An organization that fundamentally depends on a workforce that is frequently on the move between projects, between customers, and between teams, becomes critically dependent upon collaboration. Within a company, whether you are in sales, consulting or work on customer projects, you need your people to become dependent on each other across the network of your organization. This helps to un-dam the flow of knowledge that often pools in parts of the organization due to human or technological incompatibility. Knowledge is a river. Unlocking this flow, creating out new channels, and understanding the dependencies of the ecosystem are the elements of the design of the future of successful work in organizations. This core idea is by far not lost on the top consulting companies like Accenture.
Collaboration is one of the key aspects of the Accenture Way, the work culture and their approach to doing things for their clients and shareholders. I had a conversation Rob Harles and Jason Warnke at the end of last year to uncover what this means for Accenture in more detail. As Managing Director and Global Head of Social Business and Collaboration practice for Accenture Interactive, Rob Harles focuses on building social strategies for their medium and large enterprise clients. Jason Warnke leads the internal social enterprise program across Accenture’s global CIO organization, focusing on collaboration as well as extensive digital video broadcasts to their extended internal and external ecosystem. Collectively they bring not just the internal experience, but also that of the customers they serve.
To begin, Accenture has nearly 350,000 people spread globally, and a global collaboration infrastructure to support them. Per Mr. Warnke, this is organized into three key areas—content collaboration & search, video broadcast, and the digital workplace—together under a single heading as the Content & Knowledge platform. They have long held their Knowledge Exchange as the internal gold standard for documents and service assets. In addition they have the Stream, a company-wide activity stream that is also integrated with their business applications.
Such an activity stream is a design approach that exemplifies a leading philosophy in social business: build collaboration capabilities into the flows of what people do. It avoids a key problem about collaboration technologies: making people go somewhere out of their usual work spaces to collaborate, rather than doing it in the tools and processes they have to use in their job. On an implementation level, integrating enterprise processes into such activity streams is a continual evolving challenge, so I applaud Accenture’s effort on this front.
One curious thing about Accenture that Mr. Warnke noted was that they have mostly done away with office phones. Everything has moved over to videoconferencing with Skype. It makes sense particularly with consultants out in the field, at customer locations, or in transit. In addition, their video content has also moved to shorter lengths, in a talk show style: “snackable TV” as Mr. Warnke describes it.
What interests me is what they have done for their internal Learning models. They have had a Learning Management System (LMS) for a while but have a balance between traditional assigned and guided training, and the more dynamic performance support. In concept, the latter involves more than the common LMS approach of browse-and-search for courses, and instead allows people to find information, expertise, and learn new things, as they need it in performing their work. Accenture for example, supports searching for knowledge by social graph. They have professional communities that employees can rely on to get answers from the broader network, and not just the direct relationships one might have.
Accenture has moved into gamification on a broad level, giving points to employees for many different aspects that encourage connectivity, learning and competition. There are points for taking courses, answering questions, creating content, referencing and more. The main point is to work to the nature of their employees to want to gain the next level of skill, not just as individuals, but socially known and respected by others in the company.
In addition, they have knit some of their internal communities together with customers to bring in ideas from outside the organization. In this way, Accenture is also giving their clients a feel for the culture of a collaborative organization. Per Mr. Harles, “A client will say they want a culture that is much more collaborative. But what they are really saying is 'How can I put technology to make that happen?' You have to have culture first before the tech.”
Mr. Harles: “How do you want to interact with your customers, vendors, [and others] more effectively? It’s a big leap. Psychological one. We don’t think there is one platform for all of these things.”
I asked them about the dilemma that organizations face today with broad digital transformation: Who owns the responsibility?
Mr. Warnke: “[In the industry] it was either nobody owns social, or everybody does. Here (in Accenture) it wasn’t a question: everyone does. All we are working on in CIO is making sure that our people have what they need. One of things about our CIO group is that they have thought about it not only as something they can enable, but become involved in framing the business strategy itself. They are much more thoughtful partners.”
As for a Chief Digital Officer, Mr. Harles says, “I think whatever you call it is less important. Even having the one person in the role is less important. But maybe having a person to cross-pollinate this across. They have a bit of knowledge that they can talk the language of each other. It is important to have this common language across these roles.”
What strikes me about Accenture’s approach is that it both supports diversity of ideas of what can be done, but still centralizes to fewer common systems across the enterprise to supports many job roles and departmental functions. This is a familiar challenge in many companies: various parts of an organization have different speeds, different needs, different resources, different roles, and certainly different objectives. Compounded with a certain degree of competitiveness, what we see are silos of information and knowledge because some departments will choose or build different tools from others for their specific needs. It is eminently more significant to get it right when it comes to how you involve the external world of customers and partners.
Often organizations think that the need for a common infrastructure is about reducing duplication or eliminating waste. That, to me, is a by-product. Rather, what a unified company-wide collaboration system does is—per my river metaphor at the beginning—unlock the dams in the company that isolate knowledge, capabilities and skills. Like the great rivers of history, this free flow enables trade and connectivity, and is the real engine of success in an organization. Accenture has faced this and designed an interesting solution on a scale of giants.
Rawn Shah comments on work culture, learning, collaboration & management. He is Sr Manager, Learning Architecture & Innovation at Adobe. [His views do not represent Adobe]. He is also a Partner at Ethos VO (UK) and can be reached on Twitter @rawn and on LinkedIn.
