Democratization of data is going to be vital: Kaushal Mody, Accenture

Indian market is going through a fundamental shift away from traditional business intelligence and data management towards big data, advanced analytics, and platforms are emerging to support the ‘as-a-service’ economy. Kaushal Mody, global director for Delivery Excellence and Innovation at Accenture Operations highlights how the company is helping its clients to identify analytics-as-a-service to drive business outcomes.

Indian enterprises are focusing on greater operational agility and flexibility in their digital journey. What is the role of analytics in driving this transformation?

Every business is a digital business. Digitization is fundamentally changing the way organizations are operating—from interacting with customers and managing employees, to becoming more profitable and expanding their footprint. And, we believe, analytics will act as a fuel in digitization.

Analytics can help organizations to acquire and retain customers, improve return on marketing campaigns, increase content effectiveness, and optimize cross-channel sales. It can also help in reducing cost and duration of R&D programs, and improve regulatory compliance. Indian businesses nowadays use analytics to optimize working capital, improve talent sourcing, reduce employee attrition, manage supply chain risks, and save costs.

We, at Accenture, help clients to identify analytics to drive business outcomes. We also help in developing advanced analytical capabilities and right analytical skills. We are building on our history of innovation in information management and transformative outsourcing, with a global network of analytical talent and innovation centers.

What are the drivers for Analytics-as-a-Service in Indian market?

We are seeing Indian market undergoing tremendous change—a fundamental shift away from traditional business intelligence and data management towards big data and advanced analytics. Several platforms are emerging to support the Analytics-as-a-Service economy. Analytics is maturing and has become a strategic priority for enterprises.

Some of the trends we are seeing in Indian market are democratization of data, data discovery and visualization, data explosion and new data sources, aggressive focus on advanced analytics, big data and hybrid architectures, and changing skills requirements.

Organizational needs are shifting from structured reporting to actionable intelligence and predictive insights. Business users are now expecting interactivity, multi-channel delivery, flexibility in exploring insights, increased focus on advanced visualization, better identification of complex trends, and faster decision making. And, given the above trends, new and more complete skill-sets are being demanded from analytics professionals.

Also read: Enterprise analytics demand prompts need for higher-value professional services

What is Accenture’s play in this domain?  And what are your key differentiators?

Our offerings are asset-powered. Our portfolio includes insights platform and advanced analytical apps, which help in increasing an organization’s speed to gather insights, and enable them to make faster data-driven decisions.

We have developed a broad portfolio of analytics offerings that cover the entire business analytics services stack. Depending on the desired client outcome, our analytics offerings are provided as consulting engagements, embedded in BPO offerings or delivered ‘as-a-service’.

The trends we are seeing in Indian market are democratization of data, data explosion and new data sources, and aggressive focus on advanced analytics.

Accenture is known for the depth of its industry insight and solutions. A large part of our workforce has certified industry skills or are aligned with a specific industry. We have developed high-performance industry blueprints for analytics for many industries that demonstrate the usage of analytics across their organizations to drive business outcomes.

Accenture’s most important asset is its people—we have a specialized team of digital professionals, including data scientists and analytics experts. The diverse and global makeup of our workforce enables us to serve our diverse and global client base. We aim to continuously enrich our analytics curriculum to be able to build the appropriate skills and capabilities to serve our clients.

Who are your clients and which vertical industries are you targeting?

Accenture builds trust-based and enduring relationships at the C-suite level with many of the world’s leading companies—the Global 2000, and major governmental organizations. Accenture analytics also serves 70 of the Fortune global 100 companies, and works with many leading companies around the world.

Accenture’s clients span all industries around the world, and the company’s industry experience is best in class. We have expertise in more than 40 industries across 13 industry groups. We aim to continue developing new advanced analytics solutions using themes such as linking first party and third party data sources, real time data scoring and analytics, and risk and compliance analytics.

Could you elaborate on your offerings?

The Accenture analytics offering framework highlights our core capabilities of information and analytics strategy. All offerings encompass these capabilities, which are essential in delivering a successful end-to-end solution to our clients.

Offerings include differentiated assets and solutions that can be delivered as-a-service via the Accenture Insights Platform. We embed big data capabilities into all our offerings, helping clients garner real insight and intelligence from data. We help clients to optimize working capital, improve cash collection and discount capture and reduces invoice disputes. We aim to empower decision makers through a blend of analytics, industry expertise and technology.

Accenture continues to strengthen its advanced analytics offerings by developing new predictive and prescriptive analytics solutions. Our analytics portfolio continues to grow at a very healthy pace. As a testimonial to our leadership position in analytics industry, we continue to receive significant appreciation from both our clients and also the analyst community.

What are your future plans?

Accenture strives to have the strongest analytics capabilities in the world in every industry market, and to be at the center of an unparalleled ecosystem of partners, platforms and innovation. We continue to invest organically and inorganically to build capabilities and create assets to differentiate our offerings.

We are committed as a company to weaving analytics into everything that we do, throughout all of our offerings. This has been the largest driver of growth in our analytics capabilities over the past few years.