Accenture CIO Organization Ehances Accenture.com by Providing Collaboration Capabilities and Cost Savings

Accenture believes it is important for all businesses to provide employees with a single, robust solution for publishing website content.

Accenture.com is the central Web presence of Accenture, delivering more than 15,000 pages of information about Accenture’s services, research and client successes. The website supports the global brand of Accenture and provides information to a wide variety of visitors, including current and potential clients, journalists, job seekers, investors and even Accenture employees. The website is also a key relationship management tool that provides a vehicle for lead and revenue generation. As a hub of company and industry information for external and internal users, the website boasts 340,000 registered users, more than 15,000 pages, over 3 million page views a month and more than 24,000 unique visitors per day.

In 2005, Accenture’s CIO Organization collaborated with Accenture’s Internet Marketing team to re-envision and rebuild accenture.com as a Content Management Solution (CMS) using Microsoft technologies that provide self-publishing capabilities in order to save time and money in updating the website.

Prior to 2005, Accenture relied on a few disparate global websites operating on different platforms and lacking a unified functionality and user interface. Accenture knows it was not unique in this challenge, as a 2007 Accenture survey of CIOs around the world found that many enterprises run between five and 20 applications to publish content. At the same time Accenture was facing the challenge of relying on multiple websites, the Internet began to transform corporate websites from content providers to collaborative solutions.

To meet the needs of a changing workplace and to provide a single interface for external users, Accenture required one global website managed by the Internet Marketing and CIO Organization teams. Accenture also needed a website that would allow for customization, quick and easy access to existing and prospective clients, collaboration among users and content self-publishing. For companies on the path to high performance, an efficient, customizable and client-focused website is key to success. Additionally, the website needed to serve as a vehicle to produce new business leads that could be used to drive opportunities for the company.

In 2005, Accenture’s CIO Organization partnered with the Accenture Delivery Center in Manila and the Internet Marketing organization to set a new strategic direction for the website, establish a new look and feel, and build a CMS using Microsoft technologies.

The groups teamed to provide an easy-to-maintain, accessible and effective customer-facing website. In fact, Accenture knows through its own High Performance IT research that high performers have a much larger focus on building customer interfaces, which translates into a higher level of customer information access. With accenture.com serving as one of the main access points for many customers, it was critical the site meet the needs of its visitors.

A year later, the Accenture team added additional Web 2.0 functionality such as blogs, podcasting and RSS feeds. Within just two years, Accenture realized its projected cost savings while incrementally enhancing the corporate website to stay ahead of its competitors. The accenture.com website is now a model of stability within the CIO Organization, and is helping Accenture operate as a high-performance business by enabling potential clients to find the information they need through the newest technologies.

Accenture realized a significant cost savings by simply providing accenture.com users the ability to publish their own content to the website. This new functionality reduced the technical hours previously required to upload or update information to the website. The CIO Organization itself has saved $75,000 per year by moving to this self-service system by simply removing the three-times-a-day scheduled migrations required with the previous systems. Operation support costs from 2005 to 2008 declined 30 percent as a result of the increased efficiency of the platform, as well as from moving 80 percent of the work to the Accenture Delivery Centers around the world. The website will continue to drive down costs with an expected additional 10 percent cost reduction during fiscal year 2009. These cost savings and operational efficiencies are helping Accenture achieve high performance.

“Our website—accenture.com—provided multiple advantages to Accenture. One, it allowed external and internal visitors to gain a single point of access to our information. Two, it provided a significant cost savings. And very importantly, the enhancements and improvements made to accenture.com were invisible to the end user. There was no service interruption to the website,” explains Frank B. Modruson, Accenture's chief information officer.