Specsavers has chosen Accenture to help manage its technology as the optician chain prepares for a digital future.
“Providing our customers with a great experience is at the heart of everything we do,” says Phil Pavitt, global CIO of Specsavers. “We want to deliver a superior service and make it easy for people to interact with us. By delivering cost savings and efficiencies, Accenture will help us provide our customers with an enhanced experience.”
Under the terms of the five-year agreement, Accenture will support Specsavers’ applications and event monitoring to manage the performance of all of Specsavers’ business transactions. The agreement is designed to help Specsavers reduce operating costs, improve speed to market, and increase the quality of its products and services.
Accenture, in a press statement, says it will provide Specsavers with application maintenance, development, testing and infrastructure monitoring services across its IT landscape in 10 countries: New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.
To compete based on agility and speed, companies need to take these important steps towards faster, flexible and more-liquid applications to support dynamic business needs.
“The goal of the project—which includes helping Specsavers consolidate its existing technology landscape and support the useful life of legacy applications—is to provide Specsavers with a more-manageable application portfolio, with decreased risk and enhanced business services, and enable the company to focus on its goal of becoming a digital business,” says Accenture.
Matt Prebble, managing director of Accenture’s Retail practice in the United Kingdom and Ireland, states: “Consumers expect to be able to buy seamlessly from a retailer across any channel and at any time. We look forward to helping Specsavers reduce application and technology deployment times by providing continuous service improvement and enabling them to accelerate their move to digitise their business.”
Read more: 'Let’s face it, most organisations do not actively invest in the digital literacy of their teams'
“A strong IT infrastructure is critical to becoming digital, and businesses can no longer rely on all of the applications they once did,” adds Emma McGuigan, senior managing director in Accenture Technology in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
“To compete based on agility and speed, companies need to take these important steps towards faster, flexible and more-liquid applications to support dynamic business needs. Specsavers’ investment in its applications and infrastructure will help the company prepare for its future, support revenue growth and defend its market position. In addition, it paves the way to create new opportunities to serve their customers better.”
Related: Rising to the digital challenge? Think bimodal
Send news tips and comments to divina_paredes@idg.co.nz
Read more: The top trends that will shape the most in-demand ICT skills for 2016
Follow Divina Paredes on Twitter: @divinap
Click here to read digital editions of CIO New Zealand
Sign up for CIO newsletters for regular updates on CIO news, views and events.
Read more: 90% of large companies will have CDOs by 2019: Gartner
Join the CIO New Zealand group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, CDOs, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.
Join the CIO New Zealand group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.