Accenture It Strategies

For Accenture to be able to transform its IT organization many changes would have to be made to ensure that the IT organization is able to function towards the goals that have been set by the company. Some of the changes that would have to be made will be minor changes to align the department with the company objective and other changes would be major changes to fix weakness with the organization to ensure that the business function in such a way that the company would be able to benefit.

The first strategic IT initiative that needs to take place at Accenture to ensure the company’s success is to put systems and regulations in place to ensure that the IT department would continue to be run as a business within a business.  Running IT as a business, the fundamental IT processes, is all about regulation, repeatability, and probability, particularly in situations where you have mergers and acquisitions. It's always a interference if you have to bring different IT departments together. If you have a standard that's easy to duplicate, that's a no-brainer and winner from a business bottom-line standpoint.

This transformation cannot occur without the CIO leading the renewal. CIOs must shift from reactively supporting business needs, to spearheading the structural and cultural change needed within the IT organization in order to drive business process innovations that support the entire corporate agenda. The first step is to create an organizational structure in which IT can move into a new role of business enabler, working side-by-side with the business as a partner. To enable this to happen the company would have to centralize program management and create better governance and metrics by reorganizing the office of project management if there is one in place or create a department to align better with the new IT structure.

A second strategic IT initiative that would have to occur at Accenture to ensure that the IT department is aligned with the company objective is that the company would have to select a one platform system to ensure IT systems can be able to handle the business needs. This one platform approach would also ensure that the company does not have a number of patch worked applications that that can leave its network and IT system vulnerable to hackers and attacks.  Using a one platform system would have many benefits for the company such as quicker and more flexible to update or add to their systems to meet business goals and test new technologies. The biggest advantage of a single commerce platform is that having one platform is much simpler. Keeping everything on one platform reduces the cost, the human resource, and the time required to maintain multiple platforms

Using a single platform system it would also be easier for Accenture to be in compliance with local, national and international business and IT laws and regulations. The Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002 referred to as the Sarbanes-Oxley act has changed how all public and private companies do business. Sarbanes-Oxley is a large complex piece of Federal legislation that is now the law of the land. (Seider, 2004) While the a Sarbanes audit mainly focuses on financial matters of the company, it also has a very important role in that it requires the company to provide documentation to support that its IT systems and the information that is contained in this system is reliable, verifiable and secure. Using a one platform system Accenture would be able to show that there system is secure, reliable and they would be able to verify information.