Three ways Accenture is cheating on its clients, just like Tiger Woods

Accenture recently announced that it cancels its sponsorship of Tiger Woods after the tragic infidelity scandal. Ironically, it is more fitting than ever for Accenture to be associated with Tiger Woods with these new facts on the table…

It turns out Tiger Woods has systematically cheated on his wife, ever since before the wedding, and even on his own bachelor party. It has been a repeated behavior because there have been 14 women identified as his mistresses, so far, many of whom claim they had sex with Tiger on numerous occasions.

This is representative of Accenture which also cheats. For a consulting firm, like Accenture, infidelity can have multiple meanings. Your client can be compared to a “wife”. And cheating, or going behind the back of your client, can be done in several ways:

1. Overcharging

Anyone who has worked in Accenture has seen the overcharging that is taking place on almost all client projects. This normally happens in any of a number of ways. The best, from Accenture’s perspective (though not its employees’ perspective) is to simply over-analyze the clients “problems”. Collecting endless data on a client’s IT systems, “blue-printing” processes, or management practices can take 3-4 months of consulting and generally renders little or no value to the client.

It is however, difficult for even the most carefully controlling clients to discover this kind of “fraud”, and even if they did realize Accenture “cheated” when the project is over, they have already paid for it. By then it is very difficult to do anything about it, as it is normally agreed what to do in Accenture’s contracts. Accenture can simply say “well, it is too bad it turned out useless, that discretionary IT spend analysis we did, but it was agreed in our contract, signed by you.”

Tiger who must have known what he was doing was morally very wrong. Of course, Accenture who does these analyses often, does know very well when these analyses are not needed, which makes it morally doubtful.

With the work pressure put on managers within Accenture some of them add a few hours to the invoice that were never delivered. The firm is infamous for its negative work pressure which burns out many of its employees.

Another creative way Accenture has of overcharging is to have consultants present in the client office but working on something else, for example having them work on a proposal for the next client, who might be a competitor. Then the current client is billed for the time worked on the proposal. This tactic has its advantage that the client can actually see the consultant working hard, typing away on his keyboard.

Junior consultants, straight out of university, are encouraged to think creatively to find ways to overcharge the clients. Accenture Senior Executives, continuously pressure employees lower down in the hierarchy to try to either stay on longer on their projects than initially planned or find more work to do for the client than was not initially agreed upon.

2. Harmful recommendations

Another way for Accenture to cheat its clients is to give them bad recommendations. Let’s look into this. When Accenture is hired to choose an IT system vendor (for ERP, CRM, HRM, etc) they often do an extensive analysis including data collection like for example employee attitude towards current systems. There are two strong incentives for Accenture to give “bad” recommendations in terms of what system to choose to implement.

First, some IT system vendors give higher kick-back fees to Accenture than others. SAP is known for giving higher commission to consulting firms who sell one of their systems than Microsoft or PeopleSoft do, for example.

The second incentive is the number of consulting man-days needed to implement the system. Of course, Accenture charges thousands of dollars per day when implementing a system. The actual difference between SAP and another system can be in the range of USD 5 million for a mid-sized company with two or three divisions. That is profit to Accenture and loss to the client. And a pretty good reason for Accenture to recommend one system over another.

Curiously, the official cost estimation (number of man-days to be spent on an implementation) made by Accenture for these IT System often come from nothing else than the “professional opinion” of a Senior Manager or a Senior Executive at Accenture. Quite different from the detailed data collection made for other, less relevant information, which is purely done to charge many consulting man-days (as already mentioned).

So, recipe for billing is to spend lots of days analyzing employee attitudes towards IT systems, not so much efforts on keeping costs down for the client of their next implementation project.

3. Spreading confidential information

Some clients appreciate the “best practices” they are taught by Accenture, for example, a certain process in a bank. What they don’t realize is that that “best practice” comes from the last bank who hired Accenture. And that their own competitive advantage will soon be documented in Accenture’s so called Knowledge Exchange (or “KX”) on Accenture’s intranet.

The Knowledge Exchange of Accenture is – ironically – an IT mess. There is little categorization and little classification based on confidentiality. Literally any of the almost 200.000 Accenture employees can at anytime go in and download the former clients’ business information. Attrition is high in Accenture – twice as many people leave Accenture each year compared to other consulting firms, which is already twice as many as in “industry” companies – and what many of these employees do just before leaving is to download all information useful in their next job. The next job is often a competitor to the client.

Just like Tiger Woods might have whispered fantasies or telling a little story of what he did in bed with the previous mistress to the next one, Accenture is whispering its clients’ secrets to the next potential client. Often already in the proposal stage.

Other similarities of Tiger Woods and Accenture

When the scandal had been known for a few days, Accenture posted an ad showing Tiger Woods and the text “It is what you do next that counts”. Basically what Accenture is saying, is “we are in fact the good guys, don’t associate us with cheating, it’s all Tiger’s fault”. Tiger Woods tried to get sympathies in a similar way by stating that he would take an “indefinite break from Golf”. Read: “I leave now until you beg me to come back”. Both Accenture and Tiger Woods try to manipulate to become the martyr instead of the cheater.

There are some differences between Accenture and Tiger Woods

It’s important to laugh at tragedy sometimes; here is some food for thought on differences between Tiger Woods and Accenture:

• While Tiger Woods shags beautiful ladies, the shagging in Accenture is (mainly male) employees being fucked in the ass by their bosses. 18 hours per day of data crunching anyone?

• Working for Tiger Woods (read: being his own boss) makes it possible to “fill” 15 beautiful ladies, while working for Accenture gives you 15 hour work days of filling Excel data sheets.

• While Tiger Woods had to keep secrets to keep his earnings, Accenture keeps their earnings by spreading secrets. (Just that they call it “best practices”.)

Go on Accenture, be a Tiger

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References:

Press release from Accenture on terminating the sponsorship with Tiger Woods

CNN on the Tiger Woods cheating scandal

New York Times on the Tiger Woods cheating scandal

TMZ on the Tiger Woods cheating scandal

Examiner.com - Accenture, Tiger Woods are done - former Arthur Anderson consulting firm drops Tiger Woods (video)

Arthur Andersen scandal – Accenture’s (former Andersen consulting) old sister unit with dubious ethics

The New Yorker, Branded as a cheat, article by James Surowiecki

Accenture fails to be a Tiger, an analysis of Accenture’s decision to drop Tiger Woods

Humor:

How Assenture’s CEO reacted to the news of Tiger’s Woods cheating