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Krishnan Thiagarajan

Accenture's labs are seeking to integrate technology with business requirements.

Inside the Accenture lab at Sophia Antipolis, France

Recently in Sophia Antipolis, France

Technology innovation and business results — do they sound like two sides of the same coin? They ought to, but in the real world, integrating these two ideas presents the biggest challenge to researchers worldwide. At a recent visit by a group of journalists from India to Accenture Technology Labs at Sophia Antipolis, questions on the operating model for the labs and how they straddle these two fundamental facets kept cropping up during the course of interaction.

Scott Rose, Global Managing Director of Accenture Technology Labs and an Accenture veteran who fielded these questions, said, "Our operating model is 30 per cent investment in the research area, 50 per cent in research and development, which is road-map driven such as service-oriented architecture (SOA) or the next generation retail banking branch, and 20 per cent in opportunistic projects based on the vision and feedback from industry experts." He went on to add that more than 50 per cent of R&D budget rests on a sound technology footing. Accenture had spent $243 million in fiscal year 2005 to help create and commercialise innovative business strategies and technology.

In a presentation focusing on the Tech Labs, Scott Rose highlighted three major forces in information technology that are likely to influence the shape of R&D to come:

SOA is likely to dramatically change IT Systems in the coming years. He cited a system that manages Digital Health Records in Europe as one of the key changes that can potentially transform healthcare.

Infrastructure will become a utility. As advances in hardware and network technology, including data centre automation and virtualisation, take hold, he claims this will become a reality.

Software development will transform from craftsmanship to an industrialised process

He also added that looking for trends at the intersection of business and technology at times opens up the door to solutions that have a disruptive business impact.

Key focus areas

Using the major technology trends as a benchmark and after analysing over 150 technologies, Accenture has identified four key R&D areas that are likely to drive the future of business applications, namely: Analytics/Business intelligence; Intelligence Device integration; Human Computer Interaction and Systems Integration.

According to the Accenture spokesperson, the R&D Labs have staff strength of 200 professionals at a global level. About one-third are highly qualified researchers and two-thirds are development professionals involved in prototyping the various research ideas. The top three areas spelt out are being handled by Accenture from its three existing R&D centres at Chicago, Illinois; Palo Alto, California and Sophia Antipolis, France. The first of the labs was started in Chicago 20 years ago and focuses primarily on sensors, manufacturing and process controls. Palo Alto and Sophia Antipolis were launched about 10 years ago and have a much greater technology focus.

Systems integration: India focus

The Accenture facility in Bangalore

The fourth piece of the strategic pie is to be handled by Accenture from its fourth research centre set up in July at Bangalore. This centre will focus on the entire systems integration/software engineering efforts of the company.

It plans to hire about 50 researchers by 2007 selected from the country's leading universities and engineering institutes to staff this facility. This will be expanded to 100 in a phased manner over the next three to four years. The focus of the lab will be mainly on delivery innovation.

According to Dr Lin Chase, Director of Accenture Technology Labs-India, based on interaction with delivery teams, research into systems integration will focus on five key aspects such as requirement analysis, tools and methods, metrics and measurement, testing and knowledge reuse. Since Accenture handles large and complex projects across the globe, the Bangalore lab will have access to up to 2,000 of the latest software development projects across Accenture, she added.

The next piece will focus on the tech innovations from the Accenture Technology Labs at Sophia Antipolis.

maverick@thehindu.co.in

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