In the digital workplace, it’s people-first tech that matters

If you’ve been following the Accenture thought leadership around COVID-19 , you may have seen how our Global IT team helped our own people emerge stronger from the crisis. We credit being able to respond rapidly and efficiently to the COVID-19 disruption to the investments we have been making for many years in our IT technologies, our infrastructure and our collaborative culture. Our IT strategy meant we could put our people’s health and safety first and foremost and be able to transition to “anytime, anywhere” remote working without skipping a beat because we already had the right infrastructure and tools. Over the past few weeks, we’ve also been helping our clients to get the right building blocks in place to do the same.

As we all begin to enter a post-lockdown phase, I am sure that your organizations are asking many questions about how to move forward—and outmaneuver the uncertainty that still exists. I thought you might like to listen to some useful tips in our podcast series that could help—the recordings are available free of charge 24/7 and could offer the insights you need to tackle the upcoming challenges.

Here’s a selection of topics that might help:

Remote working at Accenture: In this podcast, I have the pleasure of talking to Sarah Dugan who is digital worker change and adoption lead at Accenture. She tells me that many of our people were working virtually, even before the COVID-19 crisis, but not with the intensity and scale that this unique situation demands. In fact, the crisis put the spotlight on Accenture for doing what it does best—leading the way and helping our people continue to work wherever they may be. And we’re helping our clients to do the same. We’re taking everything that we’ve learned about our digital worker tools and working virtually and sharing that with clients. We’ve partnered with Microsoft and Avanade, too, to make our training capabilities and resources available to clients globally. So collaboration is important to remote working, as is communicating effectively. Tune in for more tips on how to stay connected.

What is a digital worker? In another interview with Accenture digital worker change and adoption lead Sarah Dugan, we dig a bit deeper into what it means to be a digital worker. With more than 500,000 people in our organization, we don’t have a “typical day” or a “one size fits all”, but there are some truly universal behaviors that we can attribute to the digital worker. Sarah explains how working in a modern, digital way is about finding out what work people need to get done and then introducing them to the tech tools that can help. She talks about the importance of leadership and our business partners to gain grass roots adoption of new ways of working—and our integrated dashboard and scorecard that helps us see how well we are performing as digital workers. Tune in for more on how your organization can connect, collaborate and create with digital workers.

ServiceNow for Accenture people: Here I’m in conversation with Accenture’s Karen Odegaard in her role as Managing Director, Enterprise Services for ServiceNow. If you’re unfamiliar with ServiceNow, it’s a platform that orchestrates and automates a flow of work between resources across an enterprise. Accenture started using the platform for its IT service management features, to automate service delivery across IT. Today, it has evolved to a single destination for our people to request support. In fact, 75% of Accenture’s half a million people are accessing ServiceNow on a monthly basis. Karen talks about our journey with the platform and how, ultimately, it is helping to support the digital worker and enhance the employee experience. Tune in to find out how we’ve only just scratched the surface of cross-enterprise services and building end-to-end processes on this platform.

Feel free to contact me if you’d like to know more about any of these topics. Or visit our podcast page to listen in to the latest tech transformation stories.