Blog post written by Jort Possel. Jort is the Global Social Media Director at Accenture and a former blogger on Blogpodium.
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.
Adding Value
Leveraging business groups and workforces was the key to setting the stage for future growth. We had to start leveraging global and other assets more effectively, in terms of the bundled value proposition we put on the table to both transform and run businesses for our clients. Focusing on adding value for clients has enabled Accenture over the past few years to raise its sights to ‘the addressable market of how much of the value chain of a client can now turn into our value chain with a margin on it’. That shift of thinking has been absolutely fundamental to changing our mix of business in a very, very fundamental way.
Accenture’s goal, which remains virtually unchanged from the firm’s earliest forays into consulting, is to help solve clients’ problems by bringing the best global resources we can focus on the problem. We will continue to create capabilities and centers of excellence around the world that can do this, integrating the value chain for the client.
High Performance
But bigger isn’t always better. The game we were, and still are, playing isn’t about scale, it’s about differentiation and superior execution. And that plays right into the High Performance Business theme—our outcomes-oriented focus. “If you’re going to bet your job or your company on the advice and counsel and assistance of somebody, they better be aligned with delivering measurable results. That’s what works for us,” Bill Green stated.
After being on a “stabilize and navigate agenda, we need to get back on a growth agenda,” Green said. He saw “tremendous headroom” for expanding into adjacent markets that are “direct extensions of what we know how to do every day.” He added, “The world has changed a lot in five years. Where the action is has changed a lot. Certainly we have opportunities in Asia that are astounding. Now for years we’ve been positioning ourselves to a footprint and a launch pad in Asia. I think we’re entering the space where we need to execute on that.”
While it didn’t receive much publicity at the time, Accenture was an early pioneer in building business service centers in Asia in the mid-1980s when it opened a center in Manila. The firm was responding to clients, mainly in the United States, who were on the cutting edge of searching for ways to reduce the costs of systems development. Manila was chosen as the site for the center primarily because of the large number of English-speaking residents and widespread familiarity with American idioms. The savings were significant in the 1980s, even with a relatively high telecommunications cost structure.
Twenty years later, the sharp drop in global telecommunications costs would drive dramatic growth in outsourcing work to Asia.
