Comment by curiousllama
4 years ago
Tech consulting, of the type Accenture does, is so weird. I once got staffed on a multimillion dollar project to "predict general macroeconomic activity."
The story described in this article just sounds so classic. I'm consistently surprised that more consultants don't get sued.
My only interaction with Accenture was years ago. They air-dropped like 100 recent grads and few account managers to build a very complex system like 1000 monkeys at 1000 typewriters. And I know for a fact they used underhanded techniques to maintain their foothold at the expense of the quality of the product.
I'd be fascinated to know if they still do this. That was the Accenture model in the 80s and 90s, but then they went hard for outsourcing.
Maybe TCS outbid them on the low end and they're pivoting back to inshore
I know someone who's a low-level manager there, most of her team is in India. You tend to get the onshore team for show for the first few weeks and then they shift you onto the cheaper team.
What kind of underhanded techniques?
There was a production issue that was somewhere between the system they built and the one I was working on. A "mole" on their team who preferred the company of our team relayed to us that the Accenture manager told their team not to help debug the issue and to let us flounder so the project sponsors would think they needed them.
Mind you, this was over ten years ago.
Accenture outsourced the IT depts of major companies in the 90s, as such they are embedded in their non IT business units and can intercept sales of one off projects.
Those companies who thought IT was an annoying cost with nerdy ugly employees rather than the core efficiency driver of their business then became utterly dependent on Accenture and at best could swap them for either equivalent junk from IBM or Deloitte or went further down the toilet with TCS.
What's notable is the lawsuit, Accenture will usually eat money for a failed project in hopes of keeping Future project jectd and general reputation.
Hertz must be terminating the overall relationship.