Accenture: Strategy, Structure and Evaluation

Introduction

Accenture is a public limited multinational corporation that was founded 30 years ago. It offers professional services in the fields of strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. Headquartered in Ireland, the company has clients in around 120 countries (Forbes, 2019). Accenture is a market leader in most of the industries because of its high revenues and market share. The company aims to reflect its vision of “becoming one of the world’s leading companies, bringing innovations to improve the way the world works and lives” in its services (ibid).

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Strategy

Julie Sweet was appointed as the new CEO of Accenture this month. She has voiced three main strategies for the company. The firm will aim to invest in technological innovation, continue maintaining relationships with its customers /employees and become more environmentally ethical (Murray, 2019). These strategies will be implemented via their matrix system, which has decentralized the company into regional and industrial divisions. Accenture’s competitive advantage of being a large corporation allows the company to invest in innovative technology and keep up with the dynamic needs of its market. Its “Digital and Cloud” services provide advanced technology that helps in saving storage costs, increase profits and facilitate the clients reach their full potential (Morgan Stanley Ahead of the Curve: The Strategy and Consulting Businesses, 2017). Accenture’s partnership with SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft etc. (Accenture.com, 2019) further hone its services in every industry it operates in. This further makes Accenture a reliable company with immense industry knowledge because the professional services provided by the firm is implemented via the latest technology.

Focusing more on Accenture’s take on innovation, the company hires a lot of young talent. Recently, it employed around 90,000 people from the newer generation (Forbes, 2019). This ensures an influx of innovative ideas in the firm that are aligned with current trends of the generation. Furthermore, Accenture heavily invests in the training of its staff, making sure their skill sets are up to date (ibid). Their global markets, especially in dynamic nations like the USA, Australia and Ireland value Accenture’s modern services. Accenture invests in its work environment and employee-employer relationship. Sweet recently announced that the company wants to be more inclusive and diverse. It already consists of 42% female employees and strives to reach a balance by 2025 (Murray, 2019). Accenture’s attempts at making the workplace more inclusive produce better quality services that satisfy customers. People around the world have become more environmentally conscious. Latest market trends reveal that customers are 50% more likely to associate with an environmentally friendly company (Newsroom.accenture.com, 2019). Hence, Accenture has made it one of its most important goals to go “green.” It has heavily invested in reducing their carbon footprint and the emissions have already gone down by 52% since 2007 (ibid).

Structure

Accenture operates in different industries providing a wide array of services. To manage its complexity, the company uses a matrix system. The company divides itself by industry type called Client Service Groups (CSG). They operate in the fields of products, resources, communication media and technology, financial services etc. Each of these industries has its heads that report to the CEO, Julie Sweet(Gurney, 2017). The organisation is further divided according to the region it operates in. Each area is called a DTE that stands for Deployed to Entity. Every DTE acts like a small company within Accenture with its own set of management, finance, projects, training etc. For example, the region of the UK and Ireland have their DTE called Analyst Consulting Group (ACG) that is broken into 16 sub-communities (Gurney, 2017).

So every CSG has its own DTE in its respective locations. Each of these mini-companies have their management and all of them report to Accenture’s top managers in the headquarters. Some employees work for a specific industry, for instance, technology. Initially, as analysts, they would provide services in many DTEs and report to numerous heads (in various geographic locations) to get trained and specialize for a specific DTE (Gurney, 2017). The chain of command in such organizations begins from analysts at the bottom to consultants, senior consultants managers, senior managers, partners, head of the region and finally the head of the industry (ibid).

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Evaluation

Accenture reported a 4% increase in its profits in the third quarter of 2019 (Newsroom.accenture.com, 2019). These statistics can be one of the indicators bolstering the fact that the company is performing well. The firm meets its standards of constant innovation, relationship building with clients/employees and is an environmentally ethical company. The way it is structured in mini-companies called DTE allows it to maintain a personal relationship with its clients. Its technology allows the company to stay ahead of its main competitors like IBM, Deloitte etc. in respective industries. Furthermore, it has adopted a new strategy called “asset-light” model that serves numerous customers via various logistics networks. They have shared assets in the form of digital tools that the employees can use to nurture large- scale agility and responsiveness (Narsana and Sands, 2019). Since Accenture is a very huge company its organizational structure is complex. But technology, innovative models and its strategies have allowed the company to be profitable and function smoothly by addressing and fixing issues.

Bibliography 

• Accenture.com. (2019). Enterprise Technology Services & Solutions | Accenture. [online] Available at: https://www.accenture.com/gb-en/about/technology-index [Accessed 19 Sep. 2019].
• Forbes. (2019). Accenture on the Forbes Best Management Consulting Firms List. [online] Available at: https://www.forbes.com/companies/accenture/?list=best-management-consulting-firms/#38ef8c2f48d6 [Accessed 19 Sep. 2019].
• Gurney, A. (2017). Organization Structure | Accenture. [online] Accenture.com. Available at: https://www.accenture.com/gb-en/blogs/blogs-know-about-accenture-structure [Accessed 18 Sep. 2019].
• Morgan Stanley Ahead of the Curve: The Strategy and Consulting Businesses. (2017).
• Murray, A. (2019). Accenture Selects Julie Sweet as New CEO. [online] Fortune. Available at: https://fortune.com/2019/07/11/accenture-new-ceo-julie-sweet/ [Accessed 19 Sep. 2019].
• Narsana, T. and Sands, E. (2019). Leverage ecosystem partners and digital tools with XPL to create a highly responsive logistics network. [online] Accenture.com. Available at: https://www.accenture.com/us-en/blogs/blogs-tushar-narsana-agile-logistics-network [Accessed 19 Sep. 2019].
• Newsroom.accenture.com. (2019). Accenture Fact Sheet | Accenture Newsroom. [online] Available at: https://newsroom.accenture.com/fact-sheet/ [Accessed 19 Sep. 2019].
• Newsroom.accenture.com. (2019). More than Half of Consumers Would Pay More for Sustainable Products Designed to Be Reused or Recycled, Accenture Survey Finds | Accenture Newsroom. [online] Available at: https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/more-than-half-of-consumers-would-pay-more-for-sustainable-products-designed-to-be-reused-or-recycled-accenture-survey-finds.htm [Accessed 19 Sep. 2019].