We are live from Sapphire Now 2018 in Orlando, Florida.
I'm Michael Krigsman.
I'm an industry analyst and the host of CxOTalk.
Right now, I have the distinct pleasure of speaking with Andrew Wilson, who is the chief
information officer of Accenture.
He's been a guest on CxOTalk before, so that makes it doubly fun.
Andrew, how are you?
Hello, Michael.
It's really good to be back.
Good to see you, my friend.
Great to see you, too.
Tell us about Accenture.
Accenture is a global force in transformation and capability, helping our clients deal with
all of the acceleration in the new technologies we see in the industry.
Four hundred and fifty thousand digital workers globally, 5 businesses, 250 cities: it's a
huge workforce that I have to keep productive, agile, liquid, and effective because their
job is to help our clients transform with the new IT.
Four hundred and fifty thousand digital workers.
What are the things that you have on your mind?
I think, since we last spoke, the role of the CIO and the job of delivering good IT
has moved on significantly and it's still accelerating.
My role really, I don't think, is just CIO anymore.
I think I'm a chief experience officer.
My focus is on delivering the right experience, both in work and out of it, for all of those
workers, all of our clients, all of the business leaders, [and] all of the businesses, which
I run.
When it comes to technology, it sets a really high bar for me, and so that's really where
we are right now.
This focus on experience; would you elaborate on that for us?
I think the experience theme really is the new digital for me.
Experience is all around presenting information in a language and in a way which human beings
recognize.
We don't need to create things that operate to serve the company.
We need to think about how things are presented to an individual.
How does an individual see Accenture?
How do they become attracted to the brand?
How, with all of this information, knowledge, and creativity, can they stay current, relevant,
learn, and be effective in this huge liquid state of new technologies?
What are the components of this?
You've described, so far, platform, data, technology services.
I think the building blocks of effective new IT are different.
Platforms, absolutely; software-as-a-service platforms; capabilities with strong roadmaps
like SAP S4/HANA, which we're talking about this week: those are key to an IT strategy
and a business strategy that can deliver at the speed of the new.
It sounds like your perspective is very clearly one through the outcomes, the expectations
of your clients, stakeholders, and employees as opposed to looking at all of this through
a technology or a systems view.
Yes.
I think the under the hood of the technology in the systems, it's important for capability,
maturity, scale, and security.
But, the agenda and the dialog cannot start there.
We must speak in the language of the business.
The next part of the journey has to be preemptive because the enterprise needs to move at speed.
We're talking about acceleration, agile, speed, and it's never going to be as slow as this
again.
You hear that a lot nowadays, but it's true.
The CIO, the chief experience officer, or the chief digital officer, whatever the title
is, that transformational leadership gene needs to be able to preempt the next stage.
Your footprint and your view is so far broader than, historically, the traditional CIO role.
How does this dovetail or intersection with keeping systems going?
Keeping services going is still important, but I'm brokering and providing those services
leveraging other platform providers and cloud.
That part of the role still exists, so it doesn't replace that, but it augments it heavily.
Whereas before I would work for a business reporting team delivering technology, I now
am the insight team, so I have to be able to orchestrate.
I have to be able to understand what AI is ready for primetime, how I raise AI, how I
decommission the old; how I switch things off.
Switching things off is as important as switching things on.
If you want to stay lean and effective in a net new position rather than just having
lots of shadow IT or shadow data, which is of a greater concern for me in the new enterprise.
It sounds to me like you're a kind of harbinger of the future of the CIO role because I don't
think that there are many CIOs who have embraced the breadth of what you have in terms of experience.
But, in general, I think the CIO role is probably evolving, as you've described it.
Well, thank you.
I do think it is our role and duty, in the ecosystem, to actually provide that North
Star, to provide that type of thinking.
Accenture's role, in the industry, is to integrate platforms and to deliver transformational
change.
It's really important that we do that to ourselves.
What are some of the challenges of covering such a broad area?
When we move fast, and when things are so new, things that are a challenge are the scale,
the speed.
You can't wait to be even a fast follower.
Who are you following?
In the new, you need to be the group that is being followed.
We also have to make some judgment calls and place some bets because there's a lot of choice
out there.
Andrew, I know that workforce diversity is very important to Accenture.
In addition to all of the things that you've just been describing, you're very involved
in that effort as well.
Yes, thank you, and the global Pride at Accenture sponsor, which is the community which recognizes,
celebrates, and looks after our LGBTQ community.
That's quite a broad and diverse group in its own right.
I'm a gay man as well, and so I believe passionately in wanting to support tolerance, inclusion,
and diversity in our culture.
It's absolutely vital and core to our talent strategy.
In our talent strategy, we need to attract and retain all forms of diverse talent.
There isn't enough good talent in the world for everything we need to do.
Happy employees ultimately means very satisfied customers.
I believe so.
Is a big part of your role actually asking questions?
We ask a lot of questions, we listen a lot, and we encourage thinking about the future
in a way that's different to what your functional requirements are, and I'm going to write them
down.
I think, as we look forward, what will happen next, we have several more chapters of the
interface of man and machine.
I think about augmentation in terms of the human, who will never be replaced, but the
job continues to change; how we curate intelligence; how we surface insight alongside data, but
where we do not obfuscate the data because that insight has to develop.
We have to raise AI as if it were children because that's exactly what it is.
We've moved a long way from building systems with waterfall, setting up functional requirements,
and running things with SLAs.
Our relationship with SAP is mission critical and sits hand in glove with our relationship
with Microsoft.
The SAP platform running on Azure cloud powered by the integration and the experience of Accenture
is our market proposition, and it powers Accenture already.
We are one of the largest and newest in the world.
Most CIOs cannot put their hand up and say, "I'm in production on S4/HANA at this scale
and this degree of newness."
I'm proud to say we can, and I'm proud to say it works.
There's a richness in what's going to happen in the next two or three years, which I'm
very excited about.
Andrew Wilson, thank you so much.
Thank you.