Accenture Technology Vision 2016

Focus on Pega® Technology.

People First: The primacy of people in the digital age.

Introuction:

People First: Technology to empower the workforce

The principal theme running through the 2016 Accenture Technology Vision is “People First.” So what do we mean by that? In essence, winning in the digital age hinges not just on using the latest technologies, but also developing an organizational and corporate culture that can fully take advantage of what these technologies have to offer.

Pega® and Accenture are increasingly seeing leading enterprises adopting technology as the new member of the workforce. Rather than replacing people, or simply supporting their work, technology is enabling people to do things differently and to do new things. And that’s a fundamental shift.

The ability to automate business processes is a major source of efficiency. But perhaps more importantly, using intelligence to provision and personalize is creating whole new ways to work, and to deliver the service that customers value. It’s no longer a case of people vs machines. It’s the right combination of people and machines that’s driving the greatest breakthroughs in performance.

Below we examine the five key trends from this year’s Technology Vision — Intelligent Automation, Liquid Workforce, Platform Economy, Predictable Disruption and Digital Trust — and provide examples showing how Pega technology resonates with and plays out in this year’s analysis.

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1. Intelligent automation – the essential new co-worker for the digital age

Leaders embrace automation because they know it’s the secret to overcoming the breakneck pace of digital change. The true visionaries use intelligent automation to create a new digital world where they are masters of competitive advantage. Their latest recruits include machines and software intelligence that they are using to bring new skills to help their people do new jobs and invent a new future for themselves and the organization.

Intelligent automation brings fundamental changes to how businesses and individuals work. Machines have different strengths and capabilities that complement their human supervisors. Together, they’re changing what’s possible.

Intelligent automation means much more than a simple transfer of tasks from man to machine. Its real power is to fundamentally change traditional ways of operating and transform what people can achieve by weaving systems, data and people together.

Pega solutions, for example, provide intelligence through automated rules and predictive analytics that enable call center agents to sift through hundreds of potential customer treatments and prioritize the top three based on the customer’s personal situation at the moment of interaction. Pega provides a Customer Decision Hub, a customer relationship management brain with memory and predictive intelligence.

This enables companies to bring together insights and decision-making from all channels — digital, retail or call center — to identify and recommend the most relevant next action to take with every individual customer.

These predictive abilities are enabling Sprint to not only help retain customers, but also grow long-term value. Analytics enables every customer interaction in any channel to create an immediate profile of that customer’s history and account. A real-time assessment determines the best action to take.

The analytics also provide data required to identify an exception, something in the account that may not be obvious or shared by the caller. So even if a customer calls about an unrelated matter, Pega solutions ensure that any underlying issues or problems that may affect their future relationship with the business are addressed. In other words, intelligent automation enables the company to balance customer needs with strategic objectives in order to create a “win-win” in real-time.

The key to intelligent automation lies in the interaction between humans and machines. It’s humans who take into account the context around data and feed that understanding back into the tool so that it can continuously learn and adjust.

To take another example, one leading global storage infrastructure and software provider is using advanced intelligence to route support requests to the most qualified technician to solve the problem. This organization has over 2000 different skill-sets spread across thousands of global technicians. Pega solutions provide real time analytics to predict which available technician has the highest likelihood of solving any customer’s problem in the shortest amount of time. The result: an optimized workforce and enhanced customer experience through speedier resolutions — all at a lower cost of service.

When it comes to providing intelligent automation, one of the core strengths of Pega solutions is the ability to automate across disparate systems and leverage existing corporate assets. That means older legacy technology environments can secure the benefits of automation without the necessity of extensive and expensive re-architecting. In addition, the ability to operate across channels can bring front-office and back-office together to create seamless customer services and interactions that are one of the hallmarks of intelligent automation.

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2. Liquid workforce – the workforce for today’s digital demands

By exploiting technology to enable workforce transformation, leading companies will create highly adaptable and change-ready enterprise environments that are able to meet today’s dynamic digital demands.

This liquid workforce competitive advantage is apparent as, according to our global technology survey of more than 3,100 IT and business executives, “deep expertise for the specialized task at hand” was only the fifth most important characteristic required for employees to perform well in a digital work environment — other qualities such as “the ability to quickly learn” or “shift gears” were ranked higher.

In the digital era, leaders understand that a change-ready workforce is a prerequisite for success. But the requirements for managing a digital workforce are very different from traditional approaches to talent. The workforce needs new skills and has new expectations to match. How can

companies attract, build and retain the differentiated talent they need — without losing them to digital native competitors? Delivering the right experiences and interactions is key.

Together, Accenture and Pega are helping one global bank address the challenges of their changing workforce and enable HR process and workforce transformation across the globe. One of the key challenges they face in an ever-faster digitally driven environment is the speed with which new recruits can be onboarded to make them as productive as possible, as quickly as possible.

To solve that problem, we are using the intelligent automation capabilities in Pega solutions to help streamline HR processes across organizational boundaries, systems and channels to significantly reduce onboarding cycle time and enable individuals joining the bank to get up to speed as rapidly as possible.

Another example comes from within Accenture’s own Pega practice. We’re reinventing the traditional onshore/offshore dynamic to offer both clients and our people distributed, agile and iterative delivery models that meet the changing demands of a more liquid workforce and provide high-value outcomes for our clients. By co-locating resources in a US hub, Accenture’s Pega practice provides clients with deep talent and skills at a lower cost than on-site. At the same time, this approach responds to the demands of millennials at Accenture who are looking for a flexible working environment, close to home, to achieve the work/life balance they seek. Providing an on-site, local hub, and offshore sourcing options provides both our clients and our people with the flexibility to achieve high performance.

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3. Platform economy – innovation from the outside, in

Industry leaders are unleashing technology’s power by developing new technology platforms. But more than that, it’s the platform-based business models and the strategies they enable that are driving the most profound global macroeconomic change since the industrial revolution. In the digital economy, platform ecosystems are nothing less than the foundation for new value creation.

Tech companies and digital-born organizations (DBOs) like Amazon, Google, and Alibaba have long understood the power of digital technologies. But look a little closer. Many of their most ground-breaking products and services are based on platforms. DBOs’ success rests on two key elements: the technology platforms they’ve built to support their businesses, and the business models these platforms enable. These platform-based business models fundamentally change how they operate.

One example, from the healthcare sector, offers a great illustration of these new platform-based business models in action. ADVANTICS™ Care Pathway Transformation, is a platform-based, data-driven digital health solution helping hospitals improve patient outcomes and reducing avoidable costs for patients with chronic cardiovascular diseases. The Care Pathway Transformation solution uses advanced analytics to drive actionable insights into care coordination and patient population health patterns. These reveal opportunities for improving the consistency and efficiency of care coordination. Using Pega technologies, the solution, developed by Boston Scientific and Accenture, enables providers to make more proactive and informed decisions based on insights into the patient population. Ultimately, this results in improved patient care, from hospital to in-home support – and fewer avoidable readmissions.

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4. Predictable disruption – digital ecosystems drive the next wave of change

Fast-emerging digital ecosystems — such as precision agriculture, the industrial internet or smart cities — are creating foundations for the next big wave of enterprise disruption. Digital ecosystems like these, and the businesses that power them, are already straddling markets and blurring industry boundaries.

While they raise the threat from new competitors entering the market, they also create opportunities for large enterprises to disrupt new and existing markets, leveraging their scale and technology capabilities to do so. One example comes from a large Brazilian convergent telecom that’s in the process of implementing the advanced analytics capabilities in Pega solutions to disrupt its industry sector with highly targeted, personalized service offerings for every customer. These will build an integrated “quadruple play” solution that will threaten the position of providers in cable, TV, broadband and mobile segments.

Pega technologies enable customized bundling of services based on accurate predictions of likely customer needs. While bundling is a complex process, these technologies are used to simplify the customer experience by creating exactly the right offering, at the right price point, for every customer.

The message behind the predictable disruption trend is that all organizations need to continuously scan the horizon for signs of imminent disruption. These can come from within or outside and industry sector. The developments by Boston Scientific, for example, send a clear signal to traditional healthcare providers that more and more innovation lies ahead. All sectors should take note.

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5. Digital trust – strengthening customer relationships through ethics and security

As each piece of the business world goes digital, opportunities to catalyze change and scale operations increase exponentially. Unfortunately, this increased ability to scale also brings increased exposure to systemic risks. As every digital advancement creates a new vector for risk, trust becomes the cornerstone of the digital economy. Without trust, digital businesses cannot use and share the data that underpins their operations. To gain the trust of individuals, ecosystems, and regulators in the digital economy, businesses must possess strong security and ethics at each stage of the customer journey. And new products and services must be ethical- and secure-by-design. Businesses that get this right will enjoy such high levels of trust that their customers will look to them as guides for the digital future.

It’s a huge opportunity. Consumers, particularly millennials, are increasingly prepared to share their information with the companies and services they use.

The potential to apply data analytics to learn more about them and deliver truly personalized offerings, can really support a company’s differentiation in a crowded marketplace.

But the willingness to share should not be misinterpreted as an open invitation. Relevance is critical. Consumers will respond positively only when an offer is appropriate to their individual context and progress along the customer lifecycle. This is where the ability of Pega solutions to create context-specific recommendations is so powerful. The right interventions at the right time, can help build a trusted relationship, which remains on the right side of personal without wandering into territory that the consumer will consider intrusive. With such a delicate balance to maintain, companies need to make sure they use the potential of analytics wisely. Without that safeguard, trust, which takes years to build, can be shattered in an instant.

People and technology in harmonyBy taking advantage of the key capabilities that Pega solutions provide — process automation, provisioning and personalization — companies can use technology in a way that embodies the “People first” mentality. Automation and disruptive capabilities are undoubtedly powerful. But the real strength of Pega solution capabilities is that companies can deploy them to train their people how to use the data they gather and share in innovative new ways that build valuable customer trust. By providing the data that’s needed to make decisions that respect the trust customers have invested in them, companies can start to realize an almost limitless source of value. But this is only possible when people and technology are truly working together.

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ContactsDavid Steuer Global Pega Practice Lead Managing Director, Accenture david.h.steuer@accenture.com

Justine Zang Global Pega Alliance Lead Senior Manager, Accenture justine.b.zang@accenture.com

About Accenture Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries and all business functions—underpinned by the world’s largest delivery network—Accenture works at the intersection of business and technology to help clients improve their performance and create sustainable value for their stakeholders. With approximately 373,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture drives innovation to improve the way the world works and lives. Visit us at www.accenture.com.

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