Accenture Technology Vision 2014 Every Business Is a ...€¦ · From Digitally Disrupted to Digital Disrupter Accenture Technology Vision 2014 Every Business Is a Digital Business

From Digitally Disrupted to Digital Disrupter

Accenture Technology Vision 2014

Every Business Is a Digital Business

Accenture Technology Vision for Intelligent Infrastructure

Big companies are back in the digital game. For the first time in a long time, the momentum in digital innovation is being driven not by newcomers—the Instagrams and TripAdvisors and Airbnbs—but by the Tescos and GEs and Disneys.

Accenture’s 2014 Technology Vision report notes

that large enterprises are making a concerted push

to transform themselves from followers to leaders

in digital. Backed by their deep resources, enormous

scale and process discipline, many Global 1,000

organizations are rewriting entire chapters of the

digital playbook. For business leaders everywhere,

the next three years will be about determining their

organizations’ pace in the digital race, and their place

in the new digital world.

Pivotal to those efforts will be an emphasis on getting

the IT infrastructure right. Accenture believes that

developing intelligent infrastructure services can give

companies significant competitive advantage as part

of their overall digital strategy.

Intelligent infrastructure services help enterprises

react to, and even stay ahead of, market and

technology changes. They can also help organizations

serve customers better, collaborate and innovate more

effectively, and reduce costs more predictably.

This overview document maps to the six technology

vectors described in Accenture’s 2014 Technology

Vision report, flagging key ideas that IT leaders

should consider as they plan for the next phases of

infrastructure improvement.

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Accenture’s three-part approach to intelligent infrastructure

Accenture takes a three-phased approach

to creating an intelligent infrastructure that

is manageable, cost effective and minimally

disruptive to business operations.

Phase one: Taking the first step into intelligence

in infrastructure services begins with the

automation and orchestration of business

processes, technologies and applications.

Phase two: Creating a generalized service

orientation perspective is thus the next essential

phase of the overall journey. It is important to be

able to link operations to business services that are

virtualized among multiple providers (internal and

external).

Phase three: The final phase is integrating

advanced analytics capabilities with automation

and service integration to make the infrastructure

itself smarter and more autonomous—that is,

capable of taking provisioning or corrective steps

with little or no human intervention.

ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VISION FOR INTELLIGENT INFRASTRUCTURE

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Digital physical blur: Extending intelligence to the edge The physical world is coming online as objects, devices, and machines acquire

more digital intelligence. What’s emerging is more than just an Internet of

“things;” it’s a new layer of connected intelligence that augments the actions

of individuals, automates processes, and incorporates digitally empowered

machines into our lives, increasing our insight into and control over the

tangible world.

The outcomes? Consumers become better

informed and better equipped to influence the

ways they experience everything around them.

And businesses get real-time connections to

the physical world that allow machines as well

as employees to act and react faster—and more

intelligently.

An intelligent infrastructure is vital to help

organizations extend intelligence to the edge.

By providing “always on, always connected”

capabilities, it can make it much easier to link

devices such as smartphones, tablets, sensors, and

programmable logic controllers to the everyday

process interactions of the business.

Importantly, an intelligent infrastructure

accelerates and augments the decentralization of

technology; new technologies can be provisioned,

operated and managed regardless of location.

Remotely managed facilities start to become more

practical: the lights-out data center can be more

than just an interesting theoretical concept.

At the same time, an intelligent infrastructure can

help the organization to serve up a rich multimedia

experience for the user – offering compelling and

very detailed graphics, moving text, super-sharp

images, and more, consistent with what more and

more media-savvy users are starting to expect.

Those levels of user experience can be presented

on a wide range of devices—again, consonant with

users’ growing expectations.


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From workforce to crowdsource: The rise of the borderless enterprise Picture a workforce that extends beyond your employees: one that consists

of any user connected to the Internet. Cloud, social, and collaboration

technologies now allow organizations to tap into vast pools of resources across

the world, many of whom are motivated to help. Channeling these efforts to

drive business goals is a challenge, but the opportunity is enormous: it can give

every business access to an immense, agile workforce that is not only better

suited to solving some of the problems that organizations struggle with today

but in many cases will do it for free.

Running and managing truly practical

collaboration sites calls for an underlying

infrastructure that is as agile as possible. The

infrastructure should make it possible to safely and

securely extract and present the wealth of useful

data now available to participants throughout a

business ecosystem. And it will better prepare an

organization’s big data platforms to receive and

properly prioritize today’s abundant data inputs.

An intelligent infrastructure also eases the

challenge for the IT organization of governing

and managing technology in an increasingly

distributed environment. Specifically, it supports

the increasingly vital need for service integration—

that is, the convening and orchestration of service

providers (on-premise, as-a-service, multi-

vendor, and so on) together with the effective

management of that mix of providers.

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Data supply chain: Putting information into circulation Yes, data technologies are evolving rapidly, but most have been adopted in

piecemeal fashion. As a result, enterprise data is vastly underutilized. Data

ecosystems are complex and littered with data silos, limiting the value that

organizations can get out of their own data by making it difficult to access.

To truly unlock that value, companies must start treating data more as a supply

chain, enabling it to flow easily and usefully through the entire organization—

and eventually throughout each company’s ecosystem of partners too.

An intelligent infrastructure can help to realize the

digital enterprise by enabling the intelligence from

the data in one area of the business to inform

opportunities in other areas. For example, a large

insurance company with life, home and auto lines

of business could share client data to provide

better customer service, as well as cross sell new

products.

More flexible infrastructure also makes it easier for

an organization to deploy and benefit from large-

scale business analytics capabilities.


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Harnessing hyperscale: Hardware is back (and never really went away) Eclipsed by more than a decade of innovation in software, the hardware world

is again a hotbed of new development as demand soars for bigger, faster,

lower-cost data centers. In this new world, hardware matters more than ever

in transforming enterprises into digital businesses with access to unlimited

computing power that can be turned on and off as needed.

Whether the new “hyperscale” data centers are in-

house or outsourced, every IT organization must

understand the new developments that make such

developments possible—developments not only

at the chip level but also in terms of networking

efficiencies, storage capabilities, and energy

utilization.

Accenture anticipates that leading IT organizations

will develop more proactive technology refresh

plans to ensure that their data center investments

are as effective as possible. Those plans may

involve more intelligent technology refresh

cycles – including automated provisioning of new

capabilities, wherever possible.

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The business of applications: Software as a core competency in a digital world The way we build software is changing. Mimicking the shift in the consumer

world, organizations are rapidly moving from enterprise applications to apps.

Yes, there will always be big, complex enterprise software systems to support

large organizations, and it will still be necessary for IT developers to keep

customizing those systems, providing updates, patches, and more. But now, as

large enterprises push for greater IT agility, there is a sharp shift toward simpler,

more modular, and more custom apps.

In one case, a large global bank has built an

internal app store that allows its users to self-

provision easily.

At the same time, IT leaders and business

leaders alike must decide who plays what

application development role in their new digital

organizations—and how to transform the nature

of application development itself. But new

decentralized development techniques can easily

lead to greater infrastructure complexity.

As such, leading IT groups will stay alert to

anything that veers away from simplicity, and will

work hard to build in governance mechanisms that

keep complexity at bay.


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Architecting Resilience: “Built to survive failure” becomes the mantra of the nonstop business In the digital era, businesses must support wide-ranging demands for nonstop

processes, services and systems. This has particular resonance in the office of

the CIO where the need for “always-on” IT infrastructure, security, and resilient

practices can mean the difference between business as usual and erosion of

brand value. The upshot: IT must adopt a new mindset to ensure that systems

are dynamic, accessible and continuous—not just designed to spec but designed

for resiliency under failure and attack.

To better understand their risks and to detect

attacks, leading IT security organizations must

design, implement, and run systems that shift the

security emphasis from monitoring to

understanding; from collection of data to

visualization of behaviors and anomalies. As such,

those leaders will turn increasingly to data

platform technologies—technologies that provide

access to and aggregation of data via services. The

data platform, and accompanying analytical

approaches, allows security to handle large volumes

of fast-changing data—orders of magnitude

greater in scale than traditional log analysis.

If they are building the system themselves, IT groups

are very likely to use Hadoop or Splunk; otherwise,

they may turn to a solution such as NetWitness,

which is designed to provide enterprises with a

precise and actionable understanding of everything

happening on their networks.

Leading practitioners are already turning to

intelligent infrastructure to make their systems

much more resilient. For instance, they are using

automated unit testing to run new code through

thousands of test cases before being deployed.

Then, best practice calls for the code to be

deployed first on a “canary” server. If there are

any issues, the canary discovers them and stops

the cascading of flawed code or configuration to

the rest of the production environment. Amazon,

Facebook and Google use such techniques to

manage continuous integration of new hardware

and software on their cloud infrastructures—while

staying always on.

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ABOUT ACCENTURE

Accenture is a global management consulting,

technology services and outsourcing company,

with more than 293,000 people serving clients in

more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled

experience, comprehensive capabilities across all

industries and business functions, and extensive

research on the world’s most successful companies,

Accenture collaborates with clients to help

them become high-performance businesses and

governments. The company generated net revenues

of US$28.6 billion for the fiscal year ended

Aug. 31, 2013. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

Copyright © 2014 Accenture All rights reserved.

Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.

CONTACTS

For more informationJack Sepple Infrastructure Services,

Senior Managing Director

[email protected]

Larry Socher Infrastructure Services,

Managing Director

[email protected]

www.accenture.com/technologyvision

Accenture Technology Vision 2014 Every Business Is a ...€¦ · From Digitally Disrupted to Digital Disrupter Accenture Technology Vision 2014 Every Business Is a Digital Business

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