The knock against Accenture is the same one consulting rivals have thumped out for more than half a decade.
As rivals tell it, Accenture is the best-dressed outsourcing business in town. Cloaked in a consultant's garb, Accenture consultants strut down client corridors with a McKinseyish air about them, only to forfeit more high-brow engagements in favor of more Wall Street–friendly outsourcing gigs — the kind that produce predictable earnings. Or so goes the knock.
These days, someone is knocking back. Ask Accenture's chief technology strategist, Bob Suh, about the firm's growing appetite for outsourcing, and his detailed response often leaves you wondering how any consulting firm without a similar diet plan will manage to compete in the future. According to Suh, predictable earnings are indeed tasty, but new insights into how to leverage, measure, and manage information technology are what Accenture now hungers for most. To that end, Suh says, outsourcing deals provide the fertile ground from which such insights now routinely germinate.
"It's learning from doing," says Suh, who argues that a successful client engagement is always "the best R&D" — a jab, perhaps, at Accenture's arch services rival, IBM Corp., which has sought to lure new consulting clients with its $7 billion annual R&D budget.
To date, Suh is credited with fine-tuning Accenture's research so that it now focuses on areas where technology often fails to pass muster, whether in predictability, productivity, metrics, or execution.
"We believe that if you can refresh the cycle times on IT capability and services, you'll be able to give clients more services, more information, and more IT capability faster and cheaper," says Suh, who predicts that the best days lie ahead for Accenture's IT consulting business, as the firm attempts to turbocharge its systems integration offerings with its ever-growing operational knowledge.
Before Accenture's IT business can savor its best days, Suh faces the challenge of driving the firm's IT vision across its multitiered army of consultants. It's a task both Accenture CEO Bill Green and the firm's chief strategy officer, Tim Breene, have frequently expressed confidence in Suh's ability to undertake. Such confidence hardly makes Suh's task a slam dunk. Four years after the firm converted itself from a partnership into a publicly owned corporation, many Accenture "partners" are known for being independent-minded, a cultural legacy that perhaps harks back to the firm's partnership roots. What's more, unlike most Accenture partners, Suh isn't "homegrown," and he is still considered something of an outsider for having performed earlier tours of duty at Perot Systems Corp. and CSC Index.
Nevertheless, the smart money's on Suh. "If anyone can articulate the types of ideas that move knowledge forward within that firm, it's Bob," says James Champy, chief of consulting at Perot Systems Corp., a former boss, and a current competitor who prefers not to knock. — Jack Sweeney
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