How Accenture Embraces Technology Change

At Accenture, we implement new technology, apps, programs, and systems at a dynamic pace. Rolling these out is the relatively easy part. Getting our 450,000 people to change and adopt new behaviors around them can be a challenge. As any leader knows, it’s not worth the investment in new systems and products if they are not adopted and effectively used—and ultimately deliver value to the company.

One important shift we have made is putting the individual first rather than the technology. This means thinking through how our people are really going to use the new products or systems and designing the technology for the user, rather than expecting the user to adapt to the technology. But even with this shift, there are still complex business changes, policies, and systems that we need our users to understand and adopt.

To enhance adoption effectiveness, we consider behavior change as a critical part of the roll-out of a new tech solution. Like most organizations, we use many of the well-known techniques such as communication campaigns, training, champion networks, and stakeholder engagement, but we now operate in the New and do these in more creative and innovative ways.

Here are some of the cool things we do to help our people change their behaviors around technology and make adoption easier:

Provide learning on demand: In the past, training users on an application or tool was often done in a classroom with an instructor or through lengthy CBT courses. Now we provide learning that is on demand and through multiple channels, including mobile, to reach our diverse user base and to sustain a learning culture. We also fold learning into everyday activities by bringing learning into an application or business process, so that it happens efficiently and effectively in real time in the actual context.

Drive grassroots adoption. Our internal IT organization provides new technology to those who want it and relies on individuals to promote it, as change is often more accepted from peers than when pushed from the top. One example is how we are rolling out Microsoft Teams, which is through phased product deployment and self-paced, self-initiated adoption over a two-year timeline with an end-date cutover. Adoption is a grassroots process through gradual familiarity and use.

Make learning compelling and engaging. When our employees need to learn a new application or create a new habit, like checking our Accenture Portal for company news, we have to make it compelling and engaging. We do this with such techniques as gamification, bite-sized videos, and 30-day challenges where ideas and skills are given in small daily bites to ingrain new habits. For more complex technology releases, we use what we call next-gen communications to educate our employees more in depth using such vehicles as animated videos, infographics, television shows, blogs, and more.

Personalize the learning experience. We focus on personalizing the learning experience by making it highly immersive and highly interactive, and whenever possible, role-specific. We customize the content, so learners can practice tasks specific to their daily activities in the context of their jobs.

Use feedback to make agile improvements. Understanding how our people are using applications and how we can make them better is critical. Gone are the days of doing one big release a year. Instead, our internal IT organization regularly interacts with users and gathers their feedback as well as feedback from change networks and the business. This feedback is shared with application teams who then make enhancements to applications in agile ways.

Enabling self-pacing. Where possible we also like to let our employees determine the pace of change and provide choices for the technology they can use. We are a technology company and many of our employees are early adopters who want the latest and greatest as soon as possible. But we also have others who take longer to adopt and aren’t looking to learn a new app every month, so where possible, we provide choices in the technology they can use and at the pace they want to adopt it. A great example of this was our company’s incremental adoption of Microsoft Windows 10 and OneDrive for Business within about a two-year time frame.

I’m proud of the strategies and approaches our change management teams are driving, which themselves change rapidly in the New. We’re pushing the creativity with videos, storytelling, TV-like series and exploring the use of artificial intelligence, bots, visual analytics, virtual reality, and more. Even more important, we’ve discovered, is the value in listening to our users and using analytics to continuously improve upon learning and adoption.

We want to make new technology easy to use, and even fun. And we want our employees to be more productive, drive more value, and deliver results to our business and to our clients. Because in the end, it is our people who drive Accenture’s ultimate success.

What are some of the innovative ways your organization uses to increase end-user change and adoption?

Andrew

 You can follow me on Twitter at @andrewxwilson.                                        

Andrew Wilson is the chief information officer at Accenture.