Accenture aims to transform the way we work as a company, enabling our people to work in a modern, smart way. To do so, we know Accenture people need to connect, collaborate and create effectively with team members and our clients.
As the pandemic has reminded us, one size does not fit all—we recognize our people want to work however, whenever and wherever they want. That means we need to make sure our tools are connected and frictionless to elevate collaboration and productivity, breaking down traditional boundaries.
While technology is a key enabler, we have found that strategy, process and technology work together to realize returns. Often IT teams define their success by measures such as uptime, security, performance or response time, ease of use and speed to market. Systems may hit the right metrics for all of those measures, but if people don’t know how to use the technology or understand the full extent of its capabilities to achieve business results, we’re missing out on the real value.
Here are the critical stages that continue to make a difference as we apply our change and adoption approach:
We define a clear journey and change management strategy: Before getting started on any technology deployment it’s important to understand the north star—what the desired business outcomes are and what success looks like. It’s not enough that a system goes live—in the longer term, the new technology must position the organization to enable transformational change. Entire organizational systems need to be reimagined to get the full value from technology. Changing behaviors, culture and ways of working are all necessary to secure adoption and drive value from IT change.
We adopt a modern approach to IT deployment: There are standard activities around any successful rollout: communications, stakeholder management, training and metrics. We’ve updated these traditional methods using our Center of Excellence to work in tandem with the business. We’ve adopted a user-centric approach with elements like design thinking, gamification and next-generation communications. When we offer live workshops and learning, we employ storytelling and interaction to bring the content to life and engage with learners. While communications involve active engagement through social media, live events, personalized news articles and other digital channels. And we measure and monitor the impact before, during and after deployment.
We focus on the vital role of adoption: We recognize that logging in to an application does not equate to adoption. We partner with the business to understand the desired business outcomes that the technology can help to achieve. Then we define and measure the behaviors that demonstrate adoption . The business impact is the ultimate indicator of whether adoption of the change is successful; for example, increased productivity, increased revenue or improved forecasting all illustrate an uptick in performance enabled by the tech change. We look at the neuroscience of change to create new behaviors and habits—how the brain processes new things—and we adopt a persona perspective to address how tech change will impact specific individuals and how they might feel about it. Long after new technology is live we continue to encourage and motivate people to work differently, using tools such as champion networks, next-generation communications and incentives.
Focus on behaviors
