Accenture has long recognized the value of helping everyone connect with anyone. Today, the Accenture People online tool is a leading-edge environment that makes it easy for employees to interact and share skills, interests and activities across Accenture’s global corporate network, meshing the best of business networking and social networking capabilities.
A revision of Accenture People was largely driven by the activity streams and improved user experience that employees had come to expect from social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Given Accenture’s tech-savvy workforce, the upgraded product would have to compare favorably with the best of the consumer tools, which are built with much larger budgets. To maintain both its market relevance and its “cool” profile, the Accenture People tool would also need to embrace social features, mobile capabilities and other new technologies, such as scannable Quick Response (QR) Codes that easily move contact information to mobile devices.
To enhance the utility of Accenture People’s update, Accenture’s IT organization followed a two-pronged path, making proven components easier to use and faster, while steadily introducing new capabilities.
Key among the proven components are employee profiles automatically populated with standard company information, including work organization, skills, level, contact information, and office location. To amplify the opportunities for sharing employee knowledge, Accenture People also integrates many of the latest social media tools:
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Autocomplete search features with thumbnails and basic demographic information help locate people 15 times faster than the previous method.
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Searching for people by name supports “sounds like” matching.
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The “People You May Know” function provides matches based on multiple factors, including employee profiles, previous projects and locations.
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An “Activity Feed,” prominent on every page, helps employees keep track of what colleagues are saying and doing in their areas of interest.
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Blogging capabilities have been significantly enhanced.
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Microblogging, much like Twitter, makes it easy for employees to reach out across the entire global workforce for their information needs.
“Accenture believes our people should be interacting across the enterprise as intuitively as they do on Facebook and other social sites,” explains Chip Allen, who led the initiative for the CIO Organization. “Our goal with this refresh was to create an Accenture People environment where connections are second-nature and collaboration is effortless. We believe we succeeded.”
Newly designed Accenture People profile pages emphasize the features employees use:
- Employee profile picture
- Standard company information
- Recent activities
- About Me personal information
- Specialization and Skills
- People You May Know profile matches
Since the new platform went live in 2012, Accenture People is much faster, and functionality in several important areas has been enhanced. The most frequently used data can be found at the top of pages, with deeper, specialized data only a single click away. This ease of access to Accenture’s vast global resources is helping to improve issue resolution, drive professional growth, and boost productivity for all employees.
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