Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Global Consulting Company Revamps Knowledge System with Integrated Portal Solution
Overview
Country or Region: Global
Industry: Business consulting and outsourcing
Customer Profile
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing company, with 133,000 employees and net revenues of U.S.$15.5 billion for fiscal year 2005.
Business Situation
The company needed to simplify access, improve search, and streamline content management for the Accenture Knowledge Exchange, its corporate system for publishing and sharing intellectual capital.
Solution
Accenture migrated the Accenture Knowledge Exchange to a corporate portal based on Microsoft®software, which provides enhanced tools for content providers and streamlined information access for employees.
Benefits
Easier knowledge retrieval
Improved employee satisfaction
Streamlined knowledge management processes
Number of servers reduced
Annual savings over U.S.$1 million / “With the new Accenture Knowledge Exchange, we can begin to realize our knowledge management vision: to help people quickly find information to create high value results for clients and our own people.”
Tom Barfield, Global Knowledge Management Lead, Human Resources, Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing company.Committed to delivering innovation, the company collaborates with clients to help them become high performance businesses.Accenture needed to simplify access, improve search, and streamline content management for the Accenture Knowledge Exchange, its corporate system for publishing and sharing intellectual capital. Accenture migrated the Accenture Knowledge Exchange to a corporate portal based on Microsoft®software. The portal provides a central information access point for employees and enhanced tools for content providers. More thorough content indexing and deeper topic coverage enhance search. Business benefits include easier knowledge retrieval, more efficient knowledge asset management, a net reduction in servers, and annual cost savings exceeding one million dollars.
Situation
Accenture (NYSE: ACN) is a global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing company. Committed to delivering innovation, Accenture collaborates with its clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. With deep industry and business process expertise, broad global resources, and a proven track record, Accenture can mobilize the right people, skills, and technologies to help clients improve their performance.
Knowledge Management Contributes to Business Success
Accenture is a prime example of the information-driven enterprise. Years of experience have been captured in thousands of documents covering market research, financial analyses, engagement histories, and position papers. Responsibility for managing Accenture’s knowledge base belongs to Tom Barfield, Global Knowledge Management Lead, within the Human Resources Department. Barfield’s goal is to contribute to Accenture’s selling and delivery capabilities with strategic, market-facing knowledge management services and content.
IT Strategy Shift
Barfield’s mission is closely linked to Accenture’s strategic vision for its information technology infrastructure. Vid Byanna, Global Infrastructure Executive Director, explains the new infrastructure direction: “A corporate initiative was launched several years ago to cut costs and simplify support by moving to Microsoft® technologies. Accenture began by migrating to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and the Microsoft Office 2003 Outlook® messaging and collaboration client.”
Accenture also deployed a corporate portal based on Microsoft SharePoint® Products and Technologies and Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 to more effectively connect employees with each other and to business information. (A portal is an “anchor” Web site or starting point for workers when they connect to the intranet.) Byanna points out that the unified architecture links the corporate Accenture Portal with key channels of information including news, career development, client team operations, and enterprise search.
Knowledge Management Makeover
One of the largest and most-used portal channels is the Accenture Knowledge Exchange, an application for publishing and sharing information related to Accenture’s core services and internal processes. The Accenture Knowledge Exchange was chosen as the first large business application to undergo migration to Microsoft technologies. Kevin Dana, Lead Architect for the Platform and Standards Architecture Team in Accenture’s CIO Organization, cites the reasons for migrating the Accenture Knowledge Exchange: “The needs of our two organizations converged. Accenture’s knowledge management group saw an opportunity to take a fresh approach to the Accenture Knowledge Exchange that was in line with the corporate shift to the Microsoft technical platform. At the same time, the CIO Organization wanted to migrate a high-impact application with a key business sponsor.”
The Accenture Knowledge Exchange migration addressed several specific business goals:
Simplify End User’s Experience Accenture wished to provide a single entry point and consistent user interfaces for its employees.
Improve Search and Browse Features Previous search functionality focused on document abstracts. Accenture wanted to expand this functionality and improve search efficiency.
Centralize Development and Operations of the Accenture Knowledge Exchange and Simplify Content Management
Content for the Accenture Knowledge Exchange was managed by 150 topic owners. It was their task to find and publish knowledge assets related to specific fields of interest. This process supported “communities of practice,” groups of individuals who share interest in a common subject. With more than 5,000 topic pages and 60,000 documents to manage, it was difficult to keep content current.
Solution
Dana’s team proposed a conversion of Accenture’s Knowledge Exchange system to a centralized platform based on Microsoft portal and database technologies. The revamped Knowledge Exchange had specific requirements for document submission, metadata, and search. Accenture teamed with Microsoft and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Avanade to re-architect and develop the new solution. The team found a good fit with Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000, Avanade Connected Architecture for .NET (ACA®.NET), and Microsoft .NET development tools. Beginning in the fall of 2003, a team of five project managers, five content conversion experts, and a global development group went to work. Support from theMicrosoft SharePoint product team allowed Accenture to take advantage of the capabilities of the technology. Avanade contributed deep technical expertise and its ACA.NET technology to accelerate custom application development on .NET technology.
The reworked Accenture Knowledge Exchange now runs on a centralized 10-server farm that replaces more than 40 distributed servers in the previous environment. After a successful pilot to approximately 1000 key users, the new Accenture Knowledge Exchange was rolled out to all Accenture employees. The legacy system was kept in place for 90 days and then decommissioned. An average of 4,500 employees per day use the Accenture Knowledge Exchange to find and download 9,000 documents, with new users signing on at the rate of 500 per day.
Content Conversion
Two main types of content needed to be migrated into the new Accenture Knowledge Exchange: topic contributions and pages. Contributions are the deliverables that Accenture employees submit. They are tagged with metadata and classified by a taxonomy. Topic pages, managed by content maintainers, highlight top contributions and feature other relevant information about a topic.
Because the topic pages in the previous application were not uniform in style and format, content conversion was a manual process. The technical delivery team worked with Barfield’s team to determine a consistent layout for the topic pages. The technical delivery team used SharePoint Web Parts to implement the layout. A team of content maintainers then began the process of populating the new topic pages.
The contributions, comprising attachments and metadata, were more easily converted. The technical delivery team developed a pre-conversion process in which metadata from the historic abstracts were extracted from existing documents and mapped to appropriate fields in a Microsoft SQL Server database. The data store was reduced from about 200,000 documents to 80,000 by removing old content and merging related documents. To complete the conversion, the attachments were extracted from legacy servers and placed in SharePoint document libraries along with the matching metadata from the Microsoft SQL Server database.
Simplified Access
Employees now have a single entry point for the Accenture Knowledge Exchange through the Accenture corporate portal. The Accenture Knowledge Exchange home page (Figure 1) was designed for clarity and ease of use. All Accenture Knowledge Exchange pages share a similar user interface, presenting employees with a predictable experience as they browse the site. A new “download cart” replaces an attachment mail-back system. This new tool streamlines document retrieval by enabling an employee to tag documents of interest while browsing. After the session, the documents are consolidated and downloaded as a Zip archive.
Improved Search
A new enterprise search application calls the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 search engine and classifies results according to source—for example All, Internal Knowledge, External Knowledge, Methods, Learning, Experts, and Discussion. While enterprise search is a powerful tool in its own right for Accenture employees, it also enables Accenture Knowledge Exchange content maintainers to manage topic page information in new ways. For example, topic page owners create customized searches that provide deeper coverage across a specific area of interest. These searches are easily embedded in topic pages using Web Parts with a custom developed Dynamic Link Web Part (DLWP). This Web Part automates the content updating process. (Web Parts are customizable components for corporate portals that can present customized views of data.) Developed by Accenture, Dynamic Link Web Parts are customized “expert searches” that contain topical search queries. Upon activation, a DLWP calls the SharePoint Search Web service to retrieve and display content that matches the search criteria. Each topic owner can configure DLWP search queries using a Web form (Figure 2). Dynamic Link Web Parts return automatically updated links, relieving topic owners of the need to find and tag new content manually. “Content managers can set up a topic page, load some static editorial content, and put the DLWPs in place to automatically find and update links for a specific user community,” explains Dana. Although technical details behind DLWPs are transparent to most employees, they benefit from more powerful searches that provide deeper coverage and greater relevancy.
New Content Management Tools
Submitting new content to the Accenture Knowledge Exchange is done through a form that captures vital metadata including client engagement details and document taxonomy. (Taxonomy refers to a vocabulary of terms—document type, technology class, or business process—that can be used to classify the document.) A custom taxonomy manager tool integrated with SharePoint Portal Server enables content owners to change definitions easily in response to industry updates or to changes in the way Accenture positions a subject. “This tool makes the changes dynamic. This saves a lot of time because content owners don’t have to retag all the words in the metadata,” comments Dana.
Benefits
The new Accenture Knowledge Exchange conserves Accenture resources and benefits employees in a number of ways.
Faster, Easier Knowledge Retrieval
An improved user interface enables employees to browse or do a targeted search faster and with a greater probability that relevant knowledge assets will be found. One key factor is full-document indexing with SharePoint Portal search versus abstract-only indexing in the previous application. Secondly, the cleaner interface enables employees to easily join a community of interest and keep updated on content. “The ability to find and retrieve information has improved because we have greatly simplified the end user experience,” comments Tom Barfield. As evidence, he cites the trend in download statistics. Individual document downloads averaged about 170,000 per month under the previous system. Recently, downloads topped 200,000 Zip archives per month. Assuming each archive contains on average two or three individual documents, download volume has doubled or tripled under the new Accenture Knowledge Exchange platform.
Employee Satisfaction on the Rise
Internal surveys before and after the migration show Accenture employees are pleased. Eighty-one percent of respondents say they have the information they need to do their jobs, a rise of 7 points since the conversion. With the statement “I can easily find the information,” 69 percent voiced agreement, an increase of 10 points. When asked to comment on “I’m encouraged to share the information I have,” 79 percent agreed, an increase of more than 5 percentage points. These are strong indicators that employees are satisfied with the Accenture Knowledge Exchange and increasingly using the system.
Improved Productivity
Dynamic Link Web Parts, uniform content submission forms, and more consistent metadata simplify building and maintaining Accenture’s corporate knowledge base. Across the Accenture Knowledge Exchange, 25,000 DLWPs save the company’s content managers 20 percent of their time previously spent finding new contributions and manually updating links. “That represents employee time that has been freed up to do other things, or to ease the load on people who already have a lot to do,” comments Barfield.
Cost Savings
The cost of managing Accenture’s corporate knowledge has been reduced between one and two million dollars annually. Several key factors contribute:
One knowledge management platform versus many organization-specific applications
Servers eliminated by consolidating 20 to 30 legacy databases
Redeployment of IT professionals from custom application support to more value-adding roles
Microsoft technologies played a substantial role in improving cost-effectiveness. Kevin Dana explains: “SharePoint [Products and Technologies] provide powerful capabilities that would be cost prohibitive to build into a custom knowledge management solution. We delivered substantially more capability in less than two years with Microsoft technologies than we could have by building the Accenture Knowledge Exchange from the ground up.”
A Look Ahead
Accenture plans to capitalize on additional capabilities of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows® SharePoint Services in the corporate Accenture Portal and for expanded team collaboration. Summarizing the experience with Microsoft technologies, business sponsor Tom Barfield finds reasons for both satisfaction and optimism, saying, “With the new Accenture Knowledge Exchange, we can begin to realize our knowledge management vision: to help people quickly find information to create high value results for clients and our own people. We have also reduced costs and invested for the future. We expect to extend the value of the Accenture Knowledge Exchange with the next version of SharePoint Portal Server.”
Microsoft Office System
Microsoft Office is the business world's chosen environment for information work that provides the software, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.
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SharePoint Products and Technologies
SharePoint Portal Server 2003 enables enterprises to deploy an intelligent portal that seamlessly connects users, teams, and knowledge so that people can use relevant information across business processes to help them work more efficiently. Windows SharePoint Services allows teams to create Web sites for information sharing and document collaboration, benefits that help increase individual and team productivity.
For more information about Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies, go to: