Accenture makes major investments in IT automation capabilities to advance to more intelligent and touch less IT operations, and business efficiency. Read more.

1. Accenture makes major investments in IT
automation capabilities to advance to more
intelligent and touchless IT operations and
business efficiency
ACCENTURE’S INTERNAL
OPERATIONS
AUTOMATION JOURNEY
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2. Our global IT organization is applying the
New now by transforming how our internal
operations teams provide applications
support to Accenture people through
increased automation. The objective is to
achieve more operational and business
efficiency. Our strategy includes a quantum
move toward intelligent automation and a
longer-term vision to achieve pervasive
touchless operations.
Our initial efforts with automation were informal, but early results were
already automating standard and repetitive tasks and eliminating manual
work. Recognizing the impact increasing automation could make on our
internal operations, our challenge was to formalize our efforts and to
drive a concerted global IT-wide intelligent automation program.
CHALLENGE
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3. As we were starting from the ground up,
we needed to define a structure and
operating model, shape our processes,
mobilize the appropriate skills and
implement our strategy and approach.
Our strategy is to undertake a
transformation journey of Accenture’s
internal operations activities, advancing
along the automation maturity curve.
To have a common understanding
across our global IT organization, we
created a consistent definition of
automation and its stages of maturity.
We define intelligent automation as the
combination of artificial intelligence and
machine learning (AI/ML) analytics with
robotic process automation (RPA)
supported by an end-to-end automation
architecture, standards and
frameworks.
WHAT ACCENTURE DID
Given the huge breadth of automation
opportunities, platforms and technologies,
we established an Automation Center of
Excellence (COE) to focus and super-
charge our efforts. Automation architects,
machine learning developers, bot
designers, robotic process automation
experts, data scientists, DevSecOps
specialists and others are tasked to
develop tools and solutions for more than
900 Accenture applications. Global IT
Operations Leads collaborate with their
teams to identify relevant automation
opportunities, using the guidance and
assets from the Automation COE.
Efforts are organized through several
workstreams, including discovery, business
analysis, solution design and agile
development. The Automation COE’s goal
is to innovate through research and proof
of concepts and create assets that work
across all business units. The scope
covers core operational areas such
incident management, service requests,
monitoring, data patrolling, changes,
testing and deployments.
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4. Foundational framework
The first stage was to lay a foundational
framework by enhancing processes,
improving data quality to enable
automations and developing an intelligent
automation platform. The guiding principle
was to take an intelligent “shift left” focus,
meaning a focus on prevention. We
concentrated on eliminating waste,
simplifying processes, implementing
preventative remediation and building a
foundational informational infrastructure.
We prioritized processes across the delivery
life cycle to be optimized and automated. An
automation discovery team analyzes use
cases to determine how to resolve
operational issues through automation. We
use scripts, macros, batch programs, mini
bots, and other standard and custom
solutions to automate standard and
repetitive tasks. We have implemented
several robotics processes to automate
repetitive and predictable tasks to eliminate
several days of manual effort for operational
activities.
WHAT ACCENTURE DID
Touchless operations
Our vision of touchless operations is to disrupt
and redefine internal operations. We are
exploring ways to deploy highly intuitive
solutions; use machine learning to predict events
and recommend next-best actions; mature self-
learning, self-healing capabilities and auto-
resolution processes; and minimize human-
engaged transactions. Our strategy will be to
focus on guided solutioning through platform
adoption, operating in the cloud, reflective
intelligence, self-service offerings,
interactive bots and gamification triggers.
Intelligent automation
In this stage, we are accelerating the adoption of
intelligent automation and artificial intelligence.
We are looking to expand our application of
cognitive chatbots and intelligent bots for all
possible processes and to focus on optimizing
processes and preparing for a digital operations
model. The vision is to create an AI/ML-powered
robotic workforce to augment humans in
operations to enhance the user experience,
improve quality and reduce operating
expenditures. Machines mimic human actions
and possess cognitive capabilities, including
natural language processing, speech recognition,
computer vision technology and machine
learning. Machines with automated intelligence
comprehend vast amounts of data, analyze,
understand and learn it on the go, and
intelligently automate processes to bring in more
operational and business efficiency.
We developed and deployed multiple AI machine
learning assets. Each asset involves AI analysis
of tickets, provides recommendations and
automatically resolves the tickets. These
solutions are helping accelerate Accenture’s
touchless operations journey while improving
speed and accuracy of ticket resolution.
To implement intelligent automation, our global IT organization’s Automation COE team is
carrying out a three-stage journey:
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5. Automation helps improve our internal operations productivity, quality,
performance and user experience. It also helps to reduce manual work of
global IT operations teams and enables employee careers to evolve to
different roles that drive creative thinking and working with machines for
problem solving. This evolution reflects a technology trend Accenture
calls Human+ Worker, where workforces are becoming human+: each
individual is empowered by their skillsets and knowledge plus a new,
constantly growing set of capabilities made possible through technology.
Companies must adapt the technologies that successfully created this
next-generation workforce to support a new way of working in the post-
digital age.
PEOPLE AND
CULTURE
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6. As the domain of information technology automation
matures, so do Accenture’s capabilities, use cases and
solutions. Our global IT organization’s Automation Center of
Excellence (COE) is providing the required structure,
governance and discipline around automation to achieve
the business goals of more operational and business
efficiency. The COE teams collaborate with IT Operations
teams to identify improvements that will make the most
impact efficiently and effectively. After optimization, teams
build and deploy optimizations and automations with the
results tracked and reported.
VALUE
DELIVERED
35%
operational cost reduction
Delivered 1,000+ automation
programs over three years resulting
in 35% cumulative savings in
operational cost, enabling
investment in new capabilities
Our intelligent automation vision is quite
ambitious. We’re miles ahead of the curve in
what we are doing today, for an
unprecedented tomorrow.
RAHUL MAHESHWARI
Managing Director–Global IT Operations, Intelligent
Automation, Accenture
40%
applications automated
Increased speed by enabling 40%
of Accenture applications with
automated technologies, driving
greater efficiencies to deliver new
business functions
10%
resource capacity increase
Created additional resource
capacity of more than 10%
annually with greater workforce
agility at scale, predictive insights
and scalable solutions
Increased quality
Increased quality through reliable
RPA and AI automation, reducing
human intervention and errors
Accenture’s intelligent automation journey is delivering value for global IT
operations and Accenture people by:
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7. DAN KIRNER
Managing Director
Global IT, Global Operations, Risk, SAP & Finance
https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-kirner-84184210/
RICH PALUMBO
Managing Director
Global IT, Infrastructure and Application Development and
Delivery
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rich-palumbo-521a4b22/
RAHUL MAHESHWARI
Managing Director
Global IT, Global Operations Intelligent Automation
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahul-m-8b7b081a/
MEET
THE TEAM
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