The bold steps we’re taking to move to touchless IT operations

Accenture has been on a journey to automate our Global IT operations with a vision to move to a state of touchless operations. Last year, we started making that vision a reality with tangible developments. Fast forward almost a year later and I’m thrilled to see the steady progress and impactful results we’ve made to complement humans and minimize human intervention.

Challenges and triumphs

Step by step, our teams have worked through the challenges and triumphs of developing intelligent assets.

One of our biggest challenges was in creating an automation culture within our own Global IT Operations group and nurturing trust that intelligent machines can make quicker and better decisions to run business-critical applications. Making the change involved developing new skills, adopting a different work style, and adjusting to performing different activities. It also involved building a new culture and solidifying the need to change.

To support success, we built upon Accenture’s existing IT technology stack to create tools and touchless operations assets on top of this stack. This approach allowed, and continues to allow, automated rollouts at scale, while ensuring seamless maintainability and security and the ability to customize organization-wide.

We built an ecosystem over the state-of-the-art Accenture enterprise architecture touchless automation platform that supports cognitive and applied intelligence. Reusing the foundational building blocks gave us the necessary connectedness and real-time speed. Our touchless automation assets benefit from the reliability, scalability, security, and maintainability that were established.

Our teams then built self-service-enabled intelligent assets, intelligent bots, and cognitive chat bots with machine predictions and deployed intelligently orchestrated actions. We also enabled an agile, plug-and-play living ecosystem with platforms and frameworks.

Assets developed and deployed

The new self-healing and auto-resolving assets our teams deployed involve analysis of millions of tickets, monitoring alerts, service requests and provide recommendations and machine-enabled solutions. These solutions are helping to advance our touchless operations journey while improving speed, accuracy, and keeping Accenture businesses and operations running.

Here are some highlights of these assets—our triumphs:

Touchless Automation Orchestrator. The Touchless Automation Orchestrator (TAO) proactively prevents system failures and outages. It eliminates manual effort to address service tickets for disk space, server issues, application pools, critical services, databases issues, failed interfaces, and server reboots.

Intelligent Application Security Platform (IASP). IASP performs comprehensive application security scanning that includes millions of lines of source code covering approximately 55% of internal applications to identify and fix security vulnerabilities. Once an application is scanned, the platform generates options on remediations and also reduces false positive detection.

Machine Learning (ML) assets. We are building machine learning assets to offer machine-suggested predictions, solutions, and fixes. One example is ML technology-based solutions to address incidents from Accenture’s Time and Expense application, where resolving incidents before the end of each cycle is critical.

Predict and Prevent. This AI-based asset forecasts and prevents outages. It intelligently analyzes the historic patterns generated from different monitoring sources. The asset captures the complex relationships and inter-component dependencies with unusual patterns and short- and long-term trends to forecast outages at granular level. The “prevent” part is invoked after successful predictions and enables auto-prevention of these outages via several remediation flows.

Breaking new ground

Our award-winning journey is breaking new ground in building machine-enabled intelligence at scale. We are developing intelligent automation assets that mimic human work and possess cognitive capabilities. And we are covering a huge scope of applications running on a wide range of technologies.

To date, the touchless operations assets we’ve developed are making a noticeable improvement in productivity, quality, performance, and user experience for our teams providing application support to Accenture teams. While we have made good strides, we have more to accomplish. We continue to collaborate to identify solutions that will make the most impact and achieve the goals of more operational and business efficiency.

You can read more about our touchless operations journey here.