Social Media @Accenture Case study – Accenture Collaboration 2.0

Social media has changed the way employees in organizations work, learn, communicate and collaborate. According to Accenture, companies that invested early to harness the power of social media claim returns as high as 20 to 1, with even greater gains predicted to be on the way and the reality is that its impact will be felt along the entire length of the value chain. Employees, who are also users of public social media sites, were looking for tools to increase their productivity through collaboration across globally dispersed workforce. Collaboration 2.0 is a suite of tools that include blogs, wikis, and youtube, facebook style social media tools that employees can use to do their jobs in a better way and strengthen client relationships. Through these tools 236,000 employees of Accenture located in 120 countries collaborate for organizational growth and Collaboration 2.0 improved team productivity, reduced travel and phone charges via a new world of virtual collaboration and strengthened client relationships. In 2008 Accenture launched collaboration initiative called “Borderless Workplace” which includes technologies a wiki called Accenture Encyclopedia, Accenture media exchange resembling YouTube, personal blogs for employees and a facebook inspired social network called Accenture people, Accenture’s Knowledge Exchange is the place to go to find the information Accenture people need.

Accenture deployed in 2007, Accenture People that is a Facebook-inspired professional/social network that enables employees to collaborate, share knowledge, find SMEs and instantly connect via email, online chat, whiteboard session, high definition telepresence videoconference, phone or voicemail. Each profile is populated with standard company information and Accenture employees are encouraged to expand their profiles and 115,000 employees have updated their profiles and 5000 profiles update every month where employees share pictures, bios, expertise, work-related interests personal interests, hobbies and other optional personal information.

According to Accenture, as employees share more about themselves on their profiles, the connections for prospective teams and colleagues become richer. From a profile, an employee can get to know coworkers, their reporting relationships and experience. Employees can use a colleague-tracker to receive alerts when associates change information on their profile – such as their skills or clients. Company also developed a Wikipedia-style site called Accenture Encyclopedia, to catalogue Accenture business and technical terminology. Close to 1000 entries posted in this encyclopedia.

More than 1,700 Accenture Groups, communities created and run by Accenture employees which enable them to share knowledge beyond their job responsibilities. Group topics span from Java programming to Lean Six Sigma to digital photography. These groups focus on an individual’s needs and interests, as well as the needs of the communities. For microblogging Accenture uses Yammer where teams can securely and quickly connect, Twitter-style, to trade ideas and get the best thinking from their global colleagues. Presently employees post more than 4200 microblog updates monthly.

Blogging capabilities amplify opportunities for sharing experience and expertise. Accenture employees created 10,706 blogs annually, increasing at a rate of more than 200 percent annually. Presently employees post 1000 blog posts a month. Blogs are an informal communications across Accenture as employees recognize the value and power of blogs that can be easily aggregated and tagged. Employees can use this space to post comments on strategies under development, answers to frequently asked questions, etc. Blogs feature thought leadership on a wide range of business issues, with a particular focus on helping companies achieve high performance and also discuss about emerging technologies and career experiences of select employees.

Accenture Media Exchange is a You-Tube-type tool that included videos related to training, marketing, knowledge transition and community-building videos circulating among employees. Currently 12,000 video items posted to Accenture Media Exchange. Videos posted include included executive interviews, project team presentations, and humorous snippets, and came from users around the world. Video content posted on the site typically is viewed by hundreds or even thousands of colleagues within a few days. Viewers can rate and comment on the posted content as well as download material useful for other applications.

According to Accenture, the knowledge base of Accenture’s employees is a massive resource and a critical asset and includes discussion forums, blogs, wikis and even ratings, comments, cross-search downloads and recommendation functionality. The existing knowledge repository, called Knowledge Exchange, was migrated to global Microsoft platform and consolidated its knowledge assets into a central repository based on Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. The development of a new Knowledge Exchange application enabled Accenture to retire over 40 databases and offer a single point of access through the Accenture Portal (the company’s employee portal). Accenture's use of NewsGator as a micro-blogging tool in the Microsoft SharePoint platform brings a geographically dispersed workforce together to meet clients' needs.

Consolidating the knowledge assets resulted in the enterprise search engine to index the content thoroughly and with a consistent taxonomy applied and IT team was able to fully index the actual content of all documents so searches would yield more relevant results. Now, Accenture employees can search a broader range of knowledge assets from a single point of access, or search deeply within an attachment. Today, the search engine indexes approximately 115,000 attachments and topic pages in the Knowledge Exchange. Accenture-wide, employees can also search across almost four million pages or attachments from 46 different Accenture content sources, enabling efficient searches that yield highly relevant results. Accenture Knowledge Exchange Activity Feeds includes RSS-like activity feeds to notify employees when articles are published, capture project status updates, display tasks and suggest related documents.

Accenture is working on more sophisticated ways to bring social media into the workplace and recent trends in social media and mobile technology have created new challenges and forced Accenture to reevaluate the IT infrastructure it has in place. Accenture has also focused on measurement strategy and on understanding what tools employees were using, and how and why they were using them. Monthly Collaboration 2.0 scorecard and other reports help Accenture continuously track usage, cost savings, employee satisfaction and impact on the clients. According to company website, cost benefits for the company included More than 20 million minutes of company-standard monthly VoIP audio/video usage, resulting in avoided mobile and landline long distance/international voice costs, more than 5,000 annual video conferencing meetings resulting in avoided travel costs and Telepresence usage has slashed travel costs and the savings are exceeding the annual targets, thus far returning more than two times the monthly operating cost.

According to Accenture, they even made these tools available to their FORTUNE 500 clients, bringing clients into their collaborative culture. Links between Accenture and client companies include Telepresence, desktop audio and video, secure IM, desktop-sharing and unified messaging that dramatically improves dialogue with clients. Collaboration 2.0 has significantly improved client satisfaction levels and clients are being services well with right skilled consultants at right time for the critical projects and reaction time to client’s requests have also improved. Employees too are satisfied with this collaboration suite as they are able to collaborate seamlessly with their colleagues across the globe, share their knowledge, interact with SMEs and voice their opinions regarding the company policies and strategies. Accenture is one of the best examples for understanding the business impact of integrating social media tools into the organization.

Discussion points:

1. What are the key lessons of the Accenture Social Media Strategy and how it improved profitability?
2. What is the role played by Collaboration 2.0 in improving the employee satisfaction and how to encourage employees to utilize this best?
3. How did clients of Accenture profit from its internal social media tools?
4. What is the role played by social media tools in organizational Knowledge management strategy?

Appendix:

Figure 1: Collaboration benefits outlined in Accenture's business case. Copyright 2010 Accenture