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Accenture ranks #35 in MT500 companies with best image

Jort Possel — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:40:04 +0000

Management Team, the largest business magazine in the Netherlands, has released its MT500: the annual ranking of the top 500 companies with the best image in the Netherlands. This list is based on independent research and mirrors the opinions of nearly 1500 managers.

Coming from the 75th position in 2010, in 2011 we climbed 21 positions to number 44. Following last year’s great result we are more than proud to announce that Accenture managed to reach the top 50 for the second time ranking #35 on this year’s MT 500.

In its write-up, MT expects Accenture to rise even further in the future. For the full article, see below (in Dutch).

The launch of a new Global Advertising Campaign

Jort Possel — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 15:36:26 +0000

Today Accenture launched the new global brand campaign to take its successful “High performance. Delivered.” positioning to the next level. After last year’s advertising campaign which featured photographs of animals — giraffes, sheep, elephants and polar bears — as metaphors to bring to life the Accenture brand theme, the new campaign demonstrates the full depth and breadth of Accenture’s global capabilities, and how we leverage our industry expertise and leading consulting and technology capabilities to create significant, tangible business value for clients. In the Netherlands, we kicked off our new advertising campaign with a series of ads in today’s Innovation issue of FD Outlook.

With clear headlines and “bold colors”, the campaign focuses on results-focused case studies featuring clients, which are being leveraged across a variety of marketing channels, including advertising. Prominent among these case studies, is Anglo-Dutch company Unilever, focusing on how Accenture helped the global consumer goods company to leverage technology to simplify, standardize and unify business processes across more than 100 countries — resulting in €1 billion in savings for Unilever.

In addition to leveraging engaging imagery, clever copy and a bold color palette, the new brand campaign features the Accenture symbol — “>” — which has been part of the company’s logo for more than 10 years. The campaign includes print ads, posters in 73 airports in 35 countries, outdoor ads, digital ads, social media and video clips of case studies. Images from the ads will also be displayed in 200 Accenture offices around the world.

For more information and visuals, please visit the advertising landing page on Accenture.nl.

Accenture’s History: 60 Years of Values-Driven Leadership

Jort Possel — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 10:09:01 +0000

In celebration of Accenture’s 10-year anniversary, I have written about it’s history over the past months. Over this period, I have taken a chronological look at the roots of Accenture by taking a closer look at one specific period which shaped the culture and values of our company: from the Beginnings in the early 1950’s to our transformation which resulted in Becoming Accenture in 2001, to Building High Performance and our Accent on the Future.

As a wrap-up of this series of blog posts, I have highlighted the blog posts which discussed the foundational periods in Accenture’s history below:

- 1953: First commercial application of a computer in the United States: Andersen was hired to program the payroll for General Electric’s Appliance Park manufacturing facility near Louisville, Kentucky. General Electric hired the Administrative Services team to assist in the design and installation of the system.

- 1965: John Higgins’ Charismatic Leadership and Accenture’s Special Sauce: Higgins was the organizational genius of Andersen. “John was probably one of the most brilliant men I have ever met in my life. He was meticulous in everything he did. It was either going to be right or not at all”. The Special Sauce was a mixture of moxie, drive and the willingness to commit the necessary resources. While Higgins didn’t coin the phrase “special sauce,” his strong leadership provided all the key ingredients for the recipe.

- 1970’s: “Bargain of the Century” – St. Charles: Beginning in the early 1970s Andersen made the “bargain of the century” when it purchased St. Dominic College in St. Charles, Illinois for $4 million. Today, the facility continues to play a role in Accenture’s education programs. A trip to the St. Charles campus is still a rite of passage for newly hired consultants.

- Early 1980’s: Competition from IT Outsourcing: The consultants realized that while Administrative Services was growing at roughly 20 percent a year, the industry was growing even faster, and, therefore, the consultants were losing market share. A new breed of non-accounting firms with practices which had it’s roots in IT outsourcing was emerging.

- Mid and late 1980’s: Demanding consultants and the “Can-do Mentality”: The financial success of the consulting practice in the mid-1980s led to renewed demands from consultants for a greater say in Andersen affairs. They saw themselves in different businesses with different economics, and didn’t see the audit practice as the “core” of their business.

“Whatever it was that the firm said we should do, we had the entrepreneurial spirit that would say, okay, we’ll go sell that to a client and then we’ll work at how to deliver it.” — Gill Rider, Accenture Executive Leadership Team member.

- Early 1990’s: Redefining Management Consulting: “Our mission essentially is to help our clients rethink and reshape their businesses as single, interconnected entities. We embrace business integration because we want to be strategically relevant and offer our clients high-value solutions. We were the first to build systems for business use. We were the first to blend industry and technology skills to create a business perspective. And we are the first to recognize that companies need to move beyond systems integration and embrace business integration.” — George Shaheen, Head Consulting Practice.

- 2001: “Renamed. Redefined. Reborn. 01.01.01.”: We established our own identity with the adoption of the new name, Accenture, and a successful IPO. Kim Petersen, senior manager-Resources in Oslo, Norway, came up with the name ‘ Accenture’ by thinking of “accent on the future“.

- 2002: Remaining relevant to our clients: We transformed our business model to blend consulting and systems integration services—areas in which we have had broad experience for decades—with outsourcing services.

- 2003: Cultural Shifts: The introduction of the Partner Career Management and Compensation program and winning the 2003 Catalyst Award in recognition of our innovative approaches to recruiting and advancing women.

Continuous innovation and rapid transformation have been themes throughout Accenture’s history. The company’s history has been more than 60 years in the making—from the earliest days as a pioneer in the new world of information technology in the 1950s to its current position as a Fortune Global 500 industry leader.

Today

Today Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 233,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining experience, capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments.

For a comprehensive overview of all Accenture history posts on Blogpodium, please visit: http://www.accenture-blogpodium.nl/tag/history/page/2/

Accenture’s History: Accent on the future

Jort Possel — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 09:56:20 +0000

Some speculated at the time of the IPO in 2001 that Accenture’s special culture and values wouldn’t be able to survive the transition to public ownership. The severe economic downturn that followed didn’t help the organization’s odds. But the partnership values and culture have retained a special meaning at Accenture.

The principles of it will never change—that is the emotional attachment, the ownership, the feeling of authority and accountability are the things we have to continue to hone and get right. Green was leading a town hall meeting at the St. Charles campus in the summer of 2004. There were about 800 employees in the auditorium, and one employee in the back of the room said, “I’ve been here three weeks. I think I understand some values, but what is this thing called stewardship?”

One of the core values: Stewardship

Stewardship is the first thing that partners talk about when they talk about what’s special about this place. It’s what they feel their obligations are in turn to our enterprise and our men and women, those here today and those yet to come. Tenacious support for clients and employees, coupled with high standards and a willingness to embrace change, were the values that each generation of Accenture “stewards” has handed down to the next. Green confirmed the importance of Accenture’s people, noting, “The company with the best people wins.” Accenture has changed dramatically in response to changing client needs, evolving markets and competitive challenges over the past half century. And a culture is in place to ensure the company will continue to change in the future to meet these and similar needs.

But some things about Accenture remain unchanged: Accenture has a passionate commitment to be the best, to do what it takes to satisfy client needs and to create opportunities for the next generation of Accenture people. And the values first articulated by the founding partners, that have guided generations of people to do the very best that they can in the interests of their clients, still thrive in the new Accenture.

In the space of a few years, the company had dramatically transformed itself at a speed that would have left more typical executives with a bad case of management whiplash from the arbitration decision, renaming, conversion to public ownership and IPO to the naming of Green as CEO and appointment of new Executive Leadership Team members, not to mention greatly expanding its outsourcing business. The executives agreed that it was time to take stock of how far they had come in such a short time, and how the company should position itself for the future. ?This is not just about sustaining, but extending our leadership, Green said.

Next generation of leaders

Accenture drew upon its traditions of stewardship and training and tasked its next generation of leaders to, in effect, write the next chapter of the company’s future. Many of the current company leaders had played just such a role in planning the firm’s future in the late 1990s under the auspices of the plan known as Horizon 2010. The leaders of tomorrow would assume a similar role in the latest planning process, dubbed Horizon 2012. Rising stars from Asia had been involved in Horizon 2012 from day one, because they are a large part of the future growth we need to embrace them in the evolving culture of Accenture.

We’re changing the game from providing advice and services to providing outcomes and results, helping organizations to become high-performance businesses. We are basing our successes on the successes of the clients we serve., Green said. The only thing Accenture employees can confidently predict about the future is that the needs of our clients will continue to change rapidly and we will have to be able to respond just as quickly and creatively. He added, I look back five years, I never would have guessed that this is what we would be doing. What we will be in five years, we haven’t even invented yet.

Accenture’s History: Cultural Shifts

Jort Possel — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 10:16:03 +0000

The dramatic growth of Accenture’s outsourcing business involved internal cultural issues particularly concerning hiring and training a much more diversified workforce. “We’ve done the right thing by creating separate workforces and trying to engineer each of them differently to recognize and be relevant to the men and women who chose to work here,” Green said. “What’s before us now is how we rationalize that and bring us all together on one common agenda.” Accenture’s leadership focused on making up for ground lost during the recession. “On the one hand we did what we had to do to be good stewards of our business. “But we lost something in the area of skills, by reducing training budgets, and in personal connections and networking.”

New programs

In 2003 we established new budgets for training and fixed those issues. The group’s training budget may have been cut back sharply in 2002, much time was spent that year working on new curricula for Accenture’s leadership and other training programs.

The new courses were part of a concerted effort at Accenture to ensure that all our employees see themselves as being important citizens. It wasn’t the first time the company had made a dramatic shift in its hiring policy that would result in multiple workforces. In 1965, for example, the consulting practice made a dramatic break with tradition when, for the first time as a matter of policy, it recruited new hires without accounting training.

The company also introduced the Partner Career Management and Compensation program, a major change in the way partners managed their careers and how they were compensated. The program was a recognition that different partners have different capabilities and that Accenture needed to strengthen and maximize those different capabilities to achieve greater success for the company. As fiscal 2005 began, the company set the foundation for the Accenture Career Framework, a multiyear program designed to clarify the career paths and professional growth opportunities for all Accenture people, at all levels. The initiative was designed to clearly articulate and document what an employee in each of the workforces could expect in terms of career progression, type of work, rewards and training.

While renowned in the business world for the quality of its entry-level training, Accenture also began focusing on “leaders teaching leaders,” in which experienced partners teach leadership skills to younger partners, expanded in 2004 to include other executive levels. “We were trying to get back to the world in which we used to live of telling stories, because we sort of lost that storytelling mentality, which is crucial to getting the culture and values going.”

Reflecting Accenture’s growth in Asia to date, the company emphasized regional education in that part of the world. “We have to recognize that we have different [ethnicities], cultures and languages within this global company and we’ve got to recognize that more,” explained David Hunter. While English remained the global language of business, and of Accenture, the company realized that it needed to offer basic core training courses in the languages of the local populations it was hiring in Asia.

Diversity

Diversity of all kinds, including racial, gender and ethnic, needed to be promoted at every level within Accenture. The company, in order to continue to attract the best people and win the best clients, had to become as diverse as the global community in which it operated. Employees have expectations for us relative to diversity and inclusion. It’s getting harder and harder to sell work and to grow in an environment where we don’t present the same kind of face to our clients that they have within their organization, be it gender or ethnicity. This drive dovetailed with efforts to encourage and support the hiring and advancement of women at Accenture to open more career paths to women. Accenture also created women’s networks that could deal with the unique issues of women concerning advancement and retention.

While noting that more work needed to be done in this and all aspects of supporting diversity, Forehand said he was honored to accept the 2003 Catalyst Award on behalf of Accenture in recognition of its innovative approaches to recruiting and advancing women. At the start of fiscal 2005 there were 244 women partners, equal to 11 percent of Accenture’s 2,219 partners.

Accenture’s History – One Global Firm

Jort Possel — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 11:19:52 +0000

The year 2003 was an extremely difficult period for many employees to live through, but the global downturn strengthened Accenture’s competitive position. With many traditional rivals left in a weakened financial state, Accenture remained unmatched in terms of its global breadth and depth. We were leveraging these strengths with scores of new and continuing engagements to drive growth in consulting revenues that was projected to exceed global growth in IT spending going forward. Once again, as it had many times in its history, Accenture showed its ability to quickly respond to changing conditions in the marketplace to best serve its customers’ needs.

Accenture also leveraged its global industry groups to differentiate itself from rival consulting as well as outsourcing firms. That fact hasn’t been lost on clients. Whether we took an insurance system we developed in Spain and installing it for a client in Chicago, or we took a banking system developed in Spain and installed it in the U.K., we got a lot of credit from our clients who say: ‘You can see that there’s “one firm”—and that’s Accenture’. A recent visit to Accenture delivery centers in India left clients with the same impression. We had a couple of clients visiting our sites in India where they said, ‘It’s very clear, you go into an Accenture office in London or you go into an Accenture office in India, and you say, that’s Accenture,’ said Karl-Heinz Floether, former group chief executive-Financial Services.

Adding Value

Leveraging business groups and workforces was the key to setting the stage for future growth. We had to start leveraging global and other assets more effectively, in terms of the bundled value proposition we put on the table to both transform and run businesses for our clients. Focusing on adding value for clients has enabled Accenture over the past few years to raise its sights to ‘the addressable market of how much of the value chain of a client can now turn into our value chain with a margin on it’. That shift of thinking has been absolutely fundamental to changing our mix of business in a very, very fundamental way.

Accenture’s goal, which remains virtually unchanged from the firm’s earliest forays into consulting, is to help solve clients’ problems by bringing the best global resources we can focus on the problem. We will continue to create capabilities and centers of excellence around the world that can do this, integrating the value chain for the client.

High Performance

But bigger isn’t always better. The game we were, and still are, playing isn’t about scale, it’s about differentiation and superior execution. And that plays right into the High Performance Business theme—our outcomes-oriented focus. “If you’re going to bet your job or your company on the advice and counsel and assistance of somebody, they better be aligned with delivering measurable results. That’s what works for us,” Bill Green stated.

After being on a “stabilize and navigate agenda, we need to get back on a growth agenda,” Green said. He saw “tremendous headroom” for expanding into adjacent markets that are “direct extensions of what we know how to do every day.” He added, “The world has changed a lot in five years. Where the action is has changed a lot. Certainly we have opportunities in Asia that are astounding. Now for years we’ve been positioning ourselves to a footprint and a launch pad in Asia. I think we’re entering the space where we need to execute on that.”

While it didn’t receive much publicity at the time, Accenture was an early pioneer in building business service centers in Asia in the mid-1980s when it opened a center in Manila. The firm was responding to clients, mainly in the United States, who were on the cutting edge of searching for ways to reduce the costs of systems development. Manila was chosen as the site for the center primarily because of the large number of English-speaking residents and widespread familiarity with American idioms. The savings were significant in the 1980s, even with a relatively high telecommunications cost structure.

Twenty years later, the sharp drop in global telecommunications costs would drive dramatic growth in outsourcing work to Asia.

Accenture to deliver border control systems at Schiphol Airport

Jort Possel — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 09:49:04 +0000

Accenture has been selected by the Dutch Ministry of Internal Affairs to design and deliver automated border control systems at Schiphol Airport. Accenture initially provides 36 electronic border crossing systems for use at the airport. To validate the identity and passports of passengers by facial recognition, the new systems use the latest in biometric technologies. Border passage-based biometrics enhances security, increases efficiency, improves travel experience and reduces the waiting time of travelers at one of the world’s busiest airports.

In partnership with Vision-Box, Accenture already has successfully implemented similar automated border crossing programs at airports in the UK, Portugal and Finland. By deploying self-service systems, it is possible to limit the large amounts of travelers in a fast, secure and customer-oriented manner. For this project in the Netherlands, Accenture is supported by Vision-Box and Capgemini to develop and implement the solution. This partnership is also responsible for trainings, support and maintenance of the electronic systems.

“Border crossings over the world are now busier than ever by the increasing number of passengers and increased complexity of required documents and visa applications. Together with our partners, Accenture has extensive experience with electronic border systems at various international airports.” – Richard Camman, Senior Executive at Accenture Health & Public Service

For further information about biometrics and integrated automated technologies, please have a look at our showcase ‘Accenture Automated Border Clearance‘.

Accenture’s History – Transformational outsourcing

Jort Possel — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 13:36:37 +0000

By 2002 Forehand knew he had to do more than just cut costs and ride out the recession. To do so would leave an opening for a rival to take market share from Accenture or otherwise redefine the business. That wasn’t the Accenture way. He knew it was time for the company to once again embrace change and reflect the new reality in the marketplace for its clients. Accenture continued to stare change in the face every day and continue to challenge ourselves with: ‘What do we have to do to remain relevant to our clients?’. That’s what we’ve done over the last years during the downturn.

“We transformed our business model to blend consulting and systems integration services—areas in which we have had broad experience for decades—with outsourcing services,” Forehand noted in his 2002 letter to Accenture stakeholders. Accenture’s existing outsourcing expertise focused on managing business processes, applications and technology infrastructure. The company also began adding outsourcing capabilities in customer information, billing systems, information technology services, supply chain management and human resources administration.

The outsourcing business took off, both on the applications side and business process side. Accenture needed to have a delivery model that was cost effective and very efficient. and introduced Global Delivery Network to put all that in place. All while we were in the middle of fighting the toughest economic environment ever. It wasn’t just fighting the good fight in the marketplace, it was positioning the firm for the future.

Outsized Outsourcing Growth
The timing of the shift toward outsourcing couldn’t have been better. In key ways it echoed the firm’s ability to capitalize on large systems installations in the 1970s following the standardization of approach and implementation pushed through by Vic Millar and his team. Accenture once again was a leader in rapidly adapting to changing technologies and client needs. The number of client engagements mushroomed, with a 37 percent jump in outsourcing revenues in fiscal 2003 compared to just a 2 percent increase in net revenues. During that year alone, Accenture’s Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) solution units collected for instance billions of customer debt for clients, handled more than 100 million incoming customer calls and were responsible for more than 29 million electricity and natural gas meter readings. Only 18 months old by the end of fiscal 2003, the unit was providing services to more than 6 million customers, more than any utility in North America.

Many clients have thought that outsourcing is primarily about cutting costs. They may have given outsourcing a try, only to see initial savings diminish as their organization reverted to status quo behaviors. Accenture CEO Bill Green described outsourcing Accenture-style as “transformational”. “When people come to Accenture for outsourcing services, it’s not just about getting the costs lower. It’s about getting capability. Our differentiator in outsourcing is all about capability and flexibility. What they’re looking for is capability, not cost. And they see we’re able to take that operation, evolve it, and continue to improve it over time and make it relevant to their customer base”.

Accenture’s History – Building High Performance

Jort Possel — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 09:57:40 +0000

The sense of accomplishment that came with the rebranding and stock listing was tempered by the sense of loss in the wake of September 11. And from a business perspective, it became clear within a few weeks that the company had been fortunate to go public when it did. With so much uncertainty in the world concerning security and the outlook for the economy, it was unclear how long the company might have had to wait to raise permanent capital, and whether it would have been able to raise anywhere near the amount it did in July 2001.

A sharp falloff in business spending was felt especially in the information technology sector in the final months of 2001. While engagements already under way continued to move forward, new business trailed off and the company adopted the first of several rounds of belt-tightening. Business process outsourcing remained one of the strongest performers among Accenture’s businesses as corporate and governmental clients sought to cut their operating costs. Accenture not only had survived the previous four years of dramatic change, it had thrived, and remained in the forefront of the global consulting industry, even though the prospects for the industry were far from certain.

However, the company once again would find its values of superior client service, long-term commitment to personnel development and the willingness to embrace change tested over the next few years as it weathered one of the most severe economic downturns since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It would face the challenge of meeting the performance expectations placed on public companies to deliver short-term results while also investing for future growth. Accenture would prove more than capable of meeting those challenges in the years ahead, but it wouldn’t be easy.

As it has at crucial junctures for more than a half century, corporate as well as government clients sought Accenture’s help to transform their businesses, cut costs and boost efficiencies via outsourcing. By the end of fiscal 2004, even as the traditional consulting business was rebounding, revenues from outsourcing amounted to nearly 40 percent of total revenues. Accenture’s ability to evolve was underscored in 2004 when the company led a successful bid by the Smart Border Alliance to win the bidding for the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) contract to create a “virtual” border for the United States.

Accenture comprised several distinct workforces—Consulting, Enterprise, Services and Solutions—with consultants representing less than half of total personnel. And it was a much more diverse workforce in every sense of the word. Green and his leadership team also took charge of a company that continued to build on its original guiding values. A focus on client service coupled with a commitment to do the right thing for employees has consistently guided decision making at Accenture. Combined with the willingness to take risks and the can-do mind-set that is the key ingredient in Accenture’s “special sauce”, these values placed Accenture at the forefront of the global consulting and outsourcing industry of the 21st Century.

Accenture’s History – Becoming Accenture

Jort Possel — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 09:55:01 +0000

The late 1990s witnessed a surge of entrepreneurial risk-taking unleashed by the growth of the Internet. Andersen Consulting pursued its entrepreneurial destiny as well by filing, and winning, an arbitration case against Andersen Worldwide. The fully independent firm established its own identity with the adoption of its new name, Accenture, and a successful IPO, despite the bursting of the dot-com bubble. The company adjusted to new realities brought on by economic recession and the war on terror.

Two months later, Accenture and the world were shocked by the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. The consultants rallied to fund and construct a Family Assistance Center in downtown Manhattan where families of September 11 victims could seek information about loved ones and emergency aid. Accenture remained true to its roots. Rather than resist change, its employees proved willing to make the kind of bold moves that characterized Accenture’s strategy over the years, and that kept Accenture in the vanguard of the global technical services industry.

After Andersen Consulting’s mid-December 1997 arbitration filing against Arthur Andersen and Andersen Worldwide, there was no going back. As part of the arbitration, the consultants were required to stop using any form of “Andersen” in their name by the end of the year. That forced the firm into a flurry of rebranding itself as Accenture in a little over four months and at a cost of nearly $200 million. With the ink barely dry on the new Accenture name, the firm took the historic step of a massive reorganization, followed by selling shares to the public in July 2001 in an Initial Public Offering (IPO) to raise much-needed permanent capital. Forehand knew that regardless of how many millions of dollars the consultants spent on advertising and golf tournaments, people were still going to confuse them with the audit firm.

In one very important sense, the arbitration decision made the rebranding process easier. Forehand no longer had to “sell” anything. They were merely following the order of the arbitrator. There still was the challenge of generating buy-in on the part of the firm’s more than 70,000 employees, and doing so in the space of 147 days. One of the first steps was to inform the employees of the decision. As part of that effort, Murphy, who was already working with branding experts, created an internal process called “brandstorming” in which employees from around the world were asked for name ideas. The winner, Kim Petersen, senior manager-Resources in Oslo, Norway, came up with Accenture by thinking of “accent on the future“.

From that point forward, it was a race against the clock to effect the monumental changes required. The biggest challenge, however, involved transitioning brand equity to the new name. Starting with Andersen Consulting’s ads included a “tear-away” corner, with the message “Renamed. Redefined. Reborn. 01.01.01.”. A direct mail campaign, complete with a capabilities brochure that outlined the organization’s breadth of capabilities, was prepared and then sent to more than 40,000 (prospective) clients. The firm also worked with more than 165 alliance partners to rebrand their materials, brochures and websites. More than 2,000 people on 56 teams put in some 40,000 hours of work to ensure that the organization’s new name met the arbitrator’s deadline. To celebrate the launch of the Accenture name, Forehand hosted three live global webcasts—appropriate to different time zones—for employees around the world.

“Our brand positioning helps ensure our leadership position in the marketplace,” Joe Forehand noted. “By strongly managing our brand, we can shape the way clients and potential clients perceive Accenture. This will inevitably benefit our bottom line”. Some scoffed at the new name at the time, but at the end of calendar year 2001, one year after the launch, awareness for the Accenture name remained at or above the awareness level for the Andersen Consulting name.

Impressions of Accenture’s transformation and first campaigns: