A new modernised technology environment delivered by Insight, means that members and students of ACCA, the world’s most widespread and innovative accountancy body, enjoy stronger, more meaningful connections. Diligent planning, implementation and ongoing service management from Insight has enabled ACCA’s Digital Transformation journey. Tony McClelland, CIO, ACCA, tells us more.
ACCA is the global professional body for certified accountants. With around 241,000 members and 542,000 future members who support economic growth across 178 countries, it is the world’s most widespread and most innovative accountancy body.
New technology is vital to keep its members informed and is the basis for the organisation to provide pertinent and relevant content to them.
Challenge
As a global organisation, ACCA needs to be able to interact with its customers anywhere in the world. It wanted to create a consistent, resilient and secure technology infrastructure that enables a unified experience for its employees, allowing them to work from any location, at any time – 24/7, 365 days a year.
ACCA has been going through a Digital Transformation to continue to be the number one accounting professional body in the world and wanted to improve its IT services to reduce the number of incidents and end-user issues. The simplified architecture would enable ACCA’s IT teams to identify root causes faster and improve the digital experience.
“Insight demonstrated to us throughout the journey that it could help us meet our challenge of being truly digital in a cloud sense. It has the answers, it has the people and it has the capability,” said Tony McClelland, CIO, ACCA.
“As the person responsible for making the recommendation to our business as to which organisation we go with, Insight has been one of my better decisions,” said Al Gibson, Head of Platform Services, ACCA.
Solution and outcome
The solution Insight delivered combines modern IT architecture with ongoing managed services to oversee and support data centre, cloud and workspace operations – including networks, cybersecurity and end-user computing. ACCA anticipated that the transformation would take three years to complete, Insight delivered it in six months.
The move to become a more agile, flexible and digital business involved migrating workloads from the aging on-premise platform to Microsoft Azure. Insight designed the architecture and delivered the migration programme, also designing a cloud governance framework using patterns and templates to operate and optimise security in a cloud environment. The Cisco network and security infrastructure was provisioned with maximum flexibility in mind, giving ACCA resilient and secure connections to the cloud services.
Within the Azure environment, Insight set up and now manages ACCA’s servers and the M365 end-user productivity and collaboration tools from Microsoft. The managed, modern desktop environment means all user applications are packaged for remote deployment and management – an important consideration given ACCA’s growing global footprint. Insight delivers a range of services that allows ACCA to provide a consistent experience to its end-users and members across the globe.
Insight’s careful implementation planning enabled ACCA to continue delivering its services throughout the implementation period with zero business disruption, and retain its position as the world’s number one professional accounting body.
Why Insight?
ACCA selected Insight as a trusted partner to integrate the technical solutions of a Digital Transformation with managed services encompassing security, infrastructure, global data centre and network cloud services.
Throughout the transformation journey, Insight demonstrated that it had the answers, the people and the capability to meet the modernisation challenges.
ACCA’s Head of IT Commercial & Operational Services, Doug Galt, summed up the relationship: “We wanted a trusted partner that could lead us forward and grow with us. Insight brings industry knowledge and innovation to ACCA to challenge our thinking.”
Tony McClelland, CIO, ACCA, discusses the project in further detail.
Can you tell us about your role at the company and what this looks like day-to-day?
I lead a team of just under 100 colleagues spanning a range of areas including architecture, planning and partnering, digital platform teams, DevOps, testing, supplier management, IT operations and cybersecurity. A lot of my personal focus is on strategic priorities such as Digital Transformation, the ACCA qualification and modern ways of working.
What does ‘future innovation’ mean to you and what are some of the complexities you expect to encounter along the way?
We see innovation in two ways. First, how we use emerging technologies, such as Generative AI, to improve our offerings; and second, how we work in a faster and more efficient manner to allow us to move at speed in the market.
As the global professional body for certified accountants, how important is providing a consistent, resilient and secure technology infrastructure?
Resilience is critical for a global business. Without the flexible infrastructure we had built we could not have continued to work in a smooth and almost uninterrupted way when COVID struck. Geo-politics, data localisation laws and the need to develop further markets all point to having resilience and flexibility that allow us to scale and to absorb shocks as the need arises.
Can you tell us more about the types of end-user issues prior to your work with Insight and how you addressed and overcame these?
Before our work with Insight, we had dependencies on aging technology with geographic limitations and dependencies. Once upon a time if we lost a key office location many of our colleagues would lose access to crucial systems. That doesn’t happen anymore as our systems and access are now cloud-based, allowing colleagues to work seamlessly from anywhere in the world.
How far does the cloud enable you to be ‘truly digital’ and what does this mean for business capabilities?
Cloud is not digital and digital is not cloud. Having a strong cloud-based infrastructure improves scalability, increases speed of deployment and removes infrastructure as a key dependency for change initiatives. We now focus on the needs of our members and students and the solutions that support them rather than focusing on infrastructure and data centres.
What’s next for ACCA in terms of your Digital Transformation journey?
We are completing the final stages of our Digital Transformation by deploying new flexible core systems. They make ACCA fitter and faster and allow us to better support business technologist colleagues who work alongside IT to develop data insights, improve customer experience and develop new products and services.
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