Over the past decade, consulting and services giant Accenture consolidated 2,100 applications into about 500. The company has a single financial system, a single HR system and a single T&E system for its 223,000 employees around the globe. The only application it has running from the 1990s is its treasury system, and that is scheduled for replacement within a year. The company touts an IT investment of $1 billion over the last 10 years, and a savings of $3 billion. In an interview with FierceCIO, Accenture CIO Frank Modruson offered some tips for simplifying the process of application consolidation and explained how it improves the quality of information.

FCIO: What are some of the most important benefits of application consolidation?

Modruson: When we eliminated a lot of applications and moved them to standard platforms, it drove down the operating costs of running the applications. There were less servers, less people to manage them. It also increased the quality of information coming out of the systems because you really got down to one version of the truth. If you can do it for less, you probably should. The more important reason is that if you do it for less, you do it better. Getting down to fewer applications involves getting through the politics of the information. Getting that accomplished ends up being better for the business as a whole.  

FCIO: Can you give an example of the improvement in the quality of information that resulted from consolidating applications?

Modruson: A few years ago we hired a chief procurement officer. I remember talking to her a few months after she joined. I asked her what she thought of our IT, and she said it's fantastic. Whenever you do strategic sourcing, the first thing you do is collect all the information around all the purchases you do and consolidate it into a data warehouse. She said she didn't have to do that here. You already had that, she said, you have one procurement system for the world. Consolidating vendors is easier because you have power with information.

Another example is chargeability metrics, one of the key metrics in our business. A typical call would go something like this: Somebody would say, I was looking for chargeability numbers for consulting in the U.K. Then the call would devolve into a debate about who is looking at the right report.  We haven't had that discussion now since 2004. When you get all the data consolidated, you don't have that discussion. There's no more debating about whose information is right.

If you have one system for your financials, you can review it, test it, audit it. You can dedicate more resources to the one than you could to the 100. You can make more investment in it and ensure the information is correct. You can put more controls around the auditing and editing of input. The other really big deal is the data structures. 

FCIO: Which applications did you consolidate first?

Modruson: We did our financials first, then HR, then sales, then a few other things and then time and expense. 

FCIO: You mentioned that data structures are an important element in improving the quality of information. Can you elaborate? 

Modruson: An example is the time and expense system. We had a pretty good time and expense system in place, but it turned out there were 35 different versions of the system, one for each country we were in. The fastest way to deploy it was that each country modified it. It turns out they also edited it for expense rules and data structure. We ended up with 35 different data structures to describe something as simple as cab fare. In Australia, they wanted to know mileage. Somewhere else they wanted to know if it was client-related. When you rolled it all together, you couldn't use it because of the inconsistent structures. 

The other example is recruiting. We look at a couple million resumes a year. Recruiting is very important to Accenture, and we think it is something we're very good at it. But when you look at recruiting itself, what's the secret sauce? It's basically who do you attract and who do you select and who accepts your offer. The technology helps the information flow, but it isn't the secret sauce. It's an enabler. 

In '04 or '05 HR reached out to me and said the recruiting system didn't have automatic reply and we don't have online applications. We had 35 or 40 recruiting applications around the world. We grew up from country-based organizations.  It's faster to put them in for a country or division than a whole company. I said we've got to consolidate. HR wanted a custom application, but I'm not a big custom application fan. We found a software-as-a-service vendor. The service is hosted in the cloud. We've been on this platform for six years. It was a change journey for the HR people. At first, they were kind of like, I want to go back. But the HR leadership stayed the course.

FCIO: Where did you find there wasn't much room for consolidation?

Modruson: One application that's very challenging to consolidate to one system is payroll. It turns out payroll is a very complex application because of taxation around the world. We use the same provider for the U.S. and Canada. A lot of the providers cover both countries. We use one for the U.K. and Ireland. We're closer now than we were 10 years ago.  These things are evolutionary. 

FCIO: Which applications were the most challenging in terms of making a business case for consolidation?

Modruson: In '01 we had email hosted in 38 or 40 places around the world. A lot of people say, how do I make the business case to change email software? It turns out it's a hard case to make. When we did that consolidation, there were some hard dollar benefits that really helped. We saved a ton of money on consolidating hosting, and that helped pay for the conversion from one technology to another.

FCIO: Which areas of the business had the hardest time adapting to consolidated applications?

Modruson: It's not any one group [that had the hardest time]. It's very interesting if you look back over time.  In '01, our IT's credibility wasn't very high. As we rolled out big change initiatives, people got very suspicious about whether it would go well. We were unproven. What happened over time is that each time we succeeded, our credibility went up and resistance went down. 

The recruiting system rolled out around '05; time and expense rolled out in about '09. We saw resistance from HR back in '05. When we went through and converted 190,000 [users] over to my time and expense system, it was incredible how little noise there was. We didn't get any complaints. By the way, no one likes doing time and expenses. The little secret we didn't tell people is that when they got the notification to convert, we actually didn't disable the old system for I think two pay periods. But you know what? Pretty much everyone used the new system. Over time, people start to trust you more and more.

With some of the newer applications that we worried about, one thing we did is migrate the senior leadership of the company to it first.  One of the first people to upgrade their workstation was our CEO at the time. 

FCIO: What advice do you have for other companies going through a major application consolidation?

Modruson: Don't let a little bit of nervousness or jitters take you off course. The last thing you want to do is get nervous part way through.