Accenture: IT Transformation

Accenture transformed IT by keeping its operational budget low and its investment budget high. This was achieved by consolidating, centralizing and standardizing IT operations, instituting a strong IT governance model, aligning the IT operating model with Accenture’s go-to-market strategy, running IT as a business and adopting an aggressive approach to outsourcing and performance measurement.

The journey to high performance improved the IT tools and service levels for Accenture's rapidly growing employee base. Moreover, reducing technology costs and investing in technology innovations closely aligned Accenture's technology decisions with our business strategy. Ten years later, the results are impressive: increased efficiencies, stunning cost reductions and a 300 percent return on Accenture’s transformational IT initiative.

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• CIO 24/7: IT Governance
• CIO 24/7: Running IT Like a Business
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In the late 1990s, Accenture inherited widely distributed legacy systems from our then-parent company. These systems were ill-suited to the global enterprise that Accenture intended to become. The company was expanding rapidly, entering new markets and enhancing our global delivery capabilities. New joint ventures and affiliate companies needed support from common systems.

Accenture's business model had evolved to include business consulting, technology services and outsourcing, each of which had varying IT requirements. Mobility was becoming increasingly important as employees worked flexibly from office, home or client premises.

With so many employees always on the move, Accenture needed the latest technology solutions and a robust messaging and collaboration platform. At the same time, Accenture wanted to achieve greater efficiency by driving down infrastructure costs, managing service levels more productively and improving internal employee satisfaction with IT services.

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. 

Accenture’s IT transformation has resulted in improved decision making, enabled better business analysis and planning, reduced total cost of ownership, eliminated redundancies, and consolidated purchases of products and services. Accenture has enjoyed dramatic growth since 2001, as employees increased by 225 percent (from 75,000 to 244,000) and revenue increased by 123 percent (from US$11.44 billion to US$25.5 billion).

Despite this expansion, Accenture’s total IT costs fell substantially over the period, as measured by several key metrics: IT costs as a percentage of net revenue fell by 59 percent; IT spend per person was cut by 70 percent; global applications fell from 600 to 267; and local applications dropped from 1,500 to 255.

Best of all, these efficiencies came without hurting user satisfaction; in fact, sponsor satisfaction with IT services improved more than 37 percent during the period. From 2000 through 2010, Accenture invested approximately US$1 billion in our transformational initiative. Over the same period, Accenture calculates that we have saved US$3.5 billion in IT costs, netting an impressive 300+ percent return on our transformation program.

These results illustrate the high performance potential available to other enterprises considering large-scale transformation of their IT infrastructure. Today, Accenture’s applications are on average less than five years old, and new systems have improved Accenture’s ability to respond more quickly and efficiently to market changes and client requests. A unique scorecard allows Accenture to better monitor information and better align IT with the business goals to deliver value to the company.

As the entire Accenture IT team looks back over a decade of accomplishment, Chief Information Officer Frank Modruson notes, “Stronger and better IT capabilities help facilitate Accenture’s drive to become a high-performance business and deliver superior client solutions and services around the world. Equally important are our leading-edge IT capabilities and world-class practices that provide solid evidence that we can help our clients achieve high performance as well.”