Running IT like a Business: Accenture's Step-by-Step Guide

Uncover the secrets of an award-winning IT function and apply them to your business!

Global management, technology and outsourcing company Accenture has achieved incredible results through the transformation of its IT function. It has doubled its revenues in ten years, significantly decreased its IT spending despite an increase in workforce of nearly 300%, and its number of satisfied customers is growing and growing. Discover how it has achieved this, and how you can realise similar benefits in your organisation.

The keys

Running IT like a Business will show you how your IT function can provide much more than products and services and add real value to your business. With clear strategies, helpful diagrams and real-life examples, this book will give you the keys to unlocking your IT function’s hidden potential.

The benefits

This book will show you how your IT function can: 

• use the latest technology developments to help your organization to do things better, faster and more cheaply
• take advantage of communication and collaboration technologies to facilitate networking across the enterprise, leading to greater synergy and higher productivity
• identify and analyze business risks and apply measures to reduce these risks
• implement technologies to diversify and grow your business
• develop vital communication skills and techniques to facilitate the change process
• realise cost savings across the organisation

The secrets

Robert E. Kress will let you in on some of Accenture’s secrets to its award-winning way of running IT like a  business, including:

• the seven key elements of its IT strategy
• many of its ‘tricks of the trade’
• the building blocks and core capabilities of Accenture and other high-performance organisations

About the author

Robert E. Kress is the COO of Accenture’s high-performance Information Technology organisation, which supports and advances the business goals of a $22 billion company with more than 215,000 employees in 52 countries. He has overall responsibility for running IT like a business within the company, including the direct management of IT governance, strategy, planning, risk management, audits and IT policy. Bob has extensive experience in IT planning, governance, technology operations, application development, product management, service planning and program management. Before joining the IT operation, he was an Accenture consultant, and developed and delivered complex IT transformation projects for clients.

Robert's first book, IT Governance to Drive High Performance: Lessons from Accenture, was published by IT Governance in 2010.