In the run-up to the Accenture Innovation Awards 2012, one of Europe’s leading creativity and innovation platforms, PICNIC invites Accenture to visit the Innovation Mash Up on May 15th at Amsterdam’s Pakhuis de Zwijger. Aimed at Dutch and international professionals responsible for driving business development and managing innovation processes, the Mash Up will explore how businesses in various sectors can successfully apply top innovation processes used by creative industry professionals to launch new products and services, engage clients and customers, and enable grow.
Posts Tagged ‘Growth’
Innovation in the Age of Uncertainty
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Drive Growth in Finance with Digital and Physical channels
Growth is back on the agenda for banks. The focus for banks globally is moving to revenue and the customer. Cost-cutting remains a major priority, but higher shareholder value cannot be delivered by pruning cost alone. Yet in developed markets, expanding the customer base is likely to be difficult and expensive. Therefore growth depends on the ability to derive more revenue from the existing customer base and to do so cost effectively.
Following the financial crisis, trust has been eroded and will require a major effort to rebuild. Customers show a far higher willingness to shop around and buy different products and services from multiple vendors. And critically, customers’ general expectations of service and the integration with their lives, have been transformed by rapid advances in everyday technology.
Achieving this will require a renewed focus on customer channels to create more effective and efficient distribution. The switch in focus from product to customer demands the development of more customization built around the needs of customers’ individual preferences. In other words, banks need to find better ways to serve their customers at lower cost and in a very personalized way.
Accenture’s History – One Global Firm
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.
CFO Day 2011 – Corporate Sustainability & Outsourcing
With over 530 participants and 350 CFOs attending and top speakers including former Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers and former Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC Yvo de Boer; CFO Day, last week’s event for financial leaders in the Netherlands had it’s 10th anniversary. The theme for this event was ‘Value Driven Corporate Sustainability’, a topic that increasingly has become a Boardroom theme.
On behalf of Gold partner Accenture, Bart van der Mark and I had the opportunity to present our (interactive) session titled ‘The role of the CFO in integrating sustainability in the organization’, about the role of the CFO, the value of sustainable performance management and a free format discussion about the role of sustainability in outsourcing programs. Read more…
Accenture’s History – Explosive growth
In my previous post the financial success of the consulting practice in the mid-1980s led to renewed demands from consultants for a bigger slice of the pie. They saw themselves in different businesses with different economics and they certainly didn’t see the audit practice as the “core” of their business.
Economies were booming around much of the world by the mid-1980s. The Andersen consultants leveraged their market-leading position to produce record revenue and profits. The consultants as a result demanded a greater say in running their business as it continued to diverge from the more traditional and regulated audit and tax practices. Partners in the traditional divisions balked, but following a series of wrenching management summits and reorganizations they finally granted the consultants a measure of the self-governance they desired. Read more…
Accenture’s History: Setting standards
In my last post I started with the early 1960s. When the firm upgraded the system from mechanical punch cards to an electronic computer. And ended with John Higgins’ charismatic leadership that provided all the key ingredients for the “special sauce”, which is a mixture of moxie, drive and the willingness to commit the necessary resources.
By the late 1960s unprecedented changes were buffeting societies and businesses around the world. Arthur Andersen’s entrepreneurial culture helped produce new ways of creating and measuring business success. The consulting division’s rapid growth, coupled with changes in technology and a tumultuous world economy, created new challenges for partners. Innovative consulting leadership enabled Arthur Andersen to emerge as a dominant global consulting firm by the end of the 1970s, and assured that the consulting practice would play an increasingly important role within Arthur Andersen. Read more…
Accenture’s History: Transforming the way clients do business
Lets have a brief overall recap of what I discussed in my previous three posts about the history of Accenture before continue discussing about the Administrative Services Division and John Higgins’ charismatic leadership.
The idea of looking back started with the celebration of 10 years Accenture, where in my first “history” post I started with Accenture’s key figures (in de early 1950’s) Arthur Andersen, Leonard Spacek and Joe Glickauf and their journey to innovation and defining Andersen’s Administrative Services Division. After that I discussed about becoming a global company and, “bargain of the century”, the purchase of St. Dominic College in St. Charles for $4 million. Continuing with the enhancement of the Administrative Services Division, the forerunner of what would become Accenture, and the willingness to go the extra mile to satisfy a client. Read more…
Bill Green at the WEF: New Waves of Growth
At the recently held 41st edition of the World Economic Forum (WEF) summit in Davos, Accenture chairman Bill Green (as was Management Consulting Group Chief Executive Mark Foster, more on his views in another post) was once again invited to share his vision and opinions on the current economic climate, and the ways in which economies and organizations can foster growht. Mr. Green, who has recently transitioned to his new role as Chairman from his former CEO role at Accenture (note: read the personal interview Forbes’ Mia Saini had with Mr. Green about his transition during his stay in Davos), emphasized the importance of Growth though Innovation. The video below gives an impression of Mr. Green’s views which he shared during te WEF summit.
