Francesca Cassidy

2 weeks ago | raconteur.net | Francesca Cassidy

Last week – on so-called ‘Liberation Day’ – US President Donald Trump announced a slew of new tariffs on dozens of counties. Although there has been much discussion of tariffs since the president took office, the scale of the levies announced caught many off guard. The EU has been hit with a blanket 20% tariff and many Asian nations, including Vietnam, Taiwan and Japan, have also been targeted. The highest tariffs have been levied against China.

1 month ago | raconteur.net | Francesca Cassidy

A new study by the University of Cambridge suggests that the path to the top of business may no longer require higher education as a first step When Tony Blair gave his now-famous “education, education, education” speech in May 2001, he stated the Labour party’s goal was to see 50% of young adults progressing to higher education by 2010. Nearly 25 years later, progress towards Blair’s goal has been rocky. In February, the Office for National Statistics released data showing that the number of...

2 months ago | raconteur.net | Francesca Cassidy

From diversifying vendors to drafting incident response plans, businesses are applying lessons from the largest IT outage of all time – Crowdstrike When Crowdstrike issued a faulty update to its security software in July 2024, sections of the economy ground to a halt as businesses were forced to manually reboot their IT systems. Flights were cancelled, payment systems were disrupted and news broadcasters went off air. In total, an estimated 8.5 million Windows devices were affected by the...

2 months ago | raconteur.net | Francesca Cassidy

Business leaders are facing mounting pressure to implement emerging technologies such as AI. But the effectiveness of digital tools depends heavily on the data that fuels them. Factors including inconsistent data formats, as well as the sheer volume of raw data, are hampering firms' efforts to gain insights from the data they hold. A robust data-governance strategy can help to ensure data integrity and establish trust in an organisation's data.

Jan 23, 2025 | raconteur.net | Francesca Cassidy

Achieving a sustainable future will require coordinated action from government and industry to reduce the consumption of conventional fuels and reform energy systems through clear policies and the adoption of clean technologies. But experts worry that efforts to decarbonise have been uneven, with developing economies and much of the Global South being left behind. What's more, progress towards the energy transition is slowing across the globe.