Accenture IT Report Energizing the Digital Enterprise

Transcription

1 Accenture IT Report Energizing the Digital Enterprise

2 Welcome to the CIO Organization, where we help drive Accenture s digital agenda

3 As Accenture s new Chief Information Officer, I am delighted to share with you this report on the work of Accenture s internal IT function, our CIO Organization. Following the distinguished work of Frank Modruson, who served as CIO for 11 years, I take on the CIO role at a time when IT s importance to an enterprise cannot be overstated. In an era when every business is a digital business, IT is uniquely equipped to energize the digital enterprise. The role of IT today is to drive, enable and execute the digital agenda across an enterprise both internally and externally. At Accenture, we embrace this mission with enthusiasm, recognizing that we are the technology function serving a high-performance global business. Gone are the days of in-house IT serving strictly as reactive problemsolver. With technology now a critical item on the C-suite agenda, proactive IT professionals are taking responsibility for the broader enablement of enterprise productivity and performance bringing ideas and innovation to the business, and changing the way we work. The many roles of IT at Accenture As you will see on the pages of this report, this transformation is already well underway at Accenture. Our IT professionals have a strategic seat at the table alongside other parts of the business, working as consultants and innovators to help our colleagues leverage the astonishing and ever-increasing power of IT, while still delivering the reliable technology services on which the enterprise depends. Our work with Accenture s Human Resources (HR) organization epitomizes the evolving role we play (see pages 12-13). We are serving as technology consultants to our HR colleagues, who want to use Digital HR technology to enhance new employee recruitment and raise current employee engagement. IT can help to empower HR and many other functions to lead, manage and facilitate internal and external change. We investigate the role of IT as innovator on pages 4-5, where we describe how we continue to use collaboration technologies to transform the way Accenture professionals work together and with our clients. The past year was marked by the implementation of the Stream as a dynamic new channel for seamless collaboration. IT is no longer content to merely react to external changes, IT is now ideally positioned to spot the next new things first, and to understand how best to leverage technological innovation at scale and maturity to make the enterprise more nimble and competitive. Our central role as a provider of core IT services will continue, as seen in the review of progress on hybrid cloud environments (pages 8-9) and software-defined networking (pages 10-11). These build on the increasingly large-scale global network and processing assets which we manage to mission-critical standards of availability and performance. Your future is our future Accenture s IT organization serves both internal and external clients. Both groups rely on IT for services and solutions, demanding insights and experience with the most advanced technologies of our day. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, a recent Gartner survey of CIOs found more than half agreed with the statement: My business and its IT organization are engulfed by a torrent of digital opportunities. We see it as our job to help our customers inside and outside Accenture seize and maximize these opportunities. So, just as we are technology consultants, innovators and service providers, we must also be technology ambassadors, speaking and understanding many languages: the language of business and the specialized dialects of business disciplines and industry sectors, as well as the language of technology. We look forward to talking with you, listening closely, and delivering, as 2014 unfolds. Andrew Wilson Accenture Chief Information Officer 3

4 Social Collabora

5 Powering the Human Network In IT s early years, the term network signified technology and infrastructure, with a focus on computing devices, and with performance measured in desktops linked, servers up and gigabytes stored. In the current age, a powerful new network is growing around people, as colleagues separated in space and time work seamlessly with each other, collaborating across a global enterprise to solve increasingly complex problems, with performance measured in brains engaged and creative connections that generate bright ideas. At its core is a simple belief: the more your people collaborate, the more powerful your performance is bound to be. Over the past seven years, Accenture has pursued an aggressive collaboration initiative devoted to using technology to connect our people more effectively. After waves centered on unified communications via Office Communicator and now Lync, as well as videoconferencing in many manifestations, the CIO Organization expanded this record of innovation in 2013 with a new focus on social collaboration tools. This year we introduced the Stream to the Accenture workforce as a way to bring together content from different channels into a single feed of information and insight. With an average of 18,000 Stream events every day, it appears that Accenture professionals welcome the opportunity to share ideas informally. tion Some practitioners have introduced collaboration tools on a build it and they will come premise, which we believe to be flawed. Since no one is interested in having yet another channel to check, Accenture s approach is to move beyond standalone tools and embed social-driven collaboration directly into core business processes. Even if measuring the return on investment in social collaboration is still a work in progress until we devise more subtle measures of success, usage must serve as a proxy for performance a growing consensus believes this is one leap of faith worth taking. 5

6 Enabling the Employee With easy and affordable access to new devices and platforms, employees are increasingly making decisions about how and where they work and the devices they require, including ones they already own. As more employees take technology into their own hands, the consumerization of IT confronts organizations everywhere with complex choices about policy, process, technology and security. For mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, many of these issues have been addressed and resolved inside Accenture. More than 140,000 mobile devices are in use across Accenture today, the vast majority of which are owned by employees. These devices are secured via eight-digit passwords with mandatory guidelines for device lock and remote wipe if necessary. For PCs owned by employees, Accenture has launched a program to implement a secure, virtual container that protects data and allows access to Accenture applications without compromising the user experience. Another initiative is testing secure cloud-based storage of content and data to support PC backup, file sharing, and file synchronization across devices registered with Accenture. The strategy is simple: if we can get content and data off devices and into the cloud, we will enable our employees to access whatever they need from the cloud, using any device. Moving content and data off devices and into the cloud radically changes the way our professionals will work. Consumerization demands a fundamental rethinking of the IT function as it moves from being a provider and steward of hardware to becoming an enabler of employee productivity. Standard enterprise-wide desktop images will give way to flexible applications deployed across multiple devices. Giving employees responsibility for end-user hardware, software and services will tend to focus enterprise IT resources around the provision of more flexible services, browser-enabled applications, risk and cost reduction, and greater value for the employee. Brin 6

7 g Your Own Device 7

8 Hybrid IT Environmen

9 Mastering Cloud Formations After 2013, all of the if questions and paradigm shift debates around cloud usage have been supplanted by it s only a matter of time. Virtually every major enterprise is experimenting with or has already adopted cloud to some degree, although few are as heavily invested in cloud platforms as Accenture. While questions about security and privacy persist, such concerns are fading before the most compelling business case of all: increased IT agility. In a large majority of instances, cloud provides a convincing case for speed to delivery, performance enhancements and cost reductions. ts Research confirms that if your company wants to take advantage of Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and the many Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications that are flooding the marketplace, you need to become comfortable with the principle of cloud-based delivery. According to Accenture s latest market study, one-third of high-performance IT organizations say that they are effectively replacing legacy components with private- and public-cloud alternatives while almost one in six (15 percent) already centrally manage a fully virtualized, dynamically provisioned hybrid infrastructure. The result is a measurable gain in IT agility: 62 percent of high performers are seeing better alignment of IT project portfolios with IT and business goals (compared to 45 percent for other organizations). Nearly seven in 10 (68 percent) state that this architectural transformation is leading to cost reduction. As an integral part of an IT strategy, cloud can make the enterprise business more responsive, more flexible, more scalable, and more competitive, which explains why Accenture has turned to cloud-based solutions with Office 365 for and team-based SharePoint sites, social collaboration tools (the Stream), and Taleo for human resources, to cite only a few examples. 9

10 Virtualizing Networks Like the wave of virtualization that led companies to shift from dedicated, barely utilized server hardware to shared, virtual compute capacity, the network is in the nascent stages of a similar transformation. Softwaredefined networks apply comparable virtualization techniques to the network itself, replacing hardware with software that enables you to easily control everything from load balancing to firewalls. Starting in the data center, dedicated, physical, monolithic network hardware, often deployed as a resilient pair per data center, is being replaced by virtual software that can be distributed to create logical networks on an application-specific (or portfolio of applications) basis. Unlike physical equipment, which can take weeks to procure and deploy, virtual network components can be deployed and configured much more rapidly, increasing speed of delivery by the IT organization. Eventually, network virtualization will expand from the data center to the traffic routing enterprise Wide Area Network (WAN) that connects corporate locations. Although not as mature yet, software defined networking in the WAN will allow IT organizations to dynamically change the paths, in real-time, that application traffic traverses. Accenture has begun moving down the path toward network virtualization in our data centers with virtual network software, and plans to continue the journey with office and wide area network virtualization in due course. As the evolving enterprise presents ever greater demands, including more bandwidth for voice, video and multimedia, corporations need better performance from more scalable, flexible architectures, as well as the agility to change the network configuration quickly to meet shifting business goals. The 10

11 Next Frontier for IT

12 12 IT Enables Digital

13 Partnering with the Business For Accenture s internal IT organization, partnering with the HR function exemplifies IT s expanding role across Accenture: instead of waiting for a project request, we are consulting from the outset with colleagues across the enterprise on how IT can help achieve greater speed, ability and performance. Accenture successfully recruits upwards of 60,000 new employees every year, a need that rises as our business expands. Equally important, we want 281,000 current employees to stay with us, by making it easier for them to pursue meaningful careers right here. To manage our talent and fully engage our massive workforce, the CIO Organization is collaborating with our HR colleagues to transform their operations into Digital HR leveraging technology to enable faster change, using analytics to optimize workforce performance, and cultivating greater engagement at every level. This initiative is proceeding on two major fronts: Raising Engagement while Reducing Attrition: Using a sophisticated complement of tools from employee engagement survey and sentiment analysis to predictive analytics, Accenture data scientists are enhancing HR s ability to gauge satisfaction and engagement, and to refine our attrition models. By studying key performance indicators culled from different sources, we gain a clearer perspective on who is performing at optimal levels and who would benefit from additional support. HR Promoting Performance Excellence: With the IT team s help, the HR team is using technology to give Accenture professionals at every level the tools to understand their roles and to map out their careers, promoting higher performance by creating new levels of transparency. Instead of forcing people to navigate the complexities of a global organization on their own, Accenture professionals as well as leaders now have websites dedicated to their specific career needs. More than recordkeeping systems, these new platforms are easily accessible from mobile devices and infinitely scalable to keep pace with Accenture s growth. 13

14 About Accenture s Internal IT Organization With thousands of highly skilled professionals deployed around the world, the CIO Organization is responsible for delivering all internal IT solutions and services for Accenture. Responsibilities range from setting Accenture s overall IT strategy to managing enterprise architecture, capabilities, products and infrastructure. The Applications Development team leverages technology to create business solutions. The Infrastructure Outsourcing organization handles or manages the delivery of infrastructure, messaging and collaboration products and services. The Accenture Global Delivery Network supports developing and maintaining business applications. Already an industry leader in achieving IT efficiency maintaining an average cost of IT as a percentage of net revenue well below the industry average the CIO Organization also focuses on effectiveness to help drive successful business outcomes through the delivery of all IT products and services for Accenture. These principles, brought to life by a global network of experts, guide Accenture s CIO Organization to continually optimize the cost and quality of IT services, align IT activities with business strategies, and help Accenture s more than 281,000 professionals deliver high performance. 14

15 Accenture s Internal IT at a Glance Hardware and Network 278,000 workstations deployed 7,050 devices monitored 5,484 servers managed (1,010 physical and 4,474 virtual devices) 36 gigabytes network bandwidth managed Collaboration 125,000 search queries per day 367,000 people searches per day 10,000 documents downloaded from the Knowledge Exchange per day 18,000 new Stream (internal social feed) events per day 1,500 new blog posts every month 18,000 minutes of video played on Media Exchange per day 6,740,000 videoconferencing minutes per month 100,000,000 audio conferencing minutes per month 321,000 accounts 9,200,000 messages per day 6,200 Telepresence hours per month 13,000 SharePoint sites 153,000 mobile devices Websites 60,000 unique visitors to Accenture Portal per day 38,500 unique visitors to accenture.com/day Applications 269 global applications 236 local applications Support 1,200,000 resolved incidents per year through helpdesk, Web chat, local support 1,548,000 self-service contacts

16 About Accenture Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with approximately 281,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$28.6 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, Its home page is This document makes descriptive reference to trademarks that may be owned by others. The use of such trademarks herein is not an assertion of ownership of such trademarks by Accenture and is not intended to represent or imply the existence of an association between Accenture and the lawful owners of such trademarks. Copyright 2014 Accenture All rights reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.