Global technology, consulting and outsourcing firm Capgemini has been successful in increasing team productivity of the North American Marketing Services branch by using a new project management solution from the software provider Wrike.

Wrike offers an excellent platform for task organization, data management, collaboration, smart notifications, Gantt charts, e-mail integration and time-tracking in a single workspace and uses a highly efficient web interface that can save managers four hours per week.

This certainly comes in handy to a global consultancy like Capgemini, one that gets a large number of client requests every week.

Once the marketing services team started using Wrike's integrated project management software, they were able to streamline the support request management. Consequently, their on-time delivery rate and customer satisfaction grew to almost 95 percent.

Daniel Stevens, Director of Marketing Services at Capgemini North America, said:

“Wrike made the process evolve… Today, we simply add Wrike’s e-mail address to the e-mail message… and the project/task automatically appears in our team’s workspace.”

He added: “In addition to the integration capabilities with our internal request process, the biggest benefit with Wrike is the high level of visibility of the support requests that channel into our team. Wrike lets us spend less time on project management and more time on providing strategic marketing services to our internal clients.”

IT services provider Capgemini has signed a £26 million deal with Corus, one of the world's biggest steel manufacturers. The deal will allow the steel company to outsource its IT infrastructure to Capgemini.

The five-year agreement covers virtualisation, utility computing and adaptive storage facilities and will also see Corus' mainframe service moved to data storage facilities in Bristol and Rotherham.

Corus CIO Bruno Laquet discussed the relevance of IT outsourcing in achieving a company's business goals. He said:

“The quality and efficiency of our mainframe systems is of key importance to our customers and employees in ensuring that we manufacture and deliver the right products with the right quality at the right time.”

The Corus Group has headquarters in London. It was formed in 1999 and taken over by Tata Steel, part of the Tata Group, in April 2007.

Business transformation consultancy Axon has appointed Steve Peck as the new President and CEO of Axon Americas. Peck previously served as the Senior Vice President of SAP Americas & Asia-Pacific Japan.

The new Axon Americas CEO has more than two decades of experience in business transformation and implementation of best practices in organizations from different industry sectors. For the last two years, Peck's job included the development of progams with Axon's SAP partners with the goal to boost SAP's market share in North and South America and Asia.

Peck also served as President of SAP Public Services, Inc. and helped the branch snatch a significantly bigger piece of the market share.

Axon Group chief executive Steve Cardell said:

"Steve brings invaluable experience and leadership to Axon Americas. His vision, passion for excellence and focus on customer success are closely aligned to Axon's goals. Steve will be a key catalyst to Axon's continued rapid growth in the Americas region and achieving our 2010 strategy.”

Peck said he was excited to join Axon at this point in the company's history, adding:

“They have reached the scale and expertise to win engagements traditionally only undertaken by the Big 4. With over 1700 consultants worldwide dedicated to SAP, Axon has earned a reputation for rapidly delivering quality and customer value. Our world class services combined with SAP's world leading software prove we are the right choice for customers in the market."

Consulting company Detica has secured an £18m contract with the Metropolitan Police Service to provide the police force with communications support - operational PDAs, mobile data terminals and associated infrastructure - over the next five years.

Supporting infrastructure also falls under the terms of the agreement. The communications devices in question will allow police vehicles to exchange information with the central dispatcher.

Analysts say that Detica has made an excellent move in deciding to use its experience and expertise in the security market to reach out to a wider client base in the UK public sector.

Detica Group is a global business and technology consultancy that specializes in information intelligence. The company's work mostly lies in the area of security, risk management and regulatory compliance. The contracts for the Mobility Projects with the Metropolitan Police total £18.1 million.

Royal Dutch Shell is set to outsource 3,000 IT jobs – both Shell's IT staff and contractors. The company announced yesterday that it will outsource its technology and telecommunications infrastructure by signing three deals. The combined value of the deals is estimated at more than four billion U.S. dollars.

The companies that won the five-year contracts are telecommunications services provider AT&T, Frankfurt-based information technology company T-Systems, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, and global IT services provider Electronic Data Systems (EDS).

AT&T will be in charge of networking and telecommunications, T-Systems will deal with the hosting and storage, while EDS will be responsible for operational integration.

The agreements go into effect in July, when most of Shell’s IT staff and contractors will be moved to the service providers. The infrastructure division, on the other hand, will be transferred to the suppliers. Shell will keep the remaining 600 IT infrastructure employers.

According to the plan, about 560 Shell employees will be transferred to AT&T, 1,500 IT employees will leave for EDS and 900 IT experts will be joining T-Systems. Shell predicts that the number of layoffs will be minimal, "20-30 redundancies" at worst.

The oil company’s information technology organization offers IT services to 150,000 clients in 100 countries worldwide. Shell’s chief information officer Alan Matula issued the following statement following the signing of the deal:

"Partnering with EDS, T-Systems and AT&T gives us greater ability to respond to the growing demands of our businesses. It allows Shell IT to focus on Information Technology that drives competitive position in the oil & gas market, whilst suppliers focus on improving essential IT capability." 

Shell’s Global IT Infrastructure and Services vice-president Swee-Chen Goh said:

"We want to look for value out of this, coming from an improved ability to focus on what drives IT in our business and access to know-how and resources in this industry. We have built the foundation blocks for success and assuming we achieve our goals there is no reason why we would not continue with the arrangement."

Consultancy firm Axon Solutions has been chosen by Gainesville Regional Utilities (GRU), a municipal multi-service utility owned by the City of Gainesville, to replace its ERP Solutions and implement SAP's World Class Business Suite.

Gainesville officials opted for Axon because of the consultancy's experience in the field. The consulting firm has already worked on similar projects for the City of Tacoma, Dallas Water and City of San Diego among others.

The SAP solutions that the business transformation consultancy will implement include Utility Asset Accounting, Purchasing and Inventory Business Intelligence. These will integrate with SAP's Customer Information and Billing Solution which were implemented last year.

Gainesville Regional Utilities' chief finance officer Jennifer Hunt says that this is “part of a long term strategy to provide automation and flexibility throughout the business. Phase 2 is truly about transforming GRU's financial information and providing all key stakeholder access to the right information.”

Ian Greenhalgh, Axon's executive vice president of Business Development, says: "We are excited to be working with GRU. Together we will deliver a platform for change."

Find the latest career opportunities at Axon on our IT consulting job board.  

Accenture Technology Labs is currently developing a digital ‘persuasive’ mirror that can analyze information provided by a user about his or her habits and then digitally age the person in order to give them a peek into the future and the consequences of their bad habits.

The ‘persuasive’ mirror takes a digital photo and the answers about a user’s lifestyle and habits and then shows the effect that the person’s present lifestyle will have on their face six months later.

While people are generally well aware of the possible consequences of their bad habits, the knowledge itself does not motivate them enough to change their lifestyle.

Accenture Technology developers are hoping to produce a device that can either scare or reward a person depending on their lifestyle and have the motivating effect that the regular mirror has when a person is trying to make a decision on what to wear, whether or not to lose weight and so on.

Accenture is currently waiting for the results of a study of the mirror’s effect on people’s behaviour, conducted at the University of California in San Diego. Once the results are in, Accenture will make further modifications on the mirror before making it available to the medical community.

Information technology services corporation EDS (Electronic Data Systems) has appointed Cherri Musser the company's new Vice-President and Chief Information Officer.

Starting March 31, Musser's responsibilities will include EDS' infrastructure, information technology strategy, planning and implementation. She had previously worked for General Motors, where she was Vice-President and CIO for GMAC Financial Services.

In the meantime, EDS has signed a deal with Microsoft that will allow the software giant to offer the Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system as an EDS enterprise application.

Microsoft Dynamics is the line of software that replaced the Microsoft Business Solutions. The last version of the CRM package (3.0) was released in December 2005. Microsoft and EDS will cooperate on the development of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 as well as on the global promotion of the service-oriented software. If things go well, the two IT companies may renew their contract at the end of next year.

Alex Halikias, CRM Service Line Leader at EDS, commented on the new IT partnership: “Microsoft has been getting ready for the enterprise space and has made inroads and has very good traction, but it could definitely use an enterprise like EDS to get more credibility and momentum in that space. One of the key catalysts for our interest in this partnership is that we see in Dynamics a very promising application with great visibility. It has been structured as service-oriented from the beginning, and the ability to develop additional solutions and be able to replicate basic XML templates is really good for a service provider like us.”

395 CIOs were polled in Capgemini's annual global survey, titled ''The role of IT function in Business Innovation – Operator vs Innovator'' between August and November 2007.

The survey shows that 81 percent of CIOs employed in the public sector believe that IT is crucial to business innovation, yet only one in four think that it is IT that it is taking the front seat in the process and driving business innovation. Even though most IT chiefs agree that information technology is a vital element of innovation, not many of them feel that they are making much progress in their companies in this respect. 72 percent of them say that outsourcing allowed them to focus on innovation.

The survey has also pointed to the new workforce using new technology to innovate independently of the company's IT department, consequently posing a challenge to the department's role within the company. 

18 companies showed an above average innovation rate. In most cases, the companies' business leaders had a good grasp of information technology and the CIO generally reported directly either to the chief executive or chief operating officer, not to the chief financial officer. In 88 percent of the cases, these companies thought of themselves as partners, not suppliers, in their business relationships. 

You can read the abstract of the survey or order the full report on the Capgemini website.