Accenture ranks as one of the largest global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing companies. In 2001, Accenture's IT organization supported 75,000 employees. Today, that number is 178,000 employees. Meanwhile, company revenues have gone from $11.5 billion in 2001 to $19 billion in 2007. By moving both IT service delivery and many internal business transactions to an online, self-service model and consolidating key applications, Frank Modruson, Accenture's CIO, says that his company will spend 30 percent less in real dollars in 2008. "As a percent of revenue per person, we've cut IT by 60 percent. That's a dramatic a reduction to the cost to serve."
Enterpriseleadership.org sat down with Frank Modruson, Accenture's chief information officer, to discuss how IT has cut costs but improved service delivery to internal customers. Here's what Modruson had to say in his second interview with www.enterpriseleadership.org.
EL. What improvements have you made to become more responsive to your internal customers?
FB. We've always focused on this as a priority. As the capabilities have evolved over time, we've had the opportunity to take it to the next level. All of our internal business transactions at Accenture happen online. We're a virtually paperless company. It doesn't mean we don't print paper, but all of your transactions as a business customer, whether it's changing your address or looking at your pay stub, occur online in a self-service model similar to the way you'd do any e-commerce transaction. For example, when you create a time report at Accenture, you create an online document, but you're really creating a transaction. We view that as being very customer centric.
When it comes to IT, we handle more than 40 percent of our helpdesk calls online in this self-service model. If you go to esupport, you can look up your problem, read about a solution, or escalate to a chat directly with the helpdesk via Instant messenger.
EL. Given that Accenture is an IT delivery company, what types of online services do you provide your external customers?
FB. First, we call our external customers clients. We don't do many things for them online because of the nature of our work. We have Accenture.com and other content sites about our business. We offer our clients micro sites that we'll tailor to them or to their industry. That's where it is ends. We've been racking our brains about what other online things we can do for them.
IT is trying to bridge the technology gap differently with our clients. For example, we've developed 12 telepresence sites internally. While I was speaking to a client about planning his trip to visit our facility in India, I told him that he might want to get on our telepresence link from Chicago to Bangalore and plan the trip that way. In fact, I added that he might consider conducting the visit via telepresence rather than traveling to India. This client was incredibly enthusiastic about them.
EL. What is your IT strategy and how does it to contribute to making Accenture a leaner, more efficient organization?
FB. Our IT strategy focuses on serving the business of Accenture by looking to make it more efficient and effective. To me, IT is about taking out the friction of our business and making it easier and easier to do the work of Accenture. One the key points in our strategy is to have a single instance of key applications globally. To this end, we only have one application to serve the entire organization for any particular functional area. We have one set of financials for the world. All of the transactions reside in the one system. You can drill down to any level of detail you want. You'll find one version of the truth. We don't have anyone saying this's what my report says and it doesn't agree with what your report says. Companies that have this scenario end up reconciling all the different reports to find the truth.
We also have one recruiting system and one scheduling system. If you go down the list, you'll find that we have one of anything. As a result, our data is cleaner because there are no discrepancies where this system has these fields and this other system has different fields. If you try to put these systems together, you have a problem.
EL. How do companies fall into the trap of redundant systems?
FB. Several years, we brought in a consultant to help us lead a strategic procurement project. I asked her how our technology compared with other companies she had done work for. She said that most companies begin the process by collecting all of the procurement transactions from all of the different systems, put the data altogether to try to make sense of it, and then do the analysis. We said that we skipped that step because we already had all of the data in one place. She said most companies don't understand how big a deal that is.
Here's how people fall into that trap. If everyone has their system, they do get their data faster. However, it doesn't work holistically across the company. You create a Tower of Babel where everything has a different name in each part of the world. It becomes difficult to get everyone to talk with each other. That's why we have companies with multiple ERP systems. I've heard of companies with 70 instances of their primary ERP. You wind up hosting 70 ERP systems, and you wind up reconciling all of these individual ERP systems to get total revenue. Accenture has one ERP system.
EL. What types of social networking or collaboration tools have you given your internal customers?
FB. This is a major program for us. We've launched Accenture Collaboration 2.0 to provide our internal customers with the next generation of social networking capabilities, similar to popular We-based sites such as Facebook. For example, in Accenture People Pages, employees can post their photo, a biography, a resume, and personal information, such as hobbies and interests. They can also list their areas of expertise, who they've worked with, and what things they have contributed to the Accenture Knowledge Exchange. Anyone can free text search this customized, extensible profile of our employees. IT contributed all of the base information, such as employee's name, address, phone number, and email address, but then we told employees to put in what they wanted.
We also have a media exchange similar to a Youtube for all of our media. We're doing an expert's page. We've introduced video from telepresence down to video on the desktop. We're deploying Office Communicator that will tie in Instant messenger, email, phone, and video -- all on the desktop. Since we have one Active Directory, one global email system, and one global desktop, our rollout of this Office Communicator will be straightforward.
EL. How are employees using these collaborative tools to make their job easier?
FB. We want people to cut through the company's hierarchy when they're searching for information and capabilities. People can locate expertise around the firm rather than going up and down the hierarchy of the person they report to. For example, when I did a free-text search on People Pages to find employees who have wine and beverage industry experience, I got 768 hits matching wine. I narrowed the search and found some people who had beverage, wine, and spirits brand management experience. If I go to Office Communicator, I can then check the presence indicator next to each picture. The indicator tells me if the person is online and available or not. Because I see the person's calendar, I know when he or she has a meeting or will be free. If the person is online and available, I can go ahead and contact the person via either Instant messenger, email, or telephone. This capability breaks down the barriers because we can just click on the person and reach out to them. We're trying to make it seamless for our people to get connected to the technology and then to make the experience better. We're trying to bring the power of 178,000 employees to each employee.
EL. Have you improved the way your employees search for documents on the Accenture Knowledge Exchange?
FB. We've added a new, enhanced search and preview feature. Our old search feature was similar to google.com. If your search found documents, such as PDFs, you had to search again on the term to find the page you want. With preview, you see a picture of the page in the document that has your search term. If Accenture is on page 32 of a 50-page document, then you see page 32 highlighted.
EL. What has been the most unusual experience with social networking?
FB. We put up a Wikipedia on Accenture so employees can add their entries about Accenture. Meanwhile, we launched an application, a social network experiment, call Percenture, which tells you the percentage of employees who've joined the company after you did. It also gives you a perspective about the size of the company, where you are, and how long you have been with the company. We didn't post it anywhere on any of our applications. We sent it to out to people via email. In the next 24 hours, more than 30,000 people hit it.
A couple of weeks later while I was speaking to a 100 people, someone asked me where he could find the link to Percenture. I said that because Percenture was an experiment, we didn't post it anywhere. One person raised his hand and said that the link was in the Wikipedia. Apparently, someone went into the Accenture entry and created a link to Percenture. The person who knew where the link was had been with the company for just two months. He knew to look there because of his online experience outside of the company. The best part of it is that someone created the entry for it.
EL. What unique wireless tool have you given employees who travel?
FB. We have a utility that allows employees to get connect to a wireless hot bus around the world. When I was going through Toyko Airport, I opened my laptop, and connected immediately without exchanging any credit card information. This utility just works.
EL. How do go about looking at the right technology mix for your internal customers?
FB. We do a variety of things. We have a portfolio management process for our applications. We manage those applications as products as we work with the customers they support. We do the same thing with our infrastructure. We channel initial funding requests through our IT steering committee, which I chair. The committee includes the chief operating officers of Accenture's operating groups, and the chief operating officers for internal functions for HR, strategy, and finance. Everyone gets one vote. We go through all of the project requests, and then prioritize them based on the importance to the business. Our portfolio management system tracks all of these products.
EL. What determines a successful product?
FB. Before any project gets going or funded, we put together the business case, which includes the cost to do the work and the expected business benefits both in hard dollars and in soft benefits that have some metrics attached to them. Once any project goes into production, we monitor attainment or realization of benefits against that original business case. We do this for three years. Once a year we have an internal audit to look at the process of measurement, to select business cases, and to report those findings to the IT steering committee right before we do funding for the next year.
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Additional Reading - Sponsor Links:
Streamlining Service Request Processes: A Key to Business Success
Taking the Service Desk to the Next Level
Author: Elizabeth M. Ferrarini - She is a technology writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.
