Insight-driven internal auditing

Moving to an enterprise-class platform upscales Accenture’s Internal Audit capabilities with data-driven decision making, dynamic planning and more.

Challenge

For many businesses, the Internal Audit function is essential to assessing risk, identifying fraud and improving processes. As a global organization serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture faces a complex challenge in carrying out this function due to the large scope of oversight and finite resources.

To enhance audit execution, our Internal Audit function has cultivated a leading analytics practice that uses more than 200 rules-based analytics solutions. A software platform that had reached its end of life and the use of niche, non-enterprise-class software (common to many internal audit functions) prevented the full integration of analytics across the entire audit process. These factors drove the need to develop a new technology capability to enable a proactive, insight-driven way of working.

What Accenture did

The Internal Audit function looked to the Enterprise Insight team within the global IT organization to collaborate on developing an innovative, intelligent solution. Enterprise Insight’s aim is to bring greater insights to Accenture’s services using the enterprise-class analytics platform and data lake it developed for the company.

Enterprise Insight and Internal Audit already had a long-running collaboration, including gaining an understanding of the analytics platform and the benefits it could offer. The analytics skill sets within Internal Audit allowed it to closely collaborate on the technical aspects of the project.

To begin, an Enterprise Insight and Internal Audit team assessed the technology landscape established years ago and the respective constraints. Internal Audit lacked the ability to process very large data sets, limiting insights. Risk models were point in time, one dimensional and inflexible, making it challenging to include analytics in the planning phases of an audit. Full population data discovery and transactional-level analysis was not possible, often resulting in random sample testing. Finally, the technology was unable to support predictive analytics, a major area of opportunity.

The solution involved transitioning existing analytical assets to the already developed Enterprise Insight analytics platform. The move allowed Internal Audit to join other Accenture functions in using a suite of leading analytical tools drawing on a common data lake aligned to Accenture’s data governance structure. These tools allow Internal Audit to prepare, transform and analyze data in ways it couldn’t do before. Additionally, the analytics platform significantly reduces complexity in developing analytics.

Transformation highlights include:

Audit selection

Dynamic audit plans, reassessed throughout the year versus an annual and static exercise

Audit scoping

Customized, data-driven audit scopes versus execution of checklist-based procedures

Fieldwork

Full population testing and risk-based coverage versus random sampling and manual tests

Post-audit

Collaboration between audit and the business to implement optimized solutions versus issuance of a finding with eventual follow-up

People and culture

Teams from Accenture’s global IT organization and Internal Audit began collaborating with each other more than two years ago to understand the analytics platform and the benefits it could offer. The project team also included Enterprise Insight leadership and business architects, along with the Enterprise Insight Accenture Technology Center China solution delivery team. The project offered opportunities for the Internal Audit team to learn best practices and techniques on the Enterprise Insight-developed technology, and for the delivery team to understand new business processes, risk scoring methodology and collaborate across Accenture to deliver analytic capabilities.

Value delivered

The Internal Audit group is significantly changing the way audits are conducted. Audit plans are now dynamic rather than an annual exercise. Internal Audit can work in a data-driven way, generating new insights and managing risk across Accenture with new approaches.

Internal Audit’s existing inventory of analytics can now be consumed in a self-service manner through several interactive business intelligence models. These models feature historical risk modeling projecting risk across multiple dimensions of Accenture’s business, and can be processed within seconds compared to 48-plus-hour run times previously. The models allow self-discovery on full population data and risk analysis at the transaction level, driving more risk-based audit selections. These features all allow analytic consideration to occur in the early planning phases of an audit, driving more strategic scope.

In addition, the use of a single, shared platform allows Internal Audit to better collaborate with the business as advisory partners in sharing knowledge capital. This advantage will allow the team to significantly expand its advisory services and to drive value across both corporate Finance and the entire company, going beyond a traditional “exception-based “mentality. This upscaling in capabilities positions Internal Audit to be strong value partners of the business.

Looking ahead, the global IT organization has started pursuing robotic process automation and natural language processing further using the new platform’s capabilities. Emerging concepts, such as predictive analytics, are now being developed and integrated into the audit cycle. The application of predictive analytics on top of existing capabilities is uncommon to the audit profession, which has historically focused on rules-based analytics.

Do you want to know more, see more, and save more in your business?

Have you ever spent hours preparing a solid business performance report, complete with interactive charts and your software’s finest functionality, only to find some of your core business information has changed overnight?  Or worse, you’re unable to submit it in a timely way due to one necessary fact you simply can’t track down? Complex operational report environments are common for any large and growing business—but they often lead to these kinds of frustrations.

It’s something we recognized was happening across our own enterprise at Accenture. We realized that every day, client account teams and business unit leaders were working from corporate reporting that was often difficult and slow to use and was historically based.  That impacted making timely, strategic decisions.

Our teams needed information that was accessible online, in real time—information that was consistent and secure. By giving our teams rapid and continuous understanding of both client and portfolio performance, they could make better sales and commercial decisions that would drive growth for the whole business.

A modern solution

Here at Accenture’s global IT organization, we need to keep pace with a keen business demand for technology to support our client teams. In terms of reporting, it was clear that there was an opportunity to create a modern solution that would bring together key financial and operational data in a new way.  It’s an approach around building applications that seamlessly adjust to business and technology change that Accenture calls “Future Systems.” In March 2017 , we launched the foundation of a new streamlined, cohesive, and intelligent information platform called Manage myBusiness.

The platform consists of a common back-end and data architecture that brings together key business information from a number of different sources within Accenture—sales, financial, and operational enterprise systems. We also designed a front end which was easy to use and could be simply personalized.  And we rolled out a change management program across Accenture to introduce and drive adoption of the platform, which was essential for the success of the transformation. 

Actionable insights

Manage myBusiness is now used widely across our organization. And it’s not going too far for me to say that it has changed how our executive teams work. With some cultural shift, they are  far more insight-driven in their management behaviors. As one executive commented on the platform: “Manage myBusiness is fantastic. We can now move away from heavy, disparate reports to real-time evaluation. It allows me to drive behaviors immediately, gaining a huge leap in efficiency."

So, let’s take a closer look at the tangible benefits of using this intelligent information platform:

• We can better anticipate business outcomes: By using consistent and universal information, tailored to individual needs, our teams can ultimately take actions on decisions in real time.

• We can work faster and smarter: We’ve gotten rid of the administrative aspects of reporting and put more focus on driving client account performance, faster.

• We save on operational costs: We found plenty of savings through a rationalization of the legacy reporting landscape and by redirecting the time from reporting to business management.

Introducing Manage myBusiness is part of our strategic business services vision and roadmap related to our overall business transformation. We believe that our company’s growth will be better realized as an insights-driven enterprise.  And we’ve invested heavily in digitizing core technologies. Now, we want to unlock new, post-digital value.

I am inspired by the adventure of enterprise transformations and enjoy seeing our passionate, expressive, and multi-talented teams challenge the status quo and push boundaries. We’re achieving our goals one step at time. 

If the story I’ve told in this blog is something you can relate to in your own organization, take a look at our case study.  Alternatively, I’d be delighted to talk you through the processes and performance milestones along the way.

Patrick Engelking is a Director in Accenture’s Internal IT organization, Digital Business Transformation, Enterprise Analytics.

Innovation is greater than the Idea

Introducing: The Gap and the Middle

When I talk with colleagues and stakeholders about Innovation, the conversation tends to steer toward a discussion of Ideas, as if the Idea and Innovation are the same thing.

In my experience, they are very related but also very different things. Taking my own organization as an example, there are any number of “innovative ideas” in discussion at any given point in time. There is no one person or group with solo ability to generate ideas - in fact, the more the better! What often comes with greater effort is the talent, investment, and the process to scale any given concept from being “just” an idea to being a scaled enterprise product or solution - one that has real enterprise or revenue impact. In other words, where we struggle on the Process of Innovation how can we better monetize what the organization generally does so well? How can the organization more effectively close The Gap?

This process of innovation is what I frequently refer to as “the middle” - the cycle of moving an idea through the innovation process, across the gap, bringing ideas to scaled reality and making a real difference to the enterprise.

Managing the process of the middle takes a balance of the right talent (to be clear, realizing a truly innovative idea, one with no clear set pattern or organizational precedent to follow). There may be levers of uncertainty to clear, management decisions to make, before a standard project can mobilize, and that requires leaders able to tolerate and break through ambiguity.

Getting this right, de-qualifiying and stopping non-scalable ideas early, sustaining investments for transformative ideas needing time, and learning lessons along the way - this is what is needed to unlock the value do doing things that matter and make innovative difference to the enterprise organization:

• Ideas to projects

• Projects to product solutions

• Solution to market offerings

• Offerings to revenue

6 data analytics success stories: An inside look Leading CIOs are successfully tapping data analytics and machine learning to achieve business goals.

Read the article in CIO magazine here:

www.cio.com/article/3221621/6-data-analytics-success-stories-an-inside-look.html

Converting sales opportunities into customers

Our internal IT develops predictive analytics solutions to help our people make better, faster, more accurate and more consistent decisions.

Challenge

Accenture is an intelligent enterprise that applies artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and embeds analytics into our operations. Our internal IT Enterprise Insight organization collaborates with Accenture business stakeholders to drive new, innovative capabilities and use case-based intelligent products to bring greater insights to Accenture’s businesses.

Included within Enterprise Insight’s analytics capability landscape are predictive models, which are being applied to Accenture’s business processes. Predictive analytics, embedded as AI, drive insights from Accenture’s huge volumes of data to predict the probability of occurrences and relationships to improve decision making. From the many possible use cases within Accenture, Enterprise Insight collaborated with business stakeholders to build an AI model to better predict the winnability of deals in the sales cycle, so that teams focus on opportunities more likely to be sold and walk away from investing business development cost in opportunities more likely to be lost.

The challenge: To create a machine learning model that scores and predicts the probability of winning sales opportunities—converting opportunities into customers and revenue—for Accenture.

Strategy and solution

The starting point for the development of our Win Probability Predictor model was to leverage an existing, third-party artificial intelligence tool we connected to Accenture’s customer relationship management system, Manage mySales. The tool was configured to generate a win probability predictor algorithm. The initial version was configured for Accenture’s business process outsourcing and infrastructure outsourcing businesses. We expanded that to Accenture globally.

Teams from Accenture’s Sales and Pricing Excellence, Manage mySales and Enterprise Insight collaborated to train and improve the Win Probability Predictor model by giving sales teams transparency on how to alter opportunities to win, and by providing real-time scoring capabilities to sales teams as they work. Drawing on five years of sales history, the AI model exposes positive and negative drivers of predicted win probabilities and shows sales teams which deals to continue to pursue and which to stop.

What this means is that an AI model can provide automatic and precise scoring of potential sales opportunities. It also provides the key drivers attributing to a score and explains the scoring. This is presented to sales teams in a way that is easy to read and digest. Sales teams can use this information to decide how best to proceed.

Transformation

AI systems are enabling people and machines to work collaboratively, changing the very nature of work and requiring all of us to manage our operations and employees in dramatically different ways. To exploit AI’s potential, leading companies like Accenture are embracing an evolution of business processes that is more fluid and adaptive, comprised of both human and advanced AI systems. This collaboration is leading to the reinvention of many traditional processes, which is what we are seeing at Accenture.

Today, at any one time, approximately 45,000 sales opportunities are in the Manage mySales CRM system, and every sales opportunity companywide is now scored by the Win Probability Predictor. The model accurately predicts the ability to win an opportunity with 97 percent accuracy—in less than three seconds. We continue to train this AI model on more than 120,000 sales opportunities a year with high speed and accuracy so that sales teams benefit from its best practices.

Connecting this AI to an online CRM system, which is available anytime and anywhere, allows sales representatives to update and test ways to improve opportunities or withdraw from a poorly positioned offer combined with their intuitive knowledge of a sales situation. Win Probability Predictor empowers teams and leadership to make smarter qualification decisions. The AI model is tailored to Accenture’s needs and is applicable and scalable to other service areas. Advanced digital capabilities, especially predictive models, hold the potential to be applied in any use case where scoring would be beneficial. Possibilities include revenue forecasting, risk assessment, sales campaigns, personnel scheduling demand and recruitment candidate matching.

Enterprise Insight continually drives innovation and applies predictive models, AI and machine learning to products to bring greater insights to the business. Within Enterprise Insight is the Studio, the research and development organization of data scientists, user experience experts and software engineers that experiments and builds advanced analytics solutions. It operates with a culture of creative agility, following emerging technology market trends, prototyping new analytics concepts and working with a fail-fast culture. A thriving analytics ecosphere is promoting winning ideas.

Analytics products are advancing Accenture’s transformation journey to becoming an enterprise that is automated, intelligent and insight-driven. Accenture envisions this future digital-insight culture as one that delivers new value in many ways. Accenture’s reporting landscape will become simplified as more clarity on what to use is gained. There will be broader insights into business performance as all business dimensions will be supported with digital insights—anywhere.

Digitizing client forecasting

Challenge

Accenture is focused on simplifying its business processes by digitizing how the company operates. As part of the ongoing investment in digital performance business management, Accenture wanted to transform the forecasting process for the teams managing Accenture’s client accounts. For these teams, Accenture has developed a suite of intelligent information platforms that it continues to evolve, enhance and expand.

“Our objective was to shift from existing manual and offline client team forecasting to a secure, automated and real-time projection capability, with new insights and easy to leverage for both the client account teams and Accenture’s management,” states Greg Giesler, Managing Director – Finance.

The solution needed to transform the client forecasting process across five business lines spanning 40 industries for Accenture operations across 52 countries. It also needed to leverage the large volume of Accenture’s financial data to ultimately better inform and support business decisions, growth and development at an account and corporate level.

Strategy and solution

The initiative to develop a solution was an exemplary collaboration among teams from Accenture’s Finance, Client Account, Sales and internal IT organization. Grounded in user feedback and the teams’ deep experience in this area, the project team came together to reimagine the way in which client teams prepare and manage their client team forecasts drawing on Accenture’s skills in innovation, integration, analytics and automation.

The resulting Client Business Projection solution transforms the business process with an experience-driven, serverless, cloud-hosted application that leverages Accenture’s enterprise platform infrastructure to provide more immediate and relevant insight. The solution is integrated with Accenture’s enterprise applications and brings together client account actuals, backlog, pipeline and speculative data sourced directly from the systems of record.

Data is digitally stored, processes and tools are standardized, and routine offline activities automated. The solution automates the financial process in two ways. The first is by integrating data from disparate sources, eliminating the effort of each team compiling its own data. Now, formulas are automated, and teams get insights in real time. The second is by eliminating the manual preparation of data and a quarterly data upload process into a tool to populate the quarterly Accenture Client Corporate forecast.

Client Business Projection can be accessed directly or via the Manage myBusiness platform, and provides multiple, easy-to-navigate dashboards with drill-down capability to enable a new projection process. The solution creates current and forward-looking views of account financial performance to enable insights to optimize financial performance. Transparency of the underlying data leads to improved quality and thus more effective information not just in Client Business Projection, but in other management tools as well. Business life cycle and process management is holistic. The solution is a significant step change in managing and surfacing business performance analysis.

Transformation

Client Business Projection is transforming the way Accenture does business. Agile, digital and more accurate forecasting is driving value for the business. Data captured is turned into fast insights for fast decisions—all enhancing the ability to generate profitable growth for Accenture.

The client forecast process today is real-time, transparent and consumable. Accenture client account teams and leadership are benefiting from instant, account-level, current and future performance analytics to perform business projections. Team members and leadership can edit their projections, interact online and conduct continuous dialogue to identify the necessary actions to achieve plan/target and drive those actions across a client portfolio.

Client Business Projection is used by teams in all countries that Accenture does business in. In the first year of launch, more than 50,000 log-ins per month occurred and approximately 10,000 unique users were recorded. Account teams are retiring their complex spreadsheets, greatly reducing manual efforts and saving time on monthly batch data preparation. Teams are now able to do things in minutes, not hours and they no longer have to wait until the end of the month because the data is always available.

The deployment of Client Business Projection moves the account forecasting process from an involved, manual quarterly exercise to always-on, digital and analytics. “Client Business Projection is a step change in the way client account team users prepare, review and use business performance analysis,” notes Domingo Mirón, Group Chief Officer – Financial Services. “It is not a tool, it is the tool that helps client teams manage their business.”

Digitizing enterprise business services

How a strategic digital business services vision and road map accelerated Accenture’s business transformation, unlocking post-digital value>

Challenge

Companies such as Accenture use the power of digital transformation to reshape themselves. Accenture invested heavily in digitizing core technologies and is now harnessing the power of that investment to achieve new post-digital value.

Before Accenture’s digital transformation, client account teams managed, sold and delivered services to clients using siloed applications. They performed redundant data entry and made key business decisions using different versions of data truth. The lack of online, end-to-end management processes and reporting ultimately impacted company growth and profitability.

This environment led to the launch of a multi-program portfolio to build a digital business services suite of applications and fundamentally streamline client account and business unit management at Accenture. Laying an application foundation and building comprehensive integration and automation created new opportunities to transform business processes and make previously unattainable insights available to business teams—all of which is now unlocking new, post-digital value.

Strategy and solution

Getting from the old to the new digital business services suite was a multi-year journey of four key phases. Every step involved the internal IT organization working closely with business stakeholders to address challenges and develop solutions collaboratively.

Accenture’s efforts went beyond simply meeting current business requirements and also envisioned flexibility for future business changes, enabled by extensible platforms. These platforms could become adaptable, boundary-less and radically human, characteristics of what Accenture calls future systems—systems that adjust seamlessly to business and technology change.

Phase 1: Business focus and foundation
The vision was to enable digital business services: a suite of applications to manage, sell and deliver work for Accenture’s clients in an integrated experience. Achieving this vision would transform processes for account planning, forecasting, sales, pricing, revenue management and reporting, and would lead to major business and operational impact.

Given this, the team obtained the executive sponsorship to mandate change and put the right skills in place: consultative IT, deep business acumen, agile software engineers and change management professionals. This team carefully crafted the strategic road map. They mapped out five “MMx” applications by priority—starting with contract revenue management (Manage myEngagements) and followed by sales (Manage mySales), reporting (Manage myBusiness), pricing (Manage myPrice) and forecasting (Client Business Projection).

Phase 2: Integration and automation
Implementing integration and automation was done in parallel. Teams built integrations across applications and with Accenture’s enterprise systems, eliminating redundant data processing, automating manual tasks and improving data quality.

One example of an integration outcome is with pricing. Accenture often sells work to clients made up of many of its consulting, system implementation and outsourcing offerings. Historically, each of these were separately priced in different systems, lengthening the sales cycle and adding overhead to client account teams. The deployment of Manage myPrice now streamlines that problem by allowing teams to price many different client solution types in one place.

In terms of automation, one focus was rethinking the approach to invoice production. The outcome is a digital automating billing solution that supports billing production requests and fulfillment in a single cohesive flow across Accenture platforms coupled with automation. Today, Accenture teams are producing client billing invoices in minutes rather than days, improving the company’s financial position.

Phase 3: Process transformation
The foundational suite of applications, coupled with integration and automation, now allows Accenture to transform business processes.

One example is the transformation of the new sales and approval process. By bringing this sales review and approval process online, the team transformed how client deal proposals are evaluated and optimized before they are sold. By streamlining approval processes, deals that previously required days or weeks to approve can now close in 24 to 48 hours, significantly accelerating the Accenture sales revenue cycle.

Another example is client business projections. A new forecasting solution integrates with Accenture’s enterprise applications and brings sales and revenue together in real time to enable a new online forecast. It allows client teams to move from an offline and quarterly cycle with limited visibility to a digital experience that allows them to review, in real time, progress against their plan.

Phase 4: Insights and analytics
Having more data available across many systems and a high-performance data architecture allows Accenture to produce insights previously unattainable.

Today, business users can surface insights through self-service analytics in Manage myBusiness as they are transacting business. Those insights can help them make more informed and better business decisions, which ultimately helps company growth and profitability. Aiding further in that is Win Probability Prediction. Connected to Manage mySales, this AI model rapidly scores potential sales opportunities on their likelihood to win. This score gives sales teams clear insight into deals to pursue or deals to avoid, improving Accenture’s client sales win rates and its cost of sales.

Transformation

The journey to creating digital business services has been one of steadily overcoming challenges and achieving new solutions. The outcome for Accenture today is the digitization of core account business processes with a suite of applications and tools to manage, sell and deliver work to clients. This level of transformation and agility was made possible due to the power of the platform and the cloud where Accenture today has 95 percent of its enterprise IT infrastructure.

Accenture’s digital transformation broke down barriers of internal inefficiencies and unleashed the power of global connection. With technologies working across platforms, Accenture’s client account teams can more directly influence the direction, growth and profitability of Accenture’s business. They work faster and more effectively, winning work more quickly and profitably. They also spend less time on administration and more time focused on growing business.

The post-digital journey is just beginning and holds huge potential for delivering more business value. Internal IT continues to integrate additional business processes like legal, staffing, risk management and more in support of Accenture’s vision for digital business services.

Empowering the Procurement Process with AI

At Accenture, we have been applying artificial intelligence (AI) as an enabler of business transformation and are seeing it deliver real benefits within key enterprise business processes. By embedding insight into business applications our people can make better business decisions. Making this happen is our Enterprise Insight team within our internal IT organization. We are a global team of business analysts, data scientists, user experience experts, software engineers, and change management practitioners who work with Accenture business stakeholders to shape, deliver, and operate analytics solutions.

One business process we addressed is purchase requisitioning and non-purchase order invoice processing. Given Accenture’s size, we purchase a high volume of goods and services—amounting to nearly 200,000 purchase orders a year. Accenture also processes 1.1 million invoices annually through our accounts payable function.

Our global procurement organization, Procurement Plus, uses SAP Ariba’s Guided Buying capability on SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing software-as-a-service (SaaS) (which we renamed internally as BuyNow) to optimize spend totaling more than $4.5 billion dollars every year. We realized that buyers of Accenture goods and services were less familiar with the downstream accounting of their purchases, and that this was creating friction and driving inefficiency and cost into the process. 

We saw an opportunity to improve the efficiency in purchase requisitioning and non-purchase order invoice processing by using predictive analytics and automating the recommendation of general ledger accounts to buyers at the point of purchase. Predictive analytics, embedded as AI, and automation better prepare buyers who are less familiar with accounting to be more accurate with their purchases. These capabilities held the potential to significantly streamline downstream accounts payable accuracy, time, and cost.  

Our Challenge, Our Solution

The challenge for our Enterprise Insight team together with Accenture Procurement Plus was to create an artificial intelligence model using predictive analytics that provides general ledger recommendations for goods or services being purchased, improving subsequent accounts payable accuracy and efficiency, and enhancing the procurement experience for Accenture. 

The starting point for the development of what we would ultimately call our General Ledger Recommendation solution was the AI model we connected to our BuyNow procurement solution and our SAP S/4HANA® accounts payable solution. Our joint team developed the solution for both purchase order-based and non-purchase order-based spend. For purchase order-based buys, BuyNow needed to improve the assignment of general ledger accounts at the point of purchase requisition. For non-purchase order-based buys, we needed to improve the assignment of general ledger accounts within the accounts payable process. Both situations were manual, time consuming, and prone to error. 

The team designed an artificial intelligence model to recommend the best account from more than 5,000 available general ledger accounts. Drawing from the accounting on historical purchases and invoices, the model recommends the general ledger accounts for new buys at the point of entry. The solution was directly embedded into our Accenture BuyNow platform experience. 

From a technology perspective, Enterprise Insight approached the problem as one of classification. First gathering historical purchase and accounts payable activity, the team ingested the data into Accenture’s data lake. The team then used the data to build and train a General Ledger Recommendation model with an AI machine learning algorithm. Using the patterns created on the historical data, the model was also able to make a predictive recommendation of a general ledger for a purchase.

Once the model was trained, the team embedded the solution into both the Accenture SAP S/4HANA accounts payable process for non-purchase order-based buys and the BuyNow procurement process for purchase order-based buys. The managed model continues to increase its accuracy in making classifications for new goods and services buys.

Poised to Deliver Business Value

By integrating seamlessly with Accenture’s BuyNow and SAP S/4HANA solutions to recommend general ledger accounts for purchase order-based and non-purchase order-based buys, the General Ledger Recommendation solution is projected to deliver significant business value including accuracy, efficiency, and an improved procurement experience.

General Ledger Recommendation is an example of how AI can provide an integrated experience to create strong business value and enable people to work smarter. AI is helping Accenture to move to a new generation of business process intelligence. Analytics products like these are advancing Accenture’s transformation journey to becoming an enterprise that is automated, intelligent, and insight-driven.

I’m curious as to what business processes has your organization improved through the application of AI and automation? Leave a comment below.

Patrick

Related Material: Powering procurement with prediction + automation

Patrick Engelking is a Director in Accenture’s Internal IT organization, Digital Business Transformation, Enterprise Analytics.

Working in the New

January - May of this year my team had an opportunity to partner with (and learn from) Pivotal Labs - extreme agile, user-centric design, test-driven development, automated dev/ops.

Complete experience refactor. We kicked off January 9 and pushed to production February 28!

Great experience:

Winning the table

Really honored to have had opportunity to present to CEO and leadership team of our global Technology business this week on our vision for rotating leadership to inspiring analytical, digital business performance management across the Enterprise.  So resonant in the business climate today.

A couple of takeaways:       

1. You build toward these conversations over time – the conversation happens based on a campaign for access to the table.
2. As always, relationships and trust are one of the two keys – build gradually, by being human
3. The second key is to come with credential – tell a story that is uniquely compelling
4. You’re there to speak, not to present - Speak as an impassioned colleague

Changing how a company "Manages"

Within Accenture's Corporate IT, we are driving a positive disruptive agenda to increase profitable growth for a 400,000-person company.  

Bold change requires a bold agenda, and we are setting long strides at constant pace.  

Hear an update on where we are going next.

Partnering with Pivotal Labs

Take a tour with me through the Chicago location of Pivotal Labs, a partner in extreme agile software creation with whom I am partnering to drive our analytics transformation agenda.

Transforming Cubed

Manage myBusiness is an application we are building within Accenture's internal Corporate IT organization.  It transforms on many levels - for our most senior business runners, for our Corporate Finance function, and for how our IT builds software.  

This update provides a brief overview.

On not being tightly coupled

Imagine this recent experience.  Conference call.  80 participants.  The agenda progresses, and my team comes into the spotlight with formal presentation of a request for a system change, building on several advance preparation discussions.  I connect to provide air-cover.  Probably a highly-invasive, performance-intensive, multi-system impactful change, right?

Wrong.

In reality, the change was minor and isolated – a modification to an already-existing web service API.  One system impacted, and all involved team members already signed up and waiting to start.  Work factored in hours, desired to drop to production in 6 weeks.  The request, however, needed a change at source, in a major legacy system.

In true fairness, when dealing with the law of large numbers, the numbers can and must win.  Integrity wins in balance over innovation.  When the organization’s overall priority is mitigation or elimination of risk, there emerges a trend toward “brute force.”  Control processes drive plans.  Criteria drive decisions.  Avoiding incident tends to minimize change.  This drives toward very large, infrequent releases of change, with long testing cycles, UN-lean teams.  Innovation discouraged…Orwellian IT. 

This is not what I want to be when I grow up. 

My teams have been agile for a while, focused on building loosely-coupled and analytic solutions that involve the end user throughout the lifecycle, enhancing and constantly re-factoring the experience based on feedback.  New ideas are welcome, and the iteration of the strategy improves the value of the product.  In partnering with Pivotal Labs, I am interested in taking that to the next, or “extreme” level.  Shipping product to production constantly, mitigating or eliminating risk because the changes are bite-sized (and easily reversible).  End users are continuously delighted by the changes which increases their engagement and makes the feedback loop even more powerful. 

How next could we could we better disambiguate those bite-sized changes from big legacy release cycles?  How does our own investment in highly automated dev/ops change how we build and operate product at ever-greater scale?  How do we shift insight delivery from weeks to days to hours?  Those are the thoughts I want to police! 

What are you seeing?

Let's talk about me (or what I didn't know I didn't know about UI testing)

I've been running lean agile teams for some time, focusing on building loosely-coupled and visual experiences that empower business teams.  Monitor, Analyze, Act is one current theme of digital dialogue.  My teams run ongoing streams of user-centric design - bring concepts out early for feedback, iteration, and experience improvement.  UI testing is central.

This month we started a partnership experiment with Pivotal Labs in Chicago.  This week I learned I still have room to learn, and that's a breath of fresh air!

"Synth" - processing interview feedback to drive better design

The little things add up to an accelerated outcome.  

Realization number one: Don't demo!  Hand the keys to your audience and let them drive.  Up to now, our teams have brought wireframes to our stakeholders and stepped through the experience (as WE understand it).  Precisely what do we miss by doing that?  We miss this point of getting intuitive UI.  Driving from our end makes assumptions about how the users will navigate and consume information when we're not in the room.  Taking the risk of letting the user drive allows all of us to see what is or is not intuitive in real-time, which moves "good UI" iterations from a jog to a run.

Realization number two: Don't lead the witness!  Up to now, our teams tended to lead more with statements rather than open-ended questions.  "This is what the wireframe is trying to say - what do you think?"  More effective: "What do you see?  What do you think it means?  If you click on that visual, what do you think will happen?"  Now the user is more engaged, more mindful..  When the experience works counter to expectation, the UI feedback is more concrete.  When the experience works to expectation, the user experiences more delight...more enlightenment.  

With little changes, you've let your stakeholder talk....he or she holds the pen.  Now your stakeholder is on your side.  Just try to get them to stop driving your experience!

Capturing more robust and more design-enriching feedback from UI testing.

Enter Pair Computing

While my teams have been agile within a "lean shop" for some time, this month we began experimentation with pushing further on the extreme agile boundary through Pair Computing.  

In some ways the operating model reflects a return to the "old school" vis-a-vis an on-premise work week.  Teams work in pairs, concentrating in simultaneous front-end design and back-end development.  Days are effectively meeting free, keeping developers focused on the code, and designers engaging with users in ongoing feedback loops that enhance the experience during delivery...better product at the end.

I have been surprised and pleased with the progress so far.  Starting with an effective, flexible code base of services, the team have shown the ability to connect to services and generate "iteration 1" UX in a matter of days - not weeks.  Watch this space - I am eager to evaluate how this offers opportunity to port even more quickly "from Monolith to Micro-Services."

What are you seeing?

Partnering with Pivotal Labs

This month I mobilized a new program workstream with Pivotal Labs.  

This is an experiment on many levels, and one which I am excited to watch unfold in the coming weeks.  If week 1 is any indicator, I anticipate of good energy and positive result.  

What's the experiment?  

1 Working with a new strategic partner, and creating an Accenture-Pivotal joint team. We will learn from one another, working to our representative core strengths.

2 Moving at an increased pace of Extreme Agile.   I set a bold scope to deliver quickly.  The 14-week timeline will look to produce a new online experience more quickly than my team has achieved before.  The team will co-locate and use peer methods to collaborate.

3 Using a new platform for automated Dev Ops - part of the speed play comes with optimization of the code and platform management lifecycle.  We will use Pivotal's proprietary solution and decide if and how we will bring it back to Accenture for wider work.  

The team are 5 days into the work, and coding started on Day 3.  What will we do in the next 13 weeks?  How will that create an experience my team can bring back in-house afterward?  I'll let you know ---- more soon!

Transforming from Reactive to Strategic

A recent analytics industry webinar that I found very relevant to the digital transformation journey we are also pursuing.  IT has the opportunity to provide strategic thought leadership and technology investment to Corporate Finance and Business Unit leadership in becoming increasingly collaborative and forward-looking.  

Becoming interactive: The journey toward becoming a data-driven Enterprise.

Within Accenture's internal IT, my good colleague Sean Freeburger recently stepped into the studio to talk with Jason Warnke about our vision. We have undertaken and are in flight with a bold journey to move Accenture toward a becoming an ever more data-driven and digital Enterprise.

Read more here!

Analytics, Cloud, and change via the Social Enterprise

As part of a rolling series of discussions within Accenture's Internal IT, we bring the leadership team together regularly to share personal perspective and key messages for our teams - where are we going? How is that driving excitement? How can teams get involved?

In this live studio segment, Amy Woodson, (infrastructure modernization), sits down with Matt Lagodzinski (Cloud migration) and me (analytics and digital reporting).  We have a dialogue on the road ahead and bringing the teams with us at speed.  

All of our programs have multi-year roadmaps which modernize the ecosphere and create more agility.  We are becoming more strategic, engaging, and creative.  Collaboration and communication are essential to the momentum.  People are essential.

Take a moment to listen!