Outlook Special Edition, December 2001
Seeking to capture the essence of the Internet revolution and its economic consequences, Bill Gates coined the phrase “Business at the speed of thought.” Our readers are certainly familiar with the phenomenon. For those who want to succeed in a business environment characterized by ongoing change, precious little time separates each new encounter with change, the decision to act on its implications and the resulting execution.
We’ve taken a slight liberty with Gates’s excellent locution because we think there’s an important corollary: In this environment, thought must also move at the speed of business. Change requires new ways of looking at things; new ideas must keep up with the changing demands of business. And to be useful, those ideas must be validated within a dramatically shortened time frame.
The history of this latest Outlook Special Edition is a case in point. During the past year, Accenture outsourcing professionals, led by Marty Cole—global managing partner of Accenture Solutions Operations and one of the authors of this report—had developed a concept that challenged the prevailing wisdom in their field. Cole and his colleagues were convinced that outsourcing was rapidly evolving beyond simply operating back-office applications and processes; they believed it could be instrumental in improving business capabilities and driving enterprise-level transformation.
To test the thesis, Cole turned to Jane Linder, senior research fellow and a director at the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change, who had recently introduced a fast-cycle research process at the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based think tank. “It is research that’s fast, hard-hitting and based on direct contact with business executives,” says Linder.
Linder had only two months to determine whether developments in the marketplace actually bore out Cole’s proposition. She and her team interviewed executives in the United States, Europe and Asia; these interviews were the basis of an Institute working paper completed in July 2001. It identified a clear trend that researchers dubbed business transformation outsourcing and contained valuable advice from pioneers about how to make it work.
At Outlook, where our mission is to showcase this company’s best new thinking, we were intrigued: Could Linder build on her original research and develop the concept further for a Special Edition? And could she do it in six weeks? “Marty was interested in finding out more about metrics and incentives,” recalls Linder, “because they play such an important part in making outsourcing effective. So we went back to the first set of interviewees for more detail; we also lined up additional companies to expand our pool of examples. But the big difference between this and the first study was the speed.”
It is also a good example of how Accenture’s thought leaders are responding to the needs of business by putting bold new ideas to work in the marketplace more quickly than ever.
David Cudaback
Editor-in-Chief
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