Accenture Case

Problem:

After the split between Andersen Consulting and Arthur Andersen, Andersen consulting spent millions on a rebranding campaign to build awareness of Accenture being the world’s largest management consulting firm. With the split and the need to unify themselves, Accenture needed to make substantial advancements in their IT department. They needed to run this department as a business to control costs and the inconsistencies in software at the different location. Accenture faced a dated IT infrastructure that was made up of platforms that are obsolete and did not communicate seamlessly with one another. This also made remote access very difficult and costly to set up. Information was compiled and manually uploaded to aggregate results from offices. Offices in other locations began adopting their own software to run a business. The problem that Accenture is having is not from the data infrastructure, but from the governance with IT and future projects will be handled.

 

Situation Assessment:

Accenture has completed a holistic overhaul of their IT infrastructure allowing the business to run its IT like a business within Accenture. In doing so Accenture decided to go with a single vendor approach providing one system for all users and meeting the application needs through economies of scale. The overhaul introduced a newly formed steering committee that included high-level management and senior IT staff to define the IT horizon for the coming fiscal year as well as updating the strategic direction of IT for the next three years.

COBIT 5 framework is designed to help enterprises of all sizes. The framework addresses business and IT functional areas across an enterprise and considers the IT-related interest of internal and external stakeholders. The framework is based upon five key principles: Meeting Stakeholders Needs, Covering the Enterprises End to End, Applying a single, integrated framework, Enabling a holistic approach, and Separating Governance from Management. The benefits of using the framework is to maintain high-quality information to support business decisions, achieve strategic goals and realize business benefits through the effective and innovative use of IT, achieve operational excellence through reliable, efficient application of technology, maintain IT-related risk at an acceptable level, optimize the cost of IT services and technology, and support compliance with relevant laws, regulations, contractual agreements and policies.

 

Alternatives:

Accenture is debating between using their own IT governance or purchasing the service from the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA).

The benefits of creating your own steering committee is the ability to collective create new rules, be a part of new product offerings or process changes. This will also keep the business sponsor and IT team alert due to the audits to determine ROI and that the project is managed effectively. The cons to establishing your own steering committee is the pushback from the different managers. Managers will provide excuses as to why presenting to the steering committee their projects will not work.

The alternative to creating a steering committee is purchasing licenses from the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA). Here Accenture would be purchasing a framework built upon other major frameworks, standards and resources such as ISACA’s Val IT and Risk IT, Information Technology Infrastructure Library, and standards from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Adopting the COBIT 5 framework would require some changes in separation of governance and management. Also there are the training courses that would give users a full understanding of the framework. The courses can be taught globally with its main locations in the United States and England.

 

Recommendation:

I would recommend against adopting the COBIT 5 framework for Accenture to use. This would call for further disruption to implement as well as Accenture losing its identity upon what it has already built. The framework is a generalized set of standards that can be applied to any business. The basic principles and enablers are similar to the framework that has been established by Accenture steering committee. With the current process in place, Accenture has reduced spending per employee by 60% and reduced IT’s overall expenses as a percentage of net revenue by 58%. The process works as it is currently set up when Accenture reviewed its company as workforce doubled in size from 2001 to 2008.