Accenture It Strategy

I. The business challenge at Accenture and the role of IT leadership team in its Strategic IT Transformation

Accenture’s journey to high performance through IT began back in the year 2001, when Accenture’s internal IT team, the Accenture CIO Organization, began reducing costs and increasing investments in innovative technologies. The building of new IT Infrastructure posed many challenges for making decisions regarding the approach to managing technology i.e. whether to have a centralized approach or a mixed one and also whether to regard IT as a cost center to generate profits or as a value generating center.

One of the significant challenges that Accenture faced with IT was in the late 1990s, when Accenture inherited widely distributed legacy systems from its then-parent company Anderson. These systems were not suited to the global enterprise that Accenture intended to become. The company was expanding rapidly, entering new markets, and enhancing its global delivery capabilities. New joint ventures and supporting firms needed support from common service deliveries. Accenture was into the arena of business consulting, technology services and outsourcing, each of which had varying IT requirements. Another challenge was to provide mobility in its services with so many employees always on the move. Also, Accenture wanted to cut down on the infrastructure costs while achieving all this.

To work upon these challenges Accenture’s IT leadership team defined some key elements for its IT Strategy which included running IT like a business, standardizing and centralizing operations, paying for a service on transactional basis, focusing on variable resources and low-cost locations. Accenture’s CIO Organization was helpful in deciding which core or strategic IT competencies it must handle in house and which must be outsourced to external vendors.

The team saw to it that its business leaders are intimately involved in all key decisions, ensuring that IT is always...