Modernizing our data platform

STORIES
Google Cloud unlocks
the promise of analytics
Modernizing
our data
platform

Copyright © 2022 Accenture. All rights reserved
Delivering new
business value
Running a business today is all
about managing dynamic data.
Accenture wanted to make better
use of platform services that could
develop, run and manage
applications in the cloud and make
data more visible and secure. Data
empowers our people and drives
innovation for our evolving
business.
After just three years of use, the
Accenture Global IT organization
recognized its analytics platform was
fast becoming obsolete. The platform
was managed by Accenture but
hosted in the cloud. Yet, increasingly,
it was difficult to upgrade and grow,
creating greater overheads for
managing storage and presenting a
high learning curve for developers.
Our people were spending valuable
time on operations, troubleshooting
and maintenance instead of
generating insights to drive
our business.
Accenture made the strategic
decision to move to Google Cloud’s
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model
to support our IT strategy to be
platform powered, cloud first and
intelligence driven. The program
team needed to determine how to
create a secure, cost-effective and
scalable architecture in the cloud
while also driving the migration of
data and applications from the
legacy system.
Using Google Cloud, we could
modernize data capabilities to unlock
the promise of advanced analytics,
increase cost savings via a pay-as-
you-go model and drive cutting-edge
performance that enables a
digital Accenture.
We decided to migrate
our data platform to
Google Cloud for
sustainability and
performance reasons.
But the platform does so
much more—it gives us
enhancements
and capabilities that
are delivering new
business value
Luis Polanco
Director—Global IT.
Data Technology Platforms, Accenture
Call for change

Accelerating
advanced cloud
When tech meets human ingenuity
Without doubt, technology—and how the world uses it—has
changed dramatically in the last five years. So, too, has the
demand for data insights. Accenture began the journey to
improve its analytics platform by assessing if cloud-hosted
PaaS offerings could address the cost, performance, and
scalability challenges of the legacy data lake. Today, Accenture
IT infrastructure runs in the hybrid cloud to take advantage of
its scale efficiencies.
The Global IT team selected Google Cloud as the platform
for its new analytics data lake, taking advantage of its
established solutions and technologies and its flexible cloud
platform offerings that power applied intelligence. Google
Cloud enables options for deploying the right server sizing and
configuration to meet the analytics’ job requirements. The
Global IT team, partnering with Google, designed a
modernized platform with the ability to deploy services faster,
realizing improved performance and stability for the
applications powered by the data lake.
As part of the transformation journey, the platform architecture
and processes had to be created to align with our security
needs to make sure that the data coming in and the data going
out was secure at the enterprise level. With the move to
Google Cloud, Accenture has created a foundation to store and
analyze its enterprise data in the data lake—with room to grow.
To take advantage of the architecture, we needed to address
who could access the data and who and how we deploy
analytics into production. A new data security model, along with
project governance was created, while adhering to our data
compliance and audit requirements. In line with industry
standards, Accenture adopted a Site Reliability Engineering
(SRE) model where teams can build, operate and run their own
environments and services. Cloud native services, driven via
code, meant that the cloud could optimize efficiency.
Moving to this model means that teams can use repeatable
infrastructure deployments, avoid manual configuration and
introduce greater consistency. Compliance and security checks
before deployment means teams can work with a unified set of
practices and tools to deliver applications and their supporting
infrastructure rapidly, reliably, at scale and while minimizing
vulnerabilities to the systems.
Now, Accenture has advanced our cloud capabilities with self-
service analytics, real-time integration across various
platforms, such as ServiceNow and Salesforce, and moved
into a PaaS model with a cloud native infrastructure.

In addition to setting up the new architecture,
Accenture needed to execute a migration strategy
to move hundreds of terabytes of data from the
existing infrastructure to Google Cloud. Sitting on
top of the existing analytics platform were more
than 50 applications driving insights to users all
over the globe. The team needed to manage a
seamless transition with minimal impact and no
downtime to the 40,000 global consumers of those
analytics applications.
Accenture wanted to take advantage of cloud
native components quickly and reduce
administrative complexity, so the migration team
reshaped the current applications to use on-
demand infrastructure concepts and on-demand
resources optimized for cloud computing. In a
phased, targeted approach, applications were
evaluated to reimplement the data ingestion
and store strategy. Processing code remained
the same, but data warehouse interfaces were
moved fully to automated services such as Google
BigQuery (which gives us the security and control
we need when sharing data) and Google Cloud
Composer to run workflows.
Since executing a multi-year program to remove
silos and make data available, we’ve moved from
zero data in the lake to 460 datasets with more
than 400 terabytes of business data available to
our end users.
As part of the rationalization of existing apps,
Accenture has enabled more than 150 source
applications and more than 250 business
applications.
Data migration

Accenture Legal Intelligent Contract
Exploration (ALICE): Our 2,800-strong Accenture
legal teams need to understand our rights and
obligations across contracts with clients and
precisely how they are documented. The award-
winning ALICE tool combines natural language
processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) to
help analyze more than 250,000 documents so that
legal leaders can quickly evaluate client contracts.
ALICE is delivering major time savings, unleashing
data that was previously not easily accessible and
offering knowledge at the moments that matter.
Manage myBusiness: A self-service analytics
dashboard that gives our business unit and client
account leads real-time, easy and secure access to
the information that they need to manage business
performance. The application uses AI to provide an
interactive experience that enables our business
leads to analyze key performance indicators,
connect to a wide suite of diagnostics and drill
down to transaction systems.
Manage myContracts: A simple way to track and
manage contracts through shared data, reporting
and dashboards. This collaboration hub uses an
intuitive visual representation of a contract health
score to enable our teams to quickly understand
the overall health of a contract. By better tracking
and monitoring the status of a specific contract,
curated mitigations can help to avoid risks
becoming issues. Shared oversight helps contract
managers to help support delivery, work smarter
with account teams, inform business planning and
manage ever-increasing contract volumes. The
application integrates with our contracting tool
Manage myDeal and the legal tool ALICE.
Anomaly detection: We process approximately 25
million expense lines annually. Every report is
analyzed by a manually designed rules-based
system to check for expense compliance. Roughly
10% of expenses are flagged for potential
noncompliance and then audited by the Accenture
compliance team. Traditional rules-based
systems—while effective at detecting known and
recurring patterns of noncompliance—can be
unreliable or exploited by fraudulent behavior. We
developed an anomaly detection solution for our
expense reporting system that more accurately
identifies noncompliant expenses, reduces false
positives and easily identifies hidden patterns
using AI.
Applications now available via Google Cloud include:

When Accenture made the decision to move to
Google Cloud, the leadership team recognized
this would represent a major change, touching
all our processes and the skills of our team.
Indeed, data analytics is far from being all about
technology—it demands skill diversity and a data
culture—and we knew we needed to transform
how our people work with the technology.
The team chose to tackle the culture, talent
and change barriers to successful cloud adoption.
The focus was on preparing the teams to transition
to the cloud, assessing the current and desired cloud
skills, developing tailored learning paths and creating
and enabling
a continuous training plan. Transformation leaders
were selected across roles, locations and functions to
provide 360 degree feedback loops and accelerate
the time to development.
The Global IT team recognized that to be a cloud-first
organization we needed to shift our talent focus to
crafting analytics solutions that bridge Google Cloud
capabilities with our internal systems.
Today, skill diversity is helping us to implement the
right business cases that are making data analytics
shine in our company. We have more than 260 data
projects on the Google Cloud platform, more than 60
data science projects and we have created 75
predictive models.
Skill diversity

We embrace innovation while knowing that it is most effective
when we adopt a “fail fast and early” approach through
purposeful, measured experimentation.
We also understand the important of knowing our
customers to provide personalized product offerings
that are useful for them.
And we recognize that if we want to be agile in our
business, we need to adopt a transparent, as-a-service
approach—one that demands the right information at
the right time. For example, in the early weeks of the
COVID-19 pandemic, our Global IT team delivered value-
added analytic quickly to numerous enterprise functions
and this enabled our organization to respond with data-driven
decision making.
Google Cloud Platform with its open architecture approach
is giving our teams greater freedom to:
Democratize data: We want to make data accessible to
all our people. By providing more autonomy to our users
and the ability to quickly explore our data and create analytics
insights to answer business questions, our people can reduce
their dependencies on our IT teams to deliver analytics
products.
Manage data as a product: Our business data lake in Google
Cloud is helping us to understand ourselves and mature toward
managing our data as a product. We aim to give more
ownership and visibility to every team that produces data to
ensure we have people who know their data best.
Reduce administrative complexity: We can reduce the
infrastructure that we manage and pay for, adjusting to
meet our changing size and scale. Upgrades and patches take
time and effort—our Operations and Architecture team need to
investigate, pull systems down, find fixes and implement
upgrades. With the stability of Google Cloud, our people—and
our operational overheads—are freed up.
Improve cost efficiency: We now have a platform that
is faster and more intuitive—and cost effective. It’s easy
to upscale or downscale. A pay-as-you-go model gives
our organization cost efficiency and elasticity—we only
pay for the compute time used and we receive discounted
prices for long-running workloads.
Enable insights at speed: We can take advantage of
the ecosphere of other innovative solutions and plan
our roadmap accordingly. We are moving our people
to become skilled on an industry-relevant platform that
can meet the evolving needs of our business.
A valuable difference
Discovering
meaningful
data matters

A valuable difference
>400TB
of business data available
to Accenture end users
>260
data projects active on the
Google Cloud platform
6X
faster in executing
high-volume queries
>60
data science projects
developed
Throughout the data transformation
process, we have discovered that
meaningful data matters more than
data volume. And we have learned
to be patient and consider the
technologies we are already using
rather than migrating to the next
“shiny toy” technology.
Today, through due diligence and careful
planning, the Global IT organization has
completely transformed its analytics
platform—reducing overheads,
decreasing costs in server storage and
providing our people with cutting-edge,
advanced analytics.
Going forward, Accenture intends to
continue to transform and strengthen
the big data insight capabilities we
offer, explore the full value of the
cloud ecosystem and open the
door to more innovative solutions.
75
predictive analytics
models created
90%
reduction in operational incidents
in production environments

Copyright © 2022 Accenture.
All rights reserved.
Accenture and its logo
are trademarks of Accenture.
About Accenture
Accenture is a global professional services
company with leading capabilities in digital,
cloud and security. Combining unmatched
experience and specialized skills across more
than 40 industries, we offer Strategy and
Consulting, Interactive, Technology and
Operations services — all powered by the
world’s largest network of Advanced
Technology and Intelligent Operations centers.
Our 699,000 people deliver on the promise of
technology and human ingenuity every day,
serving clients in more than 120 countries. We
embrace the power of change to create value
and shared success for our clients, people,
shareholders, partners and communities. Visit
us at www.accenture.com.
Meet the Team
Karen Odegaard
Managing Director—Global IT
Technology Platforms
/karenodegaard
Luis Polanco
Director—Global IT
Technology Platforms
/scrumluispolancoramirez
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