GLOBAL MANAGEMENT consulting firm Accenture is to create 100 new jobs over the next four years at a new centre in Ireland dedicated to predictive analytics – or the use of statistics to help businesses forecast future revenues. The new jobs will take Accenture’s workforce in Ireland to 1,400.
Brian McCarthy, executive director of Accenture Analytics, said the company had begun the recruitment process for the high-level research jobs, which will be filled by graduate to PhD-level candidates with a background in statistics, data management and related disciplines.
The company’s predictive analytics services are primarily sold to companies in financial services, the public sector and the retail industry. The Irish centre, which is part of a network of seven analytics centres globally, will initially focus on the first two sectors.
“The world is changing and businesses have huge volumes of data,” said Mr McCarthy, who is originally from Cork and is now based in Atlanta in the US.
“History is not as great a predictor as it was in the past, given the volatility we have seen.”
The analytics market is estimated by forecasters IDC to exceed $48 billion by 2013.
Research by Accenture has shown that only about a fifth of the financial services companies which say they have established causal links between their business strategies and metrics such as shareholder value can actually prove that they have done so, he added.
Mark Ryan, managing director of Accenture in Ireland, said that there was reason for optimism in the exporting sectors of the economy.
IDA Ireland chief executive Barry O’Leary said the weak euro was helping exporters’ competitiveness and that any future potential exit by Ireland from the euro zone would be “negative” in terms of the ability to attract foreign direct investment.
