IT transformation at accenture

Despite the fact that the number of employees at Accenture doubled from 2001 to 2008 accenture managed to reduce its spending per employee by 60% and reduce its overall IT expenses as a percentage of revenue by 58%. This was no miracle but a result of strategic business plan that was aligned with the IT. Some of the major problems that the parent firm Anderson faced was of interconnectivity among systems, remote access and its offices around the world implemented their own individual accounting and human resources software. Accenture’s primary motto was to create “anytime, anywhere” accessibility for its consultants and support personnel. They parted their way from the traditional view of IT as a cost center with an assigned budget instead they chose to have involvement in IT from management perspective as well i.e. business within a business. Their principle agenda was that IT products and services should be understood from the point of view of internal customers and stakeholders, defining clear SLAs, inclusion of C-level executives from different fields of business to determine budget, a-la-carte system i.e. pay per use. The IT staff was also made responsible for creating and delivering IT tools that would support business requirements as well. Its first step towards application management was choosing a single vendor approach and they looked forward to minimizing total cost of infrastructure. The move had its bit of initial resistance from the internal stakeholders but was deployed efficiently and results are quite evident from the facts listed above. They wanted to shift from the decentralized approach to a more clear centralized approach and chose credible partner like Microsoft as much was at stake and also due to the fact that it had a global presence. Single platform also led to scalability and flexibility that made business processes smoother and easier. For solving the problem of coming up with a credible approach to managing human resources and finance