Accenture develops a real-time, analytically driven Manage myBusiness platform to better drive business growth.
Challenge
Accenture is transforming into an insights-driven enterprise by taking action on two tracks: using data and analytics to transform current processes and preparing users for changes in business practice and culture. One area of priority was transforming the processes involved in business performance management for Accenture’s client accounts and for the executives leading Accenture’s business unit operations.
Over time, Accenture’s enterprise growth had created an increasingly complex operational reporting environment. Meanwhile, everyday client account teams and business unit leaders were working from corporate reporting that was cumbersome and historically based. These individuals needed an entirely new solution—one where information was accessible online, in real time, consistent, and secure. Such a solution would enable them to have rapid and continuous understanding of client and portfolio performance as they made sales and commercial decisions.
Strategy and solution
Accenture’s internal IT organization recognized there was an opportunity to create a more modern solution that could bring together key financial and operational data in a new way—an approach of building applications that seamlessly adjust to business and technology change that Accenture calls future systems.
An internal IT team collaborated with account team stakeholders to shift the landscape. The solution was to develop a new streamlined, cohesive, and intelligent information platform called Manage myBusiness.
The initial phases focused on enabling core client account management capabilities on a digital and integrated analytics technology foundation. For the foundation, the team built a common back-end and data architecture that brought key business information together from a number of different source sales, financial, and operational enterprise systems within Accenture’s environment. This architecture was designed to be highly secure and fast processing, easily able to access and return both very large and very granular datasets to end users. A loosely coupled service architecture gives the ability to render data in applications in real time. These architectures and a DevOps foundation provide the added flexibility to deploy new application features continuously, stay always on, and scale to support additional business applications.
In parallel, the team built the front-end application environment to be highly visual and compelling. The goal was to entice leaders to interact with their business data directly in a new way—the application needed to be easy to use and able to be personalized. It also needed to be readily adaptable and evolvable to feedback. This usability focus rendered a platform that fostered alignment across executives around a common set of metrics that could also be tailored to their specific spheres of influence.
So was launched Manage myBusiness, Accenture’s first enterprise-wide business performance management operations platform. A change management program deployed across Accenture’s business units then began to drive transition and adoption. It influenced executive reporting behavior change and ensured the benefits and business value of the tools were realized. Lastly, the investment has allowed internal IT to simplify and sunset its legacy reporting architectures.
Transformation
Today, Manage myBusiness is in wide use and provides relevant and actionable insights to Accenture leaders in the front office. Information is now available comprehensively rather than in silos. Executives have self-service access rather than using rapidly outdated reports. Leaders have more ability to make decisions based on go-forward projections instead of historical performance. Finally, client account teams and business unit leaders have personalized views of data for their area of responsibility in a way that is online, intuitive, secure, and actionable.
Manage myBusiness informs decisions with financial and operational information that enables leadership dialogue on business health. It changes the game by helping to answer to core questions necessary for driving profitable growth and go-to-market transformation. And by providing a crisp experience, it draws leaders online to continually assess and improve strategy, take action in real time, and get to outcomes more efficiently. Manage myBusiness also reflects the key qualities of future systems—being adaptable, boundaryless, and radically human.
More than technology
Manage myBusiness is about more than just technological change. This new technology fosters culture change within Accenture’s executive teams, allowing them to become more insight-driven in management behavior.
Empowering growth
Accenture continues to drive toward becoming an insights-driven enterprise. Human-centered design and technology allow Accenture to scale business dialogue faster across more stakeholders, continuously innovate, and drive adoption of new solutions for the future. This foundation empowers Accenture’s transformation of management processes, leadership culture, and business performance outcomes.