Accenture established governance models to provide necessary guidance for the sweeping transformation. Overall IT planning, strategy, management and governance resides within Accenture's Chief Information Officer (CIO) Organization, and all key decisions are confirmed by an IT Steering Committee, composed of operational leaders of Accenture's businesses. This means that Accenture’s business leaders are intimately involved in all key decisions, ensuring that IT is always aligned with business strategy. Accenture knows through our ongoing research into high performance that high performers define themselves not by the problems or cost of IT, but by how they can leverage IT to enable high performance.
By running IT like a business, Accenture's CIO Organization defined a managed-services model—providing a set of infrastructure and business application products and services to the business, with service level guarantees and prices that are benchmarked to the marketplace. The CIO Organization empowered users to "serve themselves" via direct access to IT products and services, boosting productivity and increasing user satisfaction. For example, if employees need to set up a team website, they can do so at the touch of a button.
The CIO Organization also consolidated, centralized and standardized IT operations, simplifying the IT environment and reducing maintenance and support costs by moving Accenture’s vast infrastructure to a single platform, something that had not been done to date by such a large company.
Leveraging the scale and cost efficiencies of the Internet, Accenture was able to move to a single technology platform that involved migrating Accenture's company-wide messaging and collaboration solutions to a Microsoft solution. Accenture executed a three-year staged rapid migration of nearly 80,000 e-mail users in 48 countries. At the height of the rollout, up to 1,000 e-mail users were transferred per day in one of the largest and fastest e-mail migrations ever completed. The company also installed an e-mail capability that allows employees on the go to manage their e-mail through mobile devices. Reflecting the impact of cloud computing on innovation, Accenture is now taking the next logical step to optimize communications by moving our entire e-mail platform to an external cloud platform beginning in 2011.
Along with e-mail migration, Accenture launched a centralized knowledge management repository based on Microsoft’s SharePoint Server to replace the legacy system.
Another step in the transformation journey was to implement an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system based on SAP technology, which better integrates core business functions such as Finance and Human Resources, and reduces Accenture's technology costs. The SAP Financials implementation was an ambitious undertaking to replace more than 200 different finance applications around the world with integrated SAP modules. The decommissioning of old financial applications alone saved Accenture more than US$12 million. Accenture subsequently transitioned human resource systems to the same SAP platform, multiplying the savings.
Outsourcing was a key element of the transformation, allowing the CIO Organization to extend its capabilities, standardize delivery and drive rapid, cost-effective implementation. Accenture sourced business application, development and maintenance to the Accenture Global Delivery Network, a network of offshore, near-shore and onshore resources. In addition, Accenture outsourced the delivery of infrastructure services and messaging and collaboration products to Accenture Infrastructure Outsourcing.
Many of the technological changes implemented over the course of Accenture’s transformational IT journey have made possible still more innovations, a process that continues to the present day.