Accenture Outlook

By adopting a narrow therapeutic focus and responding to specific customer needs, two companies have achieved high performance in this otherwise beleaguered industry.

Providers are poised to invest more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years in high-speed broadband networks.

Over the past two decades, outsourcing has dramatically changed the way companies create and distribute value. From its origins as a hardware operations play, the practice has moved first to applications and software, and then to higher-level business processes and services.

You initiated and managed specific conversations about your company and your products. For example, you could buy a couple of 10-second spots during the Super Bowl. Or you could entice customers to participate in focus groups and fill out surveys. ...

Computing pioneer Alan Kay called it the "next great 500-year idea" after the printing press: the development of a ubiquitous, high-speed broadband network linking people, businesses, educational institutions, services, everyday objects and appliances, and much more. ...

To realize a sufficient ROI in a new broadband communications infrastructure, service providers in China must create a next-generation OSS.

And no more so than in today’s tough economic environment: Companies find themselves in a bind, unable to find new ways to meet the customer’s relentless demand for lower costs and higher value. Is there a way out?

Costs are outpacing revenue growth for many organizations, while mail volume has failed to keep pace with what was until recently rising GDP. Postal services can no longer rely on their letter-carrying and bill-paying monopolies. ...

In one world, more than a few chief information officers have been compelled to chop large percentages from their IT budgets this year. Some CIOs at telecommunications and high-technology companies, for example, have lost as much as 20 percent to 30 percent from their budgets. ...

Wall Street icon Lehman Brothers—the largest bankruptcy in history. Iceland, a developed world sovereign state—flirting with insolvency. Abu Dhabi’s International Petroleum Investment Company—snapping up stakes in troubled energy, chemicals and construction companies in Spain, Germany and Canada.

Creating an agile organization
The new business environment will favor those companies able to execute strategy faster, with more flexibility and adaptability, and move their companies ahead briskly....