Accenture encourages a culture of innovation, empowering citizen developers with Power Platform

Innovation is all about seeing potential. Accenture, now the largest professional services provider in the world, started as the technology and business division of a 1950s American consultancy. Its first job was to determine if a computer could be installed at a General Electric manufacturing center. Indeed, it was possible, and the consultancy installed the first enterprise computer system—starting its long history of technological innovation. 

Today, Accenture is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland and has 760,000 global employees, most of whom are client facing and help Accenture customers across 40 industries in more than 120 countries. The company is well into its digital transformation initiative, with 90 percent of its multi-vendor IT infrastructure in the cloud. 

Accenture is a company that believes in adapting and innovating, and as such, decided they wanted to change the culture by decentralizing what is traditionally seen as a centralized function only. “We wanted to find a solution that would accelerate productivity and give our employees an opportunity to solve problems in real time, which low code does,” says Kate Mathews, Lead of the Accenture Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE). “Power Platform is so naturally interoperable with Microsoft 365, and as a top consumer of Microsoft 365 products, this was an easy place to start.”

Solving for unmet demand and greater visibility

Accenture, an early adopter of Power Platform, started its low-code journey about three years ago, driven in large part by executive sponsor Karen Odegaard identifying the need to combat the unmet demand within the central IT organization. It was about that time that Accenture began forming its Power Platform CoE. A CoE team helps invest in and nurture growth and innovation within a company, while maintaining governance and control—the Accenture team started with just two people. 

The Accenture CoE laid the foundation for how it would adopt Power Platform within the organization. The team’s goal was first to define a strategic, incremental plan to deploy and support a citizen development platform for all Accenture employees—from citizen developers to professional developers. This plan outlined data governance strategies, best practices, and a roadmap of when they would turn on certain capabilities and connectors to reduce shadow IT and best serve their customers. 

“For us, we define shadow IT as things we cannot see or control when we need to, so by standing up the platform and inviting our people to create and build—at its very core we have gained visibility into what people are doing and how they are connecting which starts governance at the platform level,” says Mathews. She emphasizes the importance of defining your strategy beforehand because governing access to data and systems is critical, and the number of available connectors and functions can be overwhelming. 

Andrea Petkovich, Product Manager in the CoE adds, “We started with one environment, default productivity, and a limited set of connectors. This gave us the foundation for Accenture to broaden the use of more enterprise capabilities.” And today, every employee at Accenture—760,000 people—has a Power Platform license.  

A journey of excellence

Over the past few years, the CoE team has grown very organically over time from 3 to 60 members. While neither Kate nor Andrea were the original two members of the team—both joining within the first six months of the CoE being formed—these two women are having a major impact on the future of low code at Accenture. 

In the last few months alone, the CoE team has rolled out Power Pages and Power Virtual Agents, marking a huge milestone as they have now enabled and are supporting all five Microsoft Power Platform products. 

They continue to strategically evaluate new offerings like Robotic Process Automation while openly welcoming customer demand to identify what will provide the most value to Accenture and what is next on the roadmap.

Accenture has strived to embed Power Platform into its standard offerings and meet people where they already work every day. “We are fortunate to have a lot of people within our company that love technology—so we have had a lot of natural adoptions,” says Mathews. Even with this success, it hasn’t stopped Accenture from hosting some large events like the Power to Everyone Hackathon last year or more recently, a global Adoption campaign. Nor has it decreased its involvement as an evangelist in their Yammer community.

Everyone’s welcome

Citizen development through the use of a low-code platform—like Power Platform—empowers people regardless of their experience with development to be able to build an app or a workflow to improve their personal or team productivity. 

Petkovich says, “Personal productivity flows are huge across Accenture—I use them myself so that any time I get a ping in Teams, I’m sent a specific email, and this helps my work stay organized.”

And while Power Platform is marketed primarily as low code, the CoE at Accenture has made it a priority to span the skillset from those citizens up to professional developers. 

Professional developers at Accenture get to try out new functionality before they are rolled out to the company at-large and are embracing Power Platform to build solutions faster. Petkovich says “Enabling professional tools like the Power Apps Component Framework or Creator kit in our dedicated environments allows people to plug-in those pro-code capabilities. It is keeping professional developers engaged in a low-code platform.”

For everyone, there is an active developer community on Yammer, with developers of all skill levels collaborating and communicating about DIY solutions in Power Platform. “Because we’re a tech-driven company and our jobs are to solve problems, the ability for our people to go and solve their own problems in real-time with Power Platform is very validating to individuals and the company culture overall,” says Mathews. 

Low-code, high impacts

Mathews and her team connect with makers using Power Platform on a regular basis to learn how their use of low-code apps, automations, and bots built in Power Platform have saved time and money while increasing productivity. Armed with this knowledge, the CoE team designed a productivity value index that captures ROI metrics.

Mathews says, “Even if each automation only saves you five minutes, if you think about the volume of flow runs in a month, you can begin to quantify time which translates to costs. Then you can start to see real value in having Power Platform.”

Another way that Accenture measures ROI is based on adoption—number of apps, number of flows, how many people are using the solutions built on the platform, and how many flow executions occur in a given month. Right now, over 200K people are taking advantage of the over 100K apps built on Power Platform every month, with even more impressive volumes seen on the automation side as well. 

With Power Platform, Accenture is able to fill gaps in unmet development demand and automate manual efforts, resulting in $6 million of value gained every year in avoided cost.

Power the future 

With generative AI recently hitting the market, the CoE team has enabled the new Microsoft Copilot functionality. The team is investigating how to best take advantage this functionality where possible and keep Accenture at the forefront of rapidly evolving technology. 

Accenture often evangelizes the technology it uses to its customers, and as the biggest single user of Power Platform in the world—it wants to leverage that experience to help its customers solve their business challenges. Mathews says, “If we can stand up a new technology like Power Platform to meet the scale of Accenture it puts us in a really good position to help our clients do the same.” 

Mathews adds, “It’s a bit like ‘to be continued,’ our Power Platform story. In many ways, it feels like we’re just getting started.” 

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