Master the cloud continuum and you'll get more from your tech

They say extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures—and we’ve certainly seen that play out in practice lately. Pandemic disruption has made many organizations reimagine their businesses by accelerating the migration of their workloads to the cloud. As we’ve experienced in the marketplace and our research reinforces, there’s a subset of organizations, around 12% to 15%, who are seeing substantial gains from their continued cloud engagement.

Operating in the Cloud Continuum—that is treating cloud as an integrated and orchestrated set of capabilities ready to unleash new innovation rather than a single, static destination—is something Accenture knows all about. We walk the walk when it comes to our cloud journey and we’re not only realizing the value that lies behind mastering the Cloud Continuum practices but also sharing those insights with our clients.

It’s all part of the bigger picture for us that includes a well-defined, widely communicated strategy that helps us make IT decisions that are good for the whole business. Inspired by our annual Accenture Technology Vision and referred to as Beyond 2025, our strategy reflects our imperatives for the future and the technology vision that backs them up.

In a podcast with my colleague Steve Courtney, who heads up the Beyond 2025 enterprise strategy for Global IT, we discussed the impact of the strategy and how it’s playing out in our organization.

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We’re a living example

Beyond 2025 is not simply about growth—it’s evolving IT to be part of the fabric of the Accenture business. We’ve been doing this for a while—we adopt new technologies at scale and then use ourselves as a living credential to help our clients do the same. It’s IT at its best—and it would seem that many in the marketplace agree. Our 2022 Technology Vision’s research identified 98% of executives believe continuous advances in technology are becoming more reliable than economic, industry or social trends in informing their organization’s long-term strategy.

In the podcast, Steve and I discuss how the concept of Beyond 2025 came about. We started by looking ahead at what a perfect end-state architecture could look like for our IT platforms and systems and how we can unlock technology innovation much faster than we’ve ever done before. We knew that involved helping our global workforce to use technology as an enabler—putting the power in their hands.

Sustainability was top of mind for us, too—it’s baked into our platforms and considered to be a key pillar for success. Everything we build today is architected to consume as few resources as possible with minimal carbon footprint (which we’re measuring and tracking). We’re moving to a “just right” consumption model, where we use shared platforms that support variable demand.

Being changemakers

Today, we have more than 30 big programs we are implementing as part of our strategy. Here are three of the bigger, perhaps more disruptive ones:

• We’re shifting how we run our global enterprise network. We're rethinking our enterprise network, with 5G as our primary transport for the last mile, extensive cloud services consumption and a utility type model for connectivity back to cloud and our hosted applications and content. It’s a fundamental shift in the way we operate that involves completely reimagining end-to-end security. It means we'll be able to move to a truly zero trust model and then focus more on security enforcement. What’s more, there are business as well as technical benefits; having a modern network helps us achieve our ambitions as a digital enterprise.
• We’re laser focused on customer experience. Even more than service level agreements (SLAs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), we see customer experience as a measure of IT success. How our people engage with new technologies is more important than ever, so we’re continuing to evolve, offering virtual reality for more immersive experiences that take advantage of the Metaverse and seamless integration with key engagement platforms like Microsoft Teams. Time will tell how these powerful platforms will benefit our business, but I'm extremely excited about it.
• We believe the future is data. Growing investments in data, artificial intelligence and digital twin technologies are giving rise to a new generation of business and intelligence in the mirrored world. We've accelerated our work in the cloud which has empowered us to discover how data can unlock valued insights. By improving the democratization of data, we can gain new value for the business—it’s an area of differentiation for the future.

Ultimately, everybody in our organization is responsible for contributing to our strategy and the whole of the business benefits from that active collaboration. We want people on board from the get-go, so we talk to our stakeholders and customers during monthly meetings and we host a regular forum where our top 50 lead architects critique and evolve the strategy, looking for opportunities or learnings. We believe that every part of every business should be transformed by technology, data and AI, with new ways of working and engaging with customers and new opportunities for growth. It’s what we call total enterprise reinvention.

I hope this is inspiring you to get more from your technology—and do listen in to our podcast series. We’ll be covering a wide range of topics offering insights into data transformation, collaborative platforms, security and much more.