Solutions geared for size and scope
It’s hard to imagine a company with a more vast and varied IT landscape than Accenture. After all, the global consulting firm employs more than 700,000 people and delivers professional services for 9,000 businesses, governments, and other public and third-sector organizations. What’s more, its clients include 91 of the current Fortune Global 100 and more than three-quarters of the Fortune Global 500. The company’s size and scope are most certainly some of its key strengths—but that also presents its challenges, particularly when it comes to IT.
But with close collaboration and strategic thinking, even the most complex IT challenges can become opportunities.
“We operate in over 55 countries and often we’re doing things 55 different ways,” explained Tom Bruss, Accenture’s Global IT Director. “By digitizing workflow processes and using ServiceNow’s platform strengths, we’ve achieved significant efficiencies and increased productivity for our employees.”
Accenture and ServiceNow have enjoyed an enduring business relationship that dates to 2015, with the consolidation of multiple legacy systems onto ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM). Since then, Accenture has steadily increased the adoption of additional capabilities and solutions across the enterprise.
Today, 64% of Accenture employees access ServiceNow every month, and there are more than 2.25 million supported end users of ServiceNow in its ecosystem. More than 1.7 million ticket transactions are completed every month and 90 business applications are operating on the ServiceNow platform.
For example, ServiceNow replaced a labor-intensive invoicing process that took three days to complete with an automated workflow that now takes just three minutes—with zero data entry errors.
Immediate ‘Impact’
The companies share a commitment to creating 360-degree value for clients and finding new ways to accelerate time-to-value. To that end, Accenture has been a design partner and early adopter of ServiceNow Impact, a solution that combines expert coaching and prescriptive guidance, personalized insights and recommendations, premium technical support, role-based training, and curated content through the Impact digital experience.
Launched in 2022, ServiceNow Impact supports customers to achieve 20% more value, 20% faster, while simultaneously delivering 10% people savings and efficiencies*.
The initial deployment included a series of advisory sessions supporting Accenture in improving its use of ITSM Virtual Agent, its DocuSign integrations, and its support portal.
Other measures included code reviews to identify defects and performance issues that may impact services; dedicated, hands-on performance improvement resources, and faster, prioritized response times from its experts.
Enhanced training sessions were also put in place, alongside a bespoke dashboard providing a single, transparent view of everything happening on the ServiceNow platform. The solution has allowed Accenture to anticipate and address challenges with platform health, rather than react to issues or implementation problems as they arise.
“Now, we’re much more proactive and we’re able to identify potential issues and take the necessary preventative action,” said Bruss. “ServiceNow is the centerpiece of our global business services strategy.”
Jumpstarting success
Perhaps the biggest achievement of the investment to date has been the reduction of priority one (P1) incidents—from four or five each month to fewer than two per month on average. Overall, platform health has improved by 8%.
Accenture has taken advantage of several ServiceNow Impact’s “Accelerators”: fixed-scope offerings that give customers access to experts to get value quickly. Jumpstart Accelerators help companies get up and running faster with a certain product or application—think AI search, virtual agent, upgrades, or automated testing—by providing a ServiceNow expert for a one-on-one coaching session.
For Accenture, the “Jumpstart Your Upgrade” Accelerator was deployed to ensure that each ServiceNow upgrade was executed seamlessly, while the “Tune Up Your Configuration Management Database (CMDB)” Accelerator provided insights into the status and best practice recommendations that optimize CMDB health.
Overall, ServiceNow Impact accelerates results on average by 20% and amplifies a customer’s ServiceNow expertise, delivering on average of about 10% in people savings.
For Accenture, the proof is in the value. As Bruss said, “ServiceNow Impact helps us identify where we can prioritize our investments, provides clarity on the results we’re trying to achieve, and unlocks more value.
“ServiceNow is enabling our employees to spend less time on basic tasks, and more time with clients and exploring opportunities to innovate and to generate more value.”
*The Total Economic Impact of ServiceNow Impact, Forrester, October 2023.”