Problem/ Issue
Statement
Accenture’s problem is that the CEO of the company needs to
decide how to find a way to manage their IT infrastructure. They currently run
on Arthur Andersen’s old system but they have a chance to change it to a world
class infrastructure. Accenture has an opportunity to start building an IT infrastructure
that would benefit their consultants and support personal access to information
anytime.
Situation Assessment
Accenture has a decentralized system that has consultant
unable to obtain information from their IT system. The existing Andersen systems were composed of
patchwork legacy applications and weren’t interconnecting. The systems and software were so obsolete
that their databases were not able to be accessed remotely. Offices around the
world were using different accounting and human resources systems all together
and a consistent view throughout the company did not exist. Accenture had the opportunity to make a new IT
infrastructure from scratch to fix all these issues.
The decision criteria consist of whether or not they should
create a centralized approach that can hold a large scale support to those consultants
that are all on the same page. Accenture can also face the risk to stay the
same. It would lastly have the opportunity to create a one-platform approach(
centralization) that will create a unity.
List of Plausible
Alternative Courses of Action/Assessment of Alternatives
The alternative courses of action are either obtaining the Best-of-Breed
approach. by having many different applications and not being consistent with existing
offices. This almost is similar to what Accenture has been in since Andersen
but they will invest in newer technology. This would involve a greater cost because it
would make many applications to become available and costs to increase. Also
training would be needed for each system and that would also involve great
costs.
They can also remain the same with the old technology and
eventually become obsolete technology by holding their existing legacy systems.
They can continue facing the issues that they currently have with time and not
being able to add value to the company or help the consultants in anyway. I would
not recommend this alternative because of the huge risk of costs going into an
IT infrastructure that many parties will need to be involved.
The last alternative is called the one-platform approach
where there will be small IT support needed because Accenture will be using
only one system rather than many different ones. This will also be done at a
lower costs then the other alternatives along with being effective. What would
be a flaw is the dependency of dealing
with the one system vendor. This can create the inability to negotiate lower
prices with many vendors cannot be the same said with the single platform
approach. The choice of this involved
picking Microsoft Office, HP as the office computers, SAP, and Cisco for
servers. This was the least time consuming especially because they only had one
year to change from the legacy systems to the new from scratch system.
Recommendation
The quality recommendation will lock in ties with the
logical recommendation because Accenture was running out time and needed a
centralized system in order to fix all the problems the they were currently
facing. The one step approach setup HR applications, an accounting application
that will be uniformed, uniformed systems, lower support costs. SAP would allow
the integration of these uniform applications where the company will have no
trouble in collecting data once needed in order to show on financial statements
and so on. Allowing support to become a lower expense can become possible by
allowing calls to a support line because of their overseas support. My current
employer allows this to occur and they become very hand with our one-platform
system. The ability to take remote control of your system is the only task
needed to find a very complex solution to a support inquiry.
Presentation
I would recommend the presenters to allow showing any other
alternatives that might exist out there to consolidate even more. Sometimes
companies believe that moving jobs overseas becomes an issue but with companies
being larger than usual, lowering costs are needed. Cost matrix is always handy
to show how much each alternative would cost and the benefits of each. Being
unbiased here is also handy because of the different applications that could be
used in the multi platform approach. Showing how investments will be and how
much and when will they start seeing the return on their investment ( ROI) kick
in.
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