Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 25 | Page 16

NEWS Almost three quarters of all English councils plan to make IT systems more accessible in 2020 F reedom of Information (FOI) requests undertaken by SoftwareONE, a leading provider of end-to-end software and cloud technology solutions, have found almost three quarters (72%) of all English councils are planning to invest in making their IT systems more accessible over the next 12 months. Almost all councils (95%) have at least one disabled employee and all respondents said they have assistive technologies in place. in 2020 will address this lack of strategy, enabling councils to empower all employees to confidently carry out their job role. However, assistance is mostly on case-by- case basis, with only 38% of councils having an official digital inclusion and accessibility strategy for employees. Further investment A total of 60% of councils said they experienced technology challenges when trying to make IT systems more accessible for employees. While the majority are providing assistive technologies despite these challenges – offering tools such as screen magnifiers (92%), dictation (77%) or speech recognition (90%) – councils may be missing out on a simpler way of improving digital inclusion. Many widely deployed solutions, such as Microsoft 365, have accessibility features such as Soundscape or Translator already built-in. This represents a real opportunity for technical consolidation and cost savings for councils, as well as improved user experience, which is currently being overlooked due to lack of awareness of the tools on offer. ////////////////// Coupa to deliver ultimate Business Spend Management experience for BMW C oupa Software, a leader in Business Spend Management (BSM), has announced that it was selected to digitally transform top German automaker BMW Group’s business spend management. In the coming months, Coupa will deploy its BSM platform globally across BMW Group to help harmonise and optimise the automaker’s purchasing processes and increase efficiency and effectiveness across all products. maximise their process efficiencies and savings, and at the same time, leverage the power of the community to spend smarter,” said Rob Bernshteyn, Chairman and CEO at Coupa. “Coupa offered BMW Group a best-in-class, user-centric platform that would gain maximum adoption across the company. We are thrilled to welcome such an iconic and admired brand to our growing community and look forward to helping it deliver measurable business value.” In early testing with the automaker, the Coupa BSM Platform demonstrated its focus on user-centricity and its ability to optimise spend for highly complex sourcing events and categories. When adopted at-scale, the platform could have the potential to impact billions of dollars of business spend. Coupa will deploy its offering to BMW to increase efficiency and effectiveness Coupa will replace a custom-built solution with its BSM platform to deliver a simpler, consumer-like experience that will enable BMW Group’s finance and procurement team to be more agile and focus time on more strategic spend initiatives. “Coupa has a long history of helping companies of all sizes and industries transform their spend management to 16 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com