a specific kind of site where you can lie about certain issues, but you can’t, for example, lie about your preferences, because you want to meet a person who you find interesting, not the opposite. So there are aspects of your privacy which you have to tell the truth about, and yet these are things that you wouldn’t want to read about yourself in the paper. It’s amazing how much people are willing to tell you about themselves after all. The analysis of such data allows us to build a complete profile. As being off-line is slowly becoming a kind of luxury, so privacy is already a luxury nowadays.

    That’s why we’re starting to see regulations come into effect. The European Union ratified the ‘right to be forgotten’ last year - so these are the first steps to giving us back the rights to our data.

    That’s true. But on the other hand, we know that the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese and others are also listening to and recording all the telephone calls in the world, all emails, anything you have ever said or written. There are people who analyze and archive it for some reason. The technology already allows it - the storage and processing of data is now so cheap that governments are able to do it. Being anonymous is really a luxury, but it seems to me that people don’t really want it. They are able to put a lot about themselves out there online. It’s true that if we want to enjoy the benefits of the Internet, we need to share data. The system needs to know about us. And that’s okay. However, in using our data, we must take into account the benefits and drawbacks. We sell our data for tangible benefits. And the problem lies in the fact that in reality we sell data for below its true value. Or even for a song.

    Okay. We’ve gone off topic a bit. Since there are so many unknowns and so many threats, what decisions about the future can we make to minimize this risk, even a little? Even if only in a professional sense, where to start?

    The key word is data. There’s more and more and there’s going to be more still. We generate it, devices generate it, and soon we will process it on an even greater, unprecedented scale. So, people who deal with this data, plus those who have an open mind, will be increasingly indispensable. Anyway, for now there is a lack of them, good professionals are always lacking in these developing fields. In a year’s time they’ll be lacking even more, and in two years more still.

    But won’t it be another ‘golden direction’? Twenty years ago, parents dreamed that their children would become doctors or lawyers. Nowadays management is most fashionable. And everybody has a tertiary degree. And now they have nowhere to work. Isn’t it going to be the same all over again? What if a machine ends up taking the place of this analyst?

    That’s true. After twenty years it might actually turn out that these professions related to information technology which we know today will no longer exist. Today, however, universities are not able to turn out as many graduates as the labor market needs. Information technology today is changing the world and drives development in its entirety. It changes the scientific approach; it affects all areas of the economy and human activity. Twenty years is not all that short-term a perspective. It seems to me that during these next twenty years, the outlook in terms of IT specialists won’t worsen. And what comes next? After that, we simply don’t know, nobody can predict what will happen.

    Marcin Szeliga, Data Scientist, JCommerce SA

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  • 4 Jan 2017 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    We are not even a week into 2017 and already Brexit is dominating the headlines as it probably will do for most of the year. Top EU ambassador Sir Ivan Rogers, has resigned his post, leaving a stinging letter for his staff, hinting at the reasons for his decision. A mixed response in general to his resignation, remain campaigners calling it disaster and Brexit campaigners saying it is about time. Brexit will be a big topic for UK business in the coming 12 months as the path towards leaving the union is slowly laid down. You can read more on the story here.

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