4 powerful digital transformation examples

Accenture is a multinational professional services company that provides strategy and consulting services on digital transformation, technology and operations for large corporate clients. The company’s leaders take the position that flexibility, an adaptive IT team and the cloud are critical to digital transformation, both in the area of ERP implementations and elsewhere.

“We aimed to achieve an internal digital transformation That means supporting Accenture’s $43.2 billion company with 500,000 people in more than 52 countries and in more than 200 office locations.

Part of Accenture’s digital transformation goal was creating flexibility in its offerings.

“As we work with a diverse range of businesses that do not all have the same technology needs … we also aimed to equip Accenture with technology which is no longer one-size-fits-all,” Becirovic said. “Our client-centric solutions needed to evolve and become more flexible.”

The cloud has been important to Accenture’s digital transformation.

Within three years, Accenture expanded its cloud footprint from 9% to 95%. Accenture now has a multi-cloud strategy that incorporates three public cloud platforms.

The company simplified where possible using a lift-and-shift approach. It’s been an evolving process.

“We initially adopted AWS, then added Microsoft Azure and — most recently — we have been experimenting with Google Cloud Platform. Using a multi-cloud approach allows us to better meet needs within specific markets while also identifying the costs and features that best fit our clients’ requirements,” Becirovic said. 

Accenture uses its own Cloud Platform to host all three.

Recently, the company added AI and advanced analytics such as predictive models to the mix, Becirovic said.

Accenture used to operate on siloed reporting functions and spreadsheets, with multiple versions of data and a focus on past performance rather than future guidance. Digital reporting and analytics have helped to drive changes in the way the Accenture decision-making workforce operates. Analytics capabilities have grown The company also added more collaboration and social tools to further spur its digital workforce.

Accenture currently uses Microsoft Teams to send more than 40 million instant messages every month, and employees download approximately 365,000 documents from an internal central repository each month, saving time and resources for more value-add activities, he said.

Accenture migrated to a single instance of SAP to unify data and provide end-to-end processes, according to its white paper, “SAP at Accenture.”