Industry veteran Annette Rippert started at Accenture back in 1986, and was made 
partner in 1998. She has an extensive background in technology and digital transformation efforts, leveraging that expertise in her previous role as head of Accenture's North America Technology business, which she rapidly expanded into new areas like data, cloud, and supply chain solutions. Her current role, leading Strategy & Consulting for the firm, sees her at the nexus of business, technology, and human potential. As if that impressive career trajectory wasn't enough, Rippert found time through it all to raise five children, only to return to the workforce and continue her meteoric rise within the firm. We recently caught up with Rippert to discuss her current role, and how the pandemic is creating opportunities for companies to transform both internally and externally.
Consulting: What have been your biggest priorities during your time in your latest role?
Rippert: As you think about the importance of what's happening right now in industry, in our strategy and consulting business we're focused on looking at the competitive nature of our clients in their industry, their growth, their profitability, how they deliver sustainable stakeholder value. Our business has been founded over a long period of time around the way that we serve, over 40 industry sectors, across all enterprise business functions, across our web ecosystem partners. We've been focused on building that business, but something very important has come into focus as I've come into my role, and as you think about the nature of the pandemic. That focus has been on industry transformation, initially, of course, on the ability of organizations to really sort out the impact of the pandemic on their own business. What we're focused on now is the use of data, analytics, artificial intelligence, the way we use the levers of technology in order to fuel transformation, business strategy, and thinking about how the industries themselves are changing. That's been a major focus point.
Consulting: How much of that focus was driven by the pandemic, how much was in the background already pre-pandemic?
Rippert: It shaped the way we put together our next-generation growth model, our new organizational structure. What you'll see since we moved into our new structure is we recently launched several initiatives including a new branding strategy. Our initiatives are focused around generating 360-degree value for our clients. That's measuring not just economic value through the way we're helping our clients transform and digitally enable their business, but also measuring the value for all of the stakeholders around the business. Not just economic value, but to their people, their shareholders, to their partners, and in their communities. We've long reflected on that as a tenet of our own business, and using ourselves as a best example of transformation, we extended that to the way we practice together with our clients. That notion of 360-degree value is very important to the way we now bring our offerings into the market.
Consulting: How do you see the overall state of the strategy consulting market?
Rippert: What has been brought about by the pandemic is this focus on first addressing the issues in the March-April-May timeframe of how businesses would enable themselves to survive, to change. What we saw emerging out of this are some themes that are very important to the strategy and consulting lens on our business. That is understanding how there has never been more rapid change across the industry. Everyone has talked about this. Capturing the nature of change in business strategy, how businesses have the opportunity to use technology and human ingenuity in order to revisit the overall value they create within their business. So new business strategies, enabling them is fundamental to understanding how we look through a lens of business strategy, through functional transformation, to creating new products and services and growth.
Our clients are really understanding what's required for the new normal. You've seen that across many examples, but now that we look at that transformational change, the other things I see that cut across strategy and consulting is the need to address the human change invoked out of this: How do we manage the change within an organization, how do we think about the impact to people, how do we think about reskilling to be able to take advantage of technology that's introduced to the rapid change in the way companies are organizing, in the ways they're moving to take costs out of an enterprise and do the right thing by their workforce in reshaping and providing new career opportunities across their workforce. It's driving a pretty significant velocity in our business and I think important to the industry as a whole.
Consulting: How have client demands shifted over the course of the pandemic crisis?
Rippert: At the beginning of the pandemic a lot of our focus was on business continuity. Whether that's through the lens of finances, remote working, restructuring the way the workforce would support changes in the business. The digital interaction with customers completely changed, supply chains were disrupted. Now what's much more clear as that dust has settled are the new capabilities that have to be put in place for resilient supply chains and for unpredicted changes in customer demand. Each one of those then reflects itself on the nature of reinvention of that particular business or function. When you think about changes on the people front, one of the things we did is working together with several other CHROs, put in place something called People + Work Connect back in April. That gave big enterprises a way to connect people looking for work with businesses looking for skilled workers. We did that using our own digital transformation capabilities and relationships, but now the nature of that platform has exploded and has been something that by bringing many companies together has fostered a matching of supply and demand that goes well beyond any corporate boundary and allows for a greater impact on society in terms of matching jobs. That's the kind of thing we saw in the early part of the pandemic. Now we're seeing these other transformational items that really help to support the new normal.
Consulting: Are companies pressing ahead with digital transformation efforts now or taking more of a wait-and-see approach?
Rippert: The buying strategy has completely changed. I think there's always a backlog of strategic projects that our clients evaluate in order to commit their capital to. Today that's very different, because the agility that's necessary within the enterprise is clearer. Investing in those programs, we had a major announcement about moving to the cloud, our Cloud First initiative. We initiated this $3 billion investment in our Cloud First program in order to position ourselves to address the velocity of change we saw coming from our clients. That involves stepping up all of our industry transformation plans in moving to the cloud, it involves stepping up the nature of our co-investment with our major ecosystem partners, and a commitment to helping our clients reskill their own workforce, understand learning and reskilling in the confines of their own business so they could move at the speed and pace necessary to address the new normal. So we see this rapid uptake in large cloud transformation programs, and positioning ourselves and then getting our skills in place in order to help our clients move at that speed are necessary.
Consulting: What are the biggest challenges clients are grappling with undertaking these efforts after a tough year?
Rippert: Volatility is a major issue. Using data and analytics in order to address that volatility has become essential. Never before has the importance and strategic relevance of information within an organization been clearer. You can imagine that volatility not only drives the need for supply chain visibility, or anticipating changes in customer demand, but fundamentally underneath all those enterprise solutions is the foundation of a company's most important asset next to their people: their data. We've seen a significant uptick in our work around areas that we would consider applied intelligence, how our clients are using their data, how they're using artificial intelligence and machine learning to anticipate and build new algorithms to support the business.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.