Last year’s enthusiastic response worldwide to our international Compact special was the impulse for us to publish an international edition again this year. To bring everyone up to date, I shall provide some background information on Compact. KPMG IT Advisory has been publishing Compact for 39 years now. What started as an internal magazine in the early seventies is now a leading magazine in the Dutch marketplace. As we run a mature IT advisory practice, we wish to share our insights with our worldwide clients, our current and future workforce, and the community. All articles are written personally by KPMG staff and our clients. We continue to be grateful that our staff and our clients are willing to share their expertise in this way.
We observe that the IT domain within organizations is still undergoing major developments. IT is not only regarded as an expense that is consistently under scrutiny, it is also increasingly expected to contribute to enhancing efficiency and optimizing operational processes. This is clearly evident during transformations, but we also encounter it in the annual discussion on the layout of the CIO agenda. It is obvious that, with reference to IT, the predominant credo is that success depends more than ever on the capability to adapt to changes in one’s surroundings.
We see CFOs, COOs and CIOs struggling with an appropriate positioning of IT and, this being the case, our theme of “What’s shaping the CIO agenda?”, which has been featured in several issues of Compact, is more topical than ever.
I am very proud to present you with this international edition of Compact, which covers a selection of articles published in the Dutch Compact editions during the past year. In this form it is intended to give you an update on recent developments in some of the fields that we are working on with our clients. Of course, this edition contains only a selection of such developments. It is by no means intended to cover all of our activities.
I would like to thank all the authors as well as our editors and editorial secretariat for their contribution to this international edition of Compact. I trust that you will all greatly enjoy reading this publication, and we look forward to your feedback.
Hans Donkers
KPMG partner, editor-in-chief of Compact