Accenture and MIT Gain in India via Custom Education Program

Accenture is facing a tremendous challenge—hiring tens of thousands of talented new staff members fast, and in India alone the global management consulting and IT firm is experiencing record growth. The company is finding a strong ally in its five-year relationship with MIT Professional Education and the collaboration with the Accenture Solutions Delivery Academy (ASDA). As part of the collaboration, Accenture is drawing on the MIT faculty coming to lecture at company locations to reach out to top Indian universities—and thus boosting its recruitment opportunities.

Accenture’s ability to plan and execute large-scale training is evident in ASDA. More than 30,000 employees in 40 countries have participated in the information technology training and certification program, co-developed with MIT, since 2007. MIT faculty work with the company to develop curriculum and exams leading to certification in more than a dozen topics such as software engineering fundamentals and application testing. These faculty members also deliver lectures at Accenture sites worldwide and a growing video library makes these talks available online to employees.

In 2010, MIT Professor John R. Williams, director of the MIT Geospatial Data Center, was scheduled to give a lecture on Smart Grid Technology to Accenture staff in Mumbai, India. The local recruiting team asked if he could also speak to students and potential recruits at K.J. Somaiya University which is also in Mumbai. Professor Williams delivered that talk to more than 500 students and faculty, and was extremely well received.

Impact of the University Talks

“As part of our collaboration, what Professor Williams did had a huge impact on Accenture’s ability to recruit top people from the university,” says Professional Education Associate Director Dawna Levenson ’83, SM ’84, who is responsible for the Accenture program. “The number of people interested in working for Accenture shot up.” Based on this experience, Accenture wants to build relationships with more of India’s top universities with the help of MIT. Students benefit even if they do not take jobs at Accenture. They hear about new research from the world’s leading technology university and that can help them advance their own thinking about applications for India.

In January, Williams and his colleague, Abel Sanchez SM ’98, PhD ’03, executive director of the MIT Geospatial Data Center, traveled to India on separate tours to deliver talks at Accenture sites and five universities. The subject was their joint work on a global tracking system using RFID tags, mobile tracking, and other technologies. The talks, titled the “4Ws: What, Where, When, Why,” described their system, which allows individual items to be tagged at a production center, then tracked to point of sale—and beyond. Drug counterfeiting, for example is a multi-billion dollar industry that may account for some 40 percent of medications sold worldwide. Their system could identify fraudulent and potentially dangerous drugs and, in the case of legitimate drug recalls, patients could be located quickly.

The MIT faculty lecture topics are sophisticated but are pertinent to India’s development, says Sanchez. “I had one student in India say to me, these ideas are great but we are a poor country and we don’t have that kind of infrastructure. I said think about a mobile platform for services and applications—India could outpace anybody because cell phone service is cheap and they are adding some 10 million devices a month.”

The Accenture staff and Indian faculty and students are impressive, Williams and Sanchez agree. MIT co- developed certificate programs and lectures can help Accenture attract and retain top employees. In India in particular, with large numbers of English speaking university graduates and global companies seeking top employees, MIT can provide an edge.

Rajan Vaish, an associate software engineer at Accenture Technology Labs in Bangalore, blogged about William’s 4Ws talk—and the opportunity to talk to the MIT professor after the lecture. “With my related work during One Laptop per Child and Open StreetMap Foundation, I could connect his related research with my experience,” wrote Vaish, “we also discussed…my application…which was featured in the MIT TR [Technology Review] April ’10 issue.”

Lessons on a Large Scale

“It’s been a great education for us at MIT,” says Williams. “We have learned a lot about their large scale systems. Accenture has very good delivery methods—they have learned to develop processes and collect feedback.” Clear software development protocols, for example, help new employees become productive quickly and facilitate Accenture’s practice of bidding out parts of large projects to offices in India, China, and Argentina and then integrating the whole. The scale of Accenture’s productivity struck Sanchez: “They write about a million lines of code a day and only NASA has ever written that much. It’s unbelievable.”

Williams says the MIT-Accenture relationship benefits his work and it doesn’t take a lot of time. “I spend a week about twice year and it is an inspiration thing. India has tremendous potential—the scale of business is expanding. They have first-tier cities like Bangalore and Mumbai expanding rapidly and now they are moving jobs out to second-tier cities. With IT, you can do that easily. India has a lot of problems but it is an awakening giant.”

What’s next for Williams and Sanchez? They are working on a collaborative agreement with Amity University in New Delhi to conduct research on cyber security issues. And Sanchez is working on two other geospatial projects that may be tested in India. His Food Provenance project, which tracks food from the grower to the purchaser, could help Indian farmers and customers, and an oral rehydration project, which uses a cell phone app to match sick children and nearby rehydration supplies, may be tested in India.