Industry news

Business leaders have once again been issued with a wake-up call regarding their IT supply chain. A new study suggests that most firms have too much confidence in their mission-critical IT contractors, with half of leaders admitting that while it could lead to outages, they are not routinely assessing their suppliers.

At the start of 2023, researchers found that organisations were too trusting of Managed Service Providers (MSPs). Despite 20% of companies hit by cyber-attacked in the last year saying attacks had come through MSPs, just four-in-ten believed they need to make sure MSPs were certified in providing cyber security essentials, while only one-third agreed personnel of providers should undergo security checks before taking on such work.

Read more on Consultancy UK here.

Public procurement laws are changing. The UK Government’s Procurement Bill is working its way through Parliament and could now be introduced as early as the end of 2023.

In this briefing, David Hansom of Clyde & Co and Susan Hilgers of Proxima look at what is changing and what you can do now to prepare for the biggest changes to procurement practice since 2015.

Read more on Civil Service World here.

TTEC Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTEC), one of the largest global customer experience (CX) technology and services innovators for end-to-end digital CX solutions, today announced that Adam Foster has been named President of TTEC EMEA.

"Our industry is rapidly evolving and ever more global. TTEC is committed to driving significant growth across Europe, Middle East, and Africa and we will continue to invest in top talent. That's why I am thrilled to welcome Adam Foster to the TTEC family," said Ken Tuchman, Chairman and CEO, TTEC.

Ken continued, "With a strong track record of executing digitally enabled growth strategies, Adam will be integral to connecting TTEC's broad set of capabilities–from CX technology to outsourcing excellence–for clients across the region."

Read more on TTEC here.

TCS’s BaNCS platform continues to be extremely popular with UK Life and Pensions providers as long-term client the Phoenix Group signs to extend its use across its latest acquisition.

Phoenix Group is a key client for TCS with a relationship going back 18+ years, having started life as a specialist consolidator of life insurance and pension funds that are closed to new business (so called ‘Zombie funds’). Alongside this, it has developed an ‘open book’ business which creates and underwrites new saving and retirement products underpinned by a strategic partnership with Standard Life Aberdeen following Phoenix Group’s acquisition of Standard Life Assurance Limited in 2018, and which signed with TCS in 2019 (see TCS purple patch continues).

Read more on TechMarketView here. 

We saw a further round of layoff announcements yesterday, as yet more companies look to reduce costs and re-prioritise resources. Revenue growth and net income have come under increasing pressure for many organisations due to a post-pandemic slowdown and rising inflation.

Read more at TechMarketView here.

We all certainly know that business and government leaders have been challenged by a digital skills shortage for years. The scarcity of tech talent has been caused, in part, by the rapid business changes of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the effects of COVID-19 and the Great Resignation that followed. Now, with the added threat of economic recession, the digital skills gap has only gotten harder to fill. The 2022 Digital Leadership  report published by Nash found almost 70 percent of digital leaders globally felt they couldn’t keep up with tech trends due to a lack of skilled labor. 

During this Fourth Industrial Revolution, more and more companies have gone from just talking about the need to transform to primarily digital processes and practices to beginning their journey. Unfortunately, many are finding they have not yet created, hired and grown the technical talent they need. These digital transformation challenges were also accelerated by COVID-19 with companies having to learn to sell, serve customers and run their business remotely. And of course, the pandemic also caused many people to reassess their work/life balance and professional priorities. 

Read more on Talent Management here.

The investment underpins the ongoing alliance to help UK clients digitally transform their business through Google Cloud’s leading technology

Building on KPMG’s global alliance with Google Cloud, KPMG in the UK has announced a new five-year agreement focused on further enabling its professionals to help enterprises transform their businesses with Google Cloud technologies and solutions. 

This relationship expansion will strengthen KPMG’s emphasis in the UK market on cloud transformation, sustainability, mainframe modernisation with Google Cloud’s Dual Run, cyber security managed services and innovation. The investment reflects KPMG firms’ continued strategy to invest in technology and enhance their current portfolio of strategic alliances around the world.

Read more on Technology Magazine here.

American tech giant Dell Technologies is preparing to lay off around 6,650 workers due to a decline in the global PC market.

According to Bloomberg, Dell co-CEO Jeff Clarke told employees in a memo  the firm is dealing with market conditions that "continue to erode with an uncertain future."

He added that earlier cost-cutting measures, such as a hiring freeze and travel restrictions, are no longer sufficient.

"We've navigated economic downturns before and we've emerged stronger," Clarke wrote.

"We will be ready when the market rebounds."

Read more on Computer Weekly here.

Pichai says it is exciting to work on technologies that truly help people

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, on Monday announced its AI chatbot technology called "Bard", which the company claims will provide "fresh, high-quality responses" to users' queries by drawing on information from the web.

In a blog post announcing the initiative, Google CEO Sundar Pichai called the programme an "experimental conversational AI service" that will be made available to the public in the coming weeks.

"We've been working on an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, that we're calling Bard. And today, we're taking another step forward by opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks," Pichai wrote.

Read more on Computer Weekly here.

Experts have released their latest supply chain trends, revealing an obsession with risk resilience, and who can blame them? A swath of predictions mirror the pressing concerns of a business world in search of safer harbors during turbulent times. In a recent Gartner survey of supply chain organizations, respondents said their top four priorities were commercial growth from the supply chain, real-time supply chain execution, authentic fulfillment of ESG commitments, and flexible work experiences. Here’s a quick recap of perspectives from these researchers and others forecasting how supply chain leaders will manage the challenges of 2023.

Read more on Forbes here.