HFS Highlight: Accenture’s Technology Vision 2021: Leaders have to Rise Up for a Once in a Generation Opportunity to Change

HFS declared 2020 the year enterprises realized digital is not optional. Storming into 2021 we have an unprecedented, opportunity to make rapid, fundamental changes to the way we design and run our organizations. As HFS has outlined in our Vision 2025 around the need for a OneOffice approach for business and technology, success will favor the bold.  

With this as our perspective, HFS attended Accenture’s #techvision2021 event, where they provided an overview of their annual technology vision statement. This event outlined their views on the changes needed to shape this year and beyond. Their core premise is that a leader must be willing to be a “master of change during moments of truth,” thus creating opportunities by focusing on people, processes, culture, and technology-enabled experiences – requiring the acceptance of a range of new realities.  

Accenture’s vision and the OneOffice 

The priorities for Accenture’s 2021 vision include Architecture changes, process digitization, technology democratization, workforce experience change, and ecosystem revolution. This is a notable shift from their 2019 Tech Vision (distributed ledger, AI, augmented Reality, and Quantum) as Accenture has contextualized its newest Vision into a talent, technology, and operational context making hoping to make it easier for executives to apply these to their strategies and goals. Accenture’s five trends for 2021 are: 

1. Stack Strategically, 
2. Mirrored World, 
3. I, Technologist, 
4. Anywhere, Everywhere, and 
5. From Me to We. 

Together these trends aspire to be transformational, but they do require a high level of digital fluency throughout organization to succeed. And while these build on technology-centric themes, it is important to add some context from the market trends and opportunities HFS is seeing in our research. Let’s break down each of Accenture’s trends and briefly summarize how each may impact organizations over the next decade.  

• Stack Strategically (HFS: architecting for cloud-native): Accenture pushes the need for the technology architect to be a key partner with business leaders to change how technology and business services are developed, shared, and delivered. Understanding how your systems, process, and people will interact with data and applications while meeting the resiliency, risk, and compliance needs require the architecture team to be at the table.  
• Mirrored World (HFS: Native Automation): In its trend report, Accenture shows few organizations are doing this at scale now. Nevertheless, they argue digital twins can lead to process digitization and native automation which can be a scale multiplier for creating business value. We believe digital twins will have their place; however, organizations must stop making data stovepipes and focus on automation that turns data into knowledge.   
• I, Technologist (HFS: Data & Decision): Accenture sees progress based on improving digital fluency. Success here boils down to harnessing data to drive better decisions across your people. Treating your technology investments as ways to curate data into malleable tools, your gig workers and knowledge workers can adapt to the task at hand. Low code, function-oriented applications, embedded analytics will change how every worker can use technology to do their job.  
• Anywhere, Everywhere (HFS: People & Process): Accenture homes in on the changing way we’ll work. Framed as “bring your own environment,” this will likely cause the most heart attacks with leaders, especially governance, risk, and security teams who are already dealing with the challenges of protecting, managing, and monitoring how the majority of their workforce is now accessing corporate assets from outside the firewall. However, this done right will unleash untold creativity and innovation.
• From Me to We (HFS: Employee, Customer, Partner, Planet Experience): More than just supply chain optimization, this requires a new vision for enterprises to deliver experiences that matter to employees, customers, partners. To be achieved, it will require value alignment on sustainability, workforce diversity, and human rights. This sounds like the simplest, but frankly, it’s likely the most ambitious.  

Bottom Line: Leadership during change is important, but what leaders do with the opportunities that change creates is where the lasting value is unleashed.  

Accenture has outlined significant aspirations for organizations in their 2021 Vision. We agree compelling big visions like this are needed as we exit the pandemic, and Accenture has the mindshare to challenge leaders to engage in a debate. However, we see these as relevant for the decade rather than a yearly one-off. Any one of these is a lot for companies to attempt to master; as such, we advise leaders to be selective in incorporating aspects of each of these to forward their own vision.