Boost Your Solution Adoption with Accenture Future Talent Platform on AWS

By Vishal M Sanghavi, Associate Director and AFTP Engineering Lead – Accenture
By S Manoj K Agarwal, Software Product Manager and AFTP Product Lead – Accenture
By Marius Cealera, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS

Accenture

Digital transformation is a way of life for many organizations. The need to accelerate transformation and keep pace with change is even more urgent because, despite geopolitical and economic uncertainty and rapidly evolving markets, businesses are always striving and aiming for and continuous growth.

Leaders, partners, employees, and customers all have a role to play in managing and adapting to this climate of change and reinvention while maintaining a digital core.

Technology can be complex and not always intuitive. To adopt new technologies and services rapidly, organizations must not only consider developing the knowledge and capabilities to take full advantage of them, but also recognize that implementing learning initiatives often involves multiple teams, stakeholders, and organizational logistics that put pressure on meeting time-sensitive business objectives.

In this post, we will show how Accenture engineered a cloud-native software as-a-service (SaaS) learning platform that enables users to succeed in fast-paced environments. We’ll take a look at why quick adoption is essential for an organization to acquire new knowledge, adapt mindsets, and develop new capabilities required to deliver changing business initiatives in a timely way.

Accenture is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and Managed Services Provider (MSP) that provides end-to-end solutions to migrate to and manage operations on AWS. By working with the Accenture AWS Business Group (AABG), a strategic collaboration by Accenture and AWS, organizations can accelerate the pace of innovation to deliver disruptive products and services.

Continuous Learning

Today, innovation is all around us. New business models, new technologies, new ways of collaborating, or even a mix of all three result in ideas and services that are being created and brought to market all the time. However, even the most intuitive solutions with the smartest interfaces require some explanation and training to ensure fast and effective adoption, regardless of how curious or tech-savvy users may be.

Ideally, learning should be available when it’s needed. An as-a-service option gives organizations the flexibility and agility to deliver training services on-demand, across multiple devices, in a modern user interface. With as-a-service learning, classroom training sessions become a thing of the past, along with their costs and limitations. Learners are no longer faced with overwhelming amounts of information, complicated manuals, or unfamiliar interfaces.

Through an innovative approach, Accenture’s Future Talent Platform (FTP) enables general or highly focused training to guide customers, partners, or employees to get the most out of new technologies or programs. Because every learning process is unique to different businesses, functions, or user types. Enabling sustainable learning at the user’s own pace is an essential investment for any growth-focused organization.

Business leaders need to ask themselves:

• Do we have the necessary knowledge within our organization to deliver on our digital, cloud, or business transformation goals and initiatives?
• Will our customers and partners require support and training to navigate these changes with us?
• How can we provide on-demand training and content that enables users to maximize value from our investments in innovation?

Future Talent Platform

Like many other large, global organizations, Accenture has experienced ongoing disruption in recent times. Yet, the company embraced change as an opportunity to realize more value—and recognize the importance of empowering people with the knowledge they need in times of change.

As Accenture Chief Technology Officer Paul Daugherty said: “Talent is our single biggest opportunity to ensure we deliver on the value of tech transformations.” That is why Accenture created FTP, a learning platform powered by behavioral science and analytics to drive knowledge transfer at scale and power change journeys.

FTP provides value through four key capabilities: content, consulting services, a multi-tenant SaaS application, and third-party integrations to industry-leading solutions—such as identity, reporting, learning management systems (including SAP SuccessFactors), external content providers (like Skillsoft and simplilearn), or public content providers (such as YouTube, TED, Azure, INKtalks, Google, HBR).

To kick start into a change journey, FTP offers more than 40,000 pre-build courses and more than 400 learning journeys across 15 topics. FTP accelerates the technology transformation journey with a variety of training options as well as other benefits such as:

• Focused learning paths: Drag-and-drop construction makes it easy to configure learning paths to meet an organization’s specific needs. Personalized training is then assigned to users based on their roles and desired training outcomes.
• Engaging and collaborative user interface: Combines the knowledge of experts in learning behavior and online interaction to maximize user engagement. Through notifications, behavior-based badges, and leaderboards, among other features, a gamified user experience is created, coupled with social collaboration with experts and peers to increase completion rates.
• Anytime, any device learning: The cloud-based learning platform is available on-demand anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Users can explore content, track their progress, view achievements, and complete training on a schedule that works best for them.
• SaaS offering: FTP provides an on-demand training experience. It differs from the comprehensive Learning Management Systems (LMS) that many organizations already have in place by providing a learning platform that integrates directly into an individual company’s own solution or program; it’s time-boxed when needed.

Figure 1 – Personalized dashboard displaying learning paths.

Small- and medium-enterprises (SMEs) can quickly curate the content and Learning Journeys through easy drag-and-drop capabilities. The dashboard provides insight across the entire lifecycle of learning. In addition, more than 15 Excel-based reports provide data for detailed analytics.

Solution Architecture

Accenture designed the Future Talent Platform from the ground up as a cloud-native, multi-tenant and serverless solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

To power its application programming interfaces (APIs), the Future Talent Platform uses Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale.

The compute layer uses AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service that runs code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers.

Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed, serverless, key-value NoSQL database, is used as the main data store, while Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon CloudFront are used for highly-scalable, reliable, and low latency content storage and delivery.

Amazon Cognito provides an identity store that scales to millions of users, supports social and enterprise identity federation, and offers advanced security features.

The almost-completely serverless nature of the platform provides industry-leading levels of availability, performance, and security while minimizing its carbon footprint and running costs.

Figure 2 – Accenture Future Talent Platform solution map.

The platform’s scalability and automated resource provisioning and onboarding enabled Accenture to deploy FTP internally with 125,000 Accenture employees onboarded.

Other companies that are benefitting from FTP include:

• A professional services company that provides add-on software solutions wanted to provide training on how to use its products more efficiently. The company chose FTP due to its rapid deployment and ease of implementation. After successfully piloting one of its software solutions, the company plans to expand the use of FTP to enhance other solutions.
• A pharmaceutical company looking to reimagine its workforce and address legacy IT infrastructure used FTP to train more than 200 employees quickly. In this way, the company could adapt to changing business needs through a standardized training curriculum.

Boost the Business

When embarking on any transformation technology journey, it’s inevitable that an organization needs to adopt new technologies, new software, and new ways of working—not only for its own stakeholders but also for its partners and customers—as part of the process of reaching new business goals and new business objectives.

To realize the full potential of these changes, it’s important to recognize that, as we stand at the edge of the next great technological era, not every organization is ready for such change. As a result, finding ways to put new knowledge into the minds of an organization’s stakeholders as soon as possible can close the capability gaps and realize results faster.

Accenture recognizes and addresses the need to deliver knowledge and expertise as quickly and efficiently as possible by providing measurable results internally and for customers. As an added benefit, the serverless nature of the Future Talent Platform enables it to deliver industry-leading levels of availability, performance, and security while minimizing environmental impact and operating costs. What’s more, the on-demand nature of the FTP platform facilitates time-boxing for greater accountability and improved agility.

Learn more about how the Future Talent Platform makes large-scale technology transformations more effective and reduces achievement disparities between users from different technology backgrounds.

You can also explore Future Talent Platform in AWS Marketplace, and connect with the Accenture team at accentureaws@amazon.com.

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Accenture – AWS Partner Spotlight

Accenture is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and MSP that provides end-to-end solutions to migrate to and manage operations on AWS. By working with the Accenture AWS Business Group (AABG), a strategic collaboration by Accenture and AWS, organizations can accelerate the pace of innovation to deliver disruptive products and services.

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