Accenture IT Report 2012-2013

Seeing Is Believing

Transforming the Way We WorkA Message from Frank B. ModrusonAccenture Chief Information Officer

Welcome to our 2012-2013 report on how Accenture does IT. Thank you for your interest in our work.

The major IT news across Accenture and among our clients is how visual communications is changing the way we all work together. No longer a rare occurrence, videoconferencing is now the norm inside Accenture and increasingly among our clients as well. Some 150,000 of our professionals are enabled today to conduct video calls from their laptops with a single click. Already, 179 client organizations are “federated” with Accenture, enabling seamless, face-to-face daily communication and collaboration.

The impact of visual communications on the way we work cannot be overstated. Tangible business benefits, including less travel, lower travel costs, and more face time with colleagues and clients, all translate into greater efficiency and substantial savings. The intangible benefits — stronger collaboration, faster problem resolution through real-time face-to-face interaction, an enhanced balance between work and life, and advancing environmental stewardship — are immeasurable.

In this report and on accenture.com (www.accenture.com/internalit), you can see the full spectrum of videoconferencing tools we are using today.

In addition to our trailblazing efforts on video, this report updates you on several other important IT innovations we introduced this past year in response to trends in mobility, the consumerization of IT, and social media. These achievements reflect the work of thousands of professionals across Accenture’s internal IT organization. I thank them all for their out-standing contributions to Accenture’s success. We all can take justifiable pride in providing our colleagues and clients with the very best that technology has to offer, further enabling high performance for all.

Seeing really is believing. So come and see what we are seeing and doing at Accenture. We welcome your inquiries.

Frank B. Modruson

On the cover: Accenture Chief Executive Officer

Pierre Nanterme (upper right), other Accenture

leadership and professionals demonstrate

the pervasive presence of videoconferencing in

today’s global enterprise.

Video Is the New Voice

Videoconferencing anytime, anywhere is changing the way we work. As video becomes the new voice across corporate enterprises, Accenture is leading the way, expanding the video ecosystem to link our employees with one another and with our clients.

Many of our people are already able to add video to an existing audio call with a single click. Before the end of fiscal year 2013, the number of video-enabled professionals will surpass 200,000. Video is quickly becoming the new “voice” across Accenture.

Last year, there were nearly 7,000 Accenture video-conferencing meetings held around the world. Our total number of videoconferencing meeting minutes now runs into the millions annually. We already use many different systems, including high-definition Telepresence video, EX Series personal video, Roundtable team videoconferencing, and Lync and Jabber personal video devices. The actual tool matters less than the impact videoconferencing as a whole is having on productivity and performance.

Accenture videoconferencing advances in 2012-2013Here is an overview of Accenture’s videoconferencing ecosystem in action.

4

New high-definition Jabber desktop videoconferencing introduced

150,000 Accenture professionals enabled with Lync desktop video

Seeing Is Believing

5

23 new Telepresence units added, expanding the network to 126

140 EX Series videoconferencing devices added, bringing the total in use to 235

More than 43 million videoconferencing minutes per year

“What’s normal now is to have a virtual meeting.... The technology is now fully changing the way Accenture is operating.”— Pierre Nanterme Accenture Chief Executive Officer

An Accenture team of more than 2,000 professionals recently faced a business challenge. Team members had to collaborate across thousands of miles, requiring significant weekly travel. “Our teams were doing great work,” explains Adrian Scott, one of the Accenture Leaders overseeing the effort, “but our travel budget was taking a beating.”

With help from the Accenture CIO Organization, the team purchased six EX Series videoconferencing systems. As soon as the systems were installed, videoconferencing became an integral part of the team’s work process, with multiple sessions each day bringing together team members in India and Australia.

The EX Series units effectively paid for themselves within the first month of operation. “We are on track to significantly cut our expected travel expenses for the year,” reports Scott. Going forward, the use of videoconferencing by this one team alone is expected to save more than US$1million per year in travel expenses.

Multiplied by the many thousands of Accenture teams collaborating worldwide, the prospective cost efficiencies from teaming without traveling are immense.

Seeing Is Succeeding: Teaming Without Travel

6Accenture team members 5,500 miles apart collaborate daily via videoconferencing.

Global companies with widely distributed teams and clients located around the world must overcome the constraints of distance and time. Few companies understand this better than Accenture, operating in120 countries across all time zones. Fewer still have mobilized such a diverse roster of videoconferencing tools to make face-to-face meeting without place-to-place travel an everyday occurrence.

Accenture’s lifelike Telepresence high-definition videoconferencing network is one of the largest in the business world, linking Accenture’s 126 locations with 63 client organizations. EX Series videoconferencing tools provide the same high-definition quality on flat screens suitable for use by one or two participants. Portable Roundtable team videoconferencing tools with 360-degree cameras let teams collabo-rate on the fly, wherever they happen to be. Lync video is fully integrated with all these videoconferencing tools.

Meeting Anytime, Anywhere Around the World

7

The result is an enterprise always working, constantly producing, consistently delivering, not in starts and stops as the sun rises and falls, but around the clock and around the world.

Accenture professionals around the world collaborate

via high-definition Telepresence videoconferencing for

more than 360,000 minutes every month.

High-Impact Face-to-Face Collaboration

Lync, one of the most powerful com-munications platforms in the market, is now the primary communications tool across Accenture. The migration of all Accenture employees to Lync was completed in fiscal year 2012. Lync integrates secure audio and instant messaging with “presence” indicators, deskstop sharing, whiteboarding and other valuable features.

Some 150,000 Accenture professionals are enabled with Lync video as well. Video adds unequalled immediacy, giving participants face-to-face contact and the ability to see and read those vital cues that help us gauge how messages and ideas are being received.

Global teams using Lync interact effortlessly, as if members were in the same office. Numerous client teams are using Lync to reduce travel, by enabling team members to work one week per month from home. Lync’s versatility is driving more effective collaboration and innovative work arrangements across Accenture.

8

The newest Lync enhancements enable users to invite clients and other external contacts to calls, even if they do not have Lync. Users can brainstorm in a whiteboard session, poll call participants on decisions, even work on content together using shared programs. Jabber, an enhanced videoconferencing tool that provides high-definition image resolution on the Lync platform, was introduced on a selective basis in fiscal year 2012.

With 150,000 Accenture professionals now enabled

with Lync video, laptops become platforms for face-to-

face collaboration with colleagues across the globe.

Advancing the Communications Ecosystem:Federation and B2B Videoconferencing

Audio and video collaboration is rapidly expanding beyond Accenture’s corporate borders to include clients and business partners. Currently, 179 client organizations are “federated” with Accenture, meaning that personnel in a federated company can communicate with Accenture personnel easily and securely over a common communications platform such as Lync or Office Communicator.

The benefits are obvious: stronger teamwork, lower costs and integrated instant messaging. With shared instant messaging and other tools, collaboration becomes seamless. Presence indicators simplify contacts and scheduling.

Videoconferencing is a one-click process, and desktop sharing of programs and documents makes calls more productive. As more companies integrate advanced communications tools within their operations, the benefits to be gained from networking with like-minded users will multiply exponentially.

9

Accenture recognized early on that being restricted to a single videoconferencing system would limit its growth. So the Accenture Videoconferencing Bridging Service engineers the interoperability of systems by building individual video bridges. In its first full year of operations, the Accenture Videoconferencing Bridging Service team helped more than 125 companies to interconnect their standards-based video systems. From left: Chris Schaaf, Jennifer Kohler, Jim Maggio

Many Accenture offices are equipped with portable

plug-and-play Roundtable cameras that capture

a 360-degree video view of meeting participants.

Visual Communications across Accenture:Video Tools for Every Task

126 Telepresence units

235 EX Series devices

250+ Roundtable devices

600 Jabber desktop videoconferencing tools

150,000 people using Lync desktop video

179 client organizations federated on Lync

125+ client

organizations interconnected via Accenture

Videoconferencing Bridging Service

63 client organizations

with Telepresence

10

11

Capitalizing on the Cloud

Lower costs, variable cost models and freedom from expensive upgrades continue to draw attention to cloud-based computing. By the end of fiscal year 2012, Accenture had moved more than 250,000 Accenture mailboxes and nearly 11,300 shared-services sites to the cloud. This initiative will earn back its required investment in just one year, and is slated to continue saving Accenture millions of dollars per year going forward.

Why would a global corporation take the risk of handing over critical communications and collaboration capabilities to a third party? Where some might see only risks, Accenture saw opportunities. Accenture’s migration experience indicates that even when starting with an optimized platform, the business case is more than validated by the benefits. Cloud-based capabilities offered by third parties provide superior performance and functionality at a much lower price, because costs are spread across a larger customer base. Accenture’s internal IT organization was impressed by the enhanced capabilities available in cloud-based offerings: mailbox sizes up to 15 times larger than pre-migration limits, not to mention robust archival services and built-in disaster recovery protocols.

Security, often a concern when companies first explore the cloud, turned out to be a non-event; Accenture found security safeguards and procedures equal to its own security procedures. Best of all, cloud-based service provides for a stable and predictable financial model.

Seizing new cloud-based opportunities continues to be an Accenture priority. By the end of fiscal year 2012, over 200 development and test environments were taking advantage of public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings. Accenture continues to add more Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings to the company’s application portfolio, especially in situations where lower integration costs are attractive. In August 2012, Accenture’s internal video sharing platform was replaced with an advanced cloud-based offering that delivers more powerful functionality with an improved user interface.

From left: Ban La, Tiffany Keane, Mike O’Brien, Gené Hall

Accenture is providing extensive support for the use of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) technologies across the enterprise. More than 115,000 smartphones and tablets already connect to Accenture’s e-mail today, up from 7,000 three years ago, and this total continues to grow at a rate of some 2,000 new devices per month.

The BYOD trend is so strong that for many companies, it may not be a matter of “if” but of “when,” and the answer could be sooner than anyone imagines. Companies face a decision: find techniques to securely allow BYOD, or let devices proliferate and face the consequences. Currently, most BYOD usage will be incremental, with users adding personal devices to their corporate-supplied tools. Eventually, the BYOD trend is projected to become substitutional, because that is where the savings are. Just as companies do not buy business clothing for most of their employees, there may well come a time when corporations will not buy technology devices either.

As companies decide how to respond to the BYOD phenomenon, they will need to address the application architecture of legacy systems. Given the plethora of platforms, a viable approach to BYOD will drive companies to focus on either a browser-based architecture, as Accenture did starting in 2001, or leverage thin client overlay solutions.

If companies do not embrace the BYOD trend, or at least make sense of it, they will be at a disadvantage in the continuing war for talent. New entrants to the workforce expect flexibility in where they work and what devices they use. Enabling your workforce to be productive on the go, outside the traditional office confines and after hours, promises to be a major business benefit of the BYOD phenomenon.

12

Empowering Everyone: Bring Your Own Device

From left: Ken Corless, Joe Chung, Renee Cordova Lottes, Maria Lucca, Rocio Lopez

13

Connecting Online for High Performance

Accenture has long recognized the value of helping everyone connect with anyone. Today, the Accenture People online tool is a leading-edge environment that makes it easy for employees to interact and share skills, interests and activities across Accenture’s global corporate network, meshing the best of business networking and social networking capabilities.

A revision of Accenture People was largely driven by the activity streams and improved user experience that employees had come to expect from social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Given Accenture’s tech-savvy workforce, the upgraded product would have to compare favorably with the best of the consumer tools, which are built with much larger budgets. To maintain both its market relevance and its “cool” profile, the Accenture People tool would also need to embrace social features, mobile capabilities and other new technologies, such as scannable Quick Response (QR) Codes that easily move contact information to mobile devices.

To enhance the utility of Accenture People’s update, Accenture’s IT organization followed a two-pronged path, making proven components easier to use and faster, while steadily introducing new capabilities.

Key among the proven components are employee profiles automatically populated with standard company information, including work organization, skills, level, contact information, and office location. To amplify the opportunities

for sharing employee knowledge, Accenture People also integrates many of the latest social media tools:

• Autocompletesearchfeatureswiththumbnailsand basic demographic information help locate people 15 times faster than the previous method.

• Searchingforpeoplebynamesupports“sounds like” matching.

• The“PeopleYouMayKnow”functionprovidesmatches based on multiple factors, including employee profiles, previous projects and locations.

• An“ActivityFeed,”prominentoneverypage,helps employees keep track of what colleagues are saying and doing in their areas of interest.

• Bloggingcapabilitieshavebeensignificantlyenhanced.

• Microblogging,muchlikeTwitter,makesiteasyfor employees to reach out across the entire global workforce for their information needs.

“Accenture believes our people should be interacting across the enterprise as intuitively as they do on Facebook and other social sites,” explains Chip Allen, who led the initiative for the CIO Organization. “Our goal with this refresh was to create an Accenture People environment where connections are second-nature and collaboration is effortless. We believe we succeeded.”

Newly designed Accenture People profile pages emphasize the features employees use:

• Employeeprofilepicture• Standardcompanyinformation• Recentactivities• AboutMepersonalinformation• SpecializationandSkills• PeopleYouMayKnowprofilematches

Since the new platform went live in 2012, Accenture People is much faster, and functional-ity in several important areas has been enhanced. The most frequently used data can be found at the top of pages, with deeper, specialized data only a single click away. This ease of access to Accenture’s vast global resources is helping to improve issue resolution, drive professional growth, and boost productivity for all employees.

14

Smarter Travel Expense Management: myTravelSummary

In a business travel climate best described as unforgiving, Accenture wanted to foster radical efficiency among 95,000 employee-travelers who visit clients spanning 120 countries. The answer: Empower employees to manage travel expenses as if they were the CEO of their own firms.

A tool that put an employee’s expenditures in context, including comparisons with other individuals, would allow everyone to make more prudent travel decisions, versus simply booking reservations…and spending money.

Accenture’s IT team and their business counterparts innovated a solution called myTravelSummary built on a single premise: If employees spent Accenture’s money the way they spent their own, they would be more accountable for travel decisions and find new ways to save. To inform employee decision making, Accenture gave its travelers easy-to-access “personal travel dashboards” with data presented simply. The robust travel-tracking tool provides an analysis of expenditures, creating immediate incentives for travelers to make major changes to their more costly habits. Now, employees can make much more cost-effective decisions with every new booking, contributing to reductions in Accenture’s overall travel spend.

According to Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT), a leading firm specializing in business travel management, Accenture is its first client to engineer an interface to travel data that creates personalized and sophisticated reports. Accenture is also one of a few companies that has consolidated all travel arrangements with one partner, CWT, and merged all its travel data internally into a single data warehouse — making the development of myTravelSummary possible.

Accenture spends a considerable amount on travel each year, and that amount increases by approximately 22 percent every year. Thanks to its powerful, individual dashboards and travel key performance indicator tracking capabilities, myTravelSummary will contribute significantly to reductions in Accenture’s travel expenses.

From left: Anthony Massetti, Naveen Sriman, Rich Palumbo, Brad Ruderman, Jill Arteman

Accenture’s Internal IT at a Glance

The Accenture Internal IT Team

Hardware and Network

• 261,000workstationsdeployed

• 5,150devicesmonitored

• 4,600serversmanaged

• 30gigabytesnetworkbandwidth managed

Websites

• 60,000uniquevisitorstoAccenture Portal per day

• 35,000uniquevisitorsto accenture.com per day

• 100,000uniquesearchqueries per day

Applications

• 246globalapplications

• 249localapplicationssupported

• SingleinstanceglobalSAPERP

Collaboration

• 295,000e-mailaccounts

• 8,700,000e-mailmessagesperday

• 6,000Telepresencehourspermonth

• 13,000SharePointsites

• 115,000mobiledevices (iPhone/Android/BlackBerry/Windows)

• 73,000,000audioconferencing minutes per month

• 3,600,000videoconferencing minutes per month

Support

• 910,000resolvedincidentsper year through help desk, Web Chat, local support

• 1,450,000self-servicecontacts

Enterprise CIOMerim BecirovicJohn J. BlasiEileen BurnsVidya S. ByannaDarrin J. CaramontaJoseph ChungSteven J. Collins Ken CorlessChris CrawfordAna López DíazSean E. FreeburgerWilliam C. HubKush K. JhawarDaniel P. KirnerElizabeth KleeMichael J. MarescaTodd D. MarquardtFrank B. ModrusonRichard A. PalumboTom ParisiMichael J. ReiterSony M. RustebergNirav Sampat

Global Delivery NetworkNescel A. AsuncionWeihong DingAndrea I. DurrutyJoie JaneoAnupam PandeySaran PrasadFlavio Squillacioti

Infrastructure OutsourcingSimon GoochIgnacio HorcajoPaul M. LarsonAnthony M. LerarisArun MenonBradley NyersPaul RanjanJohn Van Kemp

From left: Sony Rusteberg, Merim Becirovic, Dan Kirner, Frank Modruson

Beth McKim and Todd Rosenthal

This document makes descriptive reference to

trademarks that may be owned by others. The use

of such trademarks herein is not an assertion of

ownership of such trademarks by Accenture and is

not intended to represent or imply the existence

of an association between Accenture and the lawful

owners of such trademarks.

Copyright © 2013 Accenture All rights reserved.

Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with 259,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$27.9 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2012. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

For more information about Accenture’s IT organization, visit www.accenture.com/internalit