Why take a platform approach to IT?

Delivering value for customers at speed
Accenture is a global professional services organization, working with 91 of the Fortune 100 companies to unlock the power of technology and nurture talent to deliver better business outcomes. It has more than half a million employees, 6,000 clients, an ecosystem of 185 partners, and 7,900 patents and patents pending worldwide.

Transforming service management
In 2016, Accenture began a digital transformation to optimize service management. It needed to consolidate six IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions, including 15 support portals, which was making it complex for users to access the right support services. The team also wanted to take the opportunity to accelerate service delivery and streamline operations with a faster, more scalable solution.

Taking a platform approach
To simplify access to support, the company decided to take a platform approach that went beyond simply improving IT services. As Karen Odegaard, Managing Director – Global IT, Digital Worker Technology, explains, “Some issues touch multiple departments, from IT, to HR, finance, and asset management, for example. We decided to take a broader approach and think about enterprise services to improve the user experience and make life easier for everyone.”

And, to bring its vision to life, Accenture partnered with ServiceNow to create one workflow platform and a home for enterprise services, replacing well over 50 applications and multiple asset management spreadsheets with a single solution.

Optimizing and automating services
ServiceNow IT Service Management supports and automates thousands of processes and services for the company’s 624,000 employees, and 75% of the workforce access the solution at least once a month—in fact, it’s in the top three most accessed applications across the whole company. But the team didn’t just transform operations for staff, ServiceNow and Accenture formed a partnership to deliver essential services and give clients access to expertise.

Empowering the team to better serve clients
The transformation is already helping staff be more productive and efficient, while the IT team can accelerate time to value by leveraging the Now Platform App Engine’s low-code environment to develop new releases faster. “Our partnership with ServiceNow means our business runs more efficiently and we can free the team up to deliver more value to clients,” comments Karen. “I’m excited to see what ServiceNow brings to the table in the future.”

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