  Dr. Lin L. Chase heads Accenture Technology Labs India in Bangalore.
The Bangalore facility focuses on original research and development in systems integration and software engineering, with the goal of enabling businesses to reduce the cost and improve the quality of technology solution delivery. The India R&D lab is Accenture's fourth and plays a central role in the company's overall strategy. "All of our largest and most complex projects in systems integration happen in India, and that's the lifeblood of what we do as a company." "There is no major account that isn't touched by what we do here." "It's completely fundamental to our ability to deliver value to our shareholders," says Chase. Her primary goal for the lab is ensuring the success and high performance of Accenture clients in the global economy. She strives to accomplish this by exploring emerging technology trends within the context of clients' immediate and longer-term business needs. "It is my job, and our job as a team, to ensure our clients stay with us because of quality—and then stay even longer because of how innovative we are in delivering solutions very efficiently, with interesting innovations at their core." One of these solutions grew out of Accenture Technology Lab's work in requirements engineering, which seeks to nail down customers' exact needs early in an engagement and suggest specific solutions on how they can be met. It is a key stage of the Accenture Delivery Methods proprietary process for managing systems integration. For requirements engineering to be truly effective, numerous teams involved in a project need to work in close collaboration to arrive at a solution for the client. Most of the time, this interaction occurs through e-mail or telephone conference calls. However, these traditional channels do not allow participants to truly interact as if they were in the same room, or to see each other's planning documents, designs and other tools that must be shared to ensure a successfully planned project, particularly one that is complex. In response to this need, the India lab developed a large, high-resolution interactive screen that enables multiple users in different locations to work together as if they were in the same room. "You can walk up to the screen and see people on the other side, no matter where they are," says Chase. "Remote teams are able to pick up on each other's body language and mark up each other's diagrams as if they were face to face. That's the kind of almost physical interaction that is truly required to be successful in requirements engineering." Chase was selected to head the new India lab in December 2005, just nine months after joining Accenture as a systems integration researcher in Silicon Valley. There she focused on semantic data integration, business process modeling and service-oriented architecture. Prior to Accenture, Chase's career centered on artificial intelligence (AI) and speech technologies. She became interested in robotics and AI as an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh—an impressive endeavor for someone who grew up on a dairy farm in western Pennsylvania and didn't see a computer until she was 19. After graduating with a degree in physics, she joined a company that had just been started by several of her professors to develop AI applications for corporations. Almost five years later, she returned to Carnegie Mellon to earn her Ph.D. in computer science and robotics. While in graduate school, she started her own consulting company to capitalize on the growing wave of interest in speech recognition technologies. Chase then worked across Europe in a variety of technology jobs, including launching the European division of an American startup software company called SpeechWorks International. In 2002, she moved to the San Francisco Bay area and founded NeoSpeech after a South Korean speech technology company called Voiceware offered her $2 million in seed money to start her own business. She sold her share of the company two years after its successful launch and—for the first time—took a break from her frenetic career. Chase moved to a house in the mountains near Boulder, Colorado, where she spent a winter "chopping wood, relaxing and thinking about what direction I wanted to take my career." That direction brought her to Accenture Technology Labs and, she says, there's nowhere else she would rather be. "It's a tremendous accomplishment to build a world-class facility like this in India," she says, referring to the official launch of Accenture Technology Labs India in November 2006. "Our team is developing that R&D spirit together. Now we can really start to 'play cricket,' as they say here." Back to Accenture Technology Labs: Executive Leadership page. To Top |