Hunter is the technology services company's shared services director, a job he moved into a couple of weeks ago from his previous role as CIO.
-We've taken a very disciplined approach to the delivery of technology [within the company]," said Hunter.
He explained that Accenture Australia had looked at technology deployment from a managed services perspective. -I think it's very important to be able to talk to the business in business terms--instead of talking raw technologies to my management it's 'what products do we offer to the business', 'what are service levels around those products', and 'what's the cost to deliver that combination'."
Hunter said it was all wrapped around cost transparency. -I think it's paramount that the business understands what they get for the money," he said. -If they don't understand...then they'd see technology as being a cost centre," he said.
As part of his new role, Hunter will be working on an implementation which aims to bring together the various groups within Accenture Australia's business. This includes areas such as finance, technology services, facilities and services. He described it as a very large project, with about eight or nine staff from its client-facing team working with him to bring in the organisational design and change skills needed.
-Technology is seen as the underlying enabler--so we're moving to more self-service channels." One example Hunter used was an employee portal it's setting up. This means that if a staff member needs to talk about an issue, such as HR or technology, their first port of call would be this electronic medium, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Hunter said.
His group has also had an outside organisation conduct benchmarking, looking at what his team delivers, producing an assessment of what it cost the group to deliver these services versus what it would cost if the same service was provided by an external company.
Hunter said it found it was very good on best practice in some areas. Where it wasn't, it designed projects to understand why the group was more costly than the market, and to work out ways to reduce the cost of delivery.
From a staff management perspective, Hunter has about 120 staff reporting to him. He said he preferred as flat a management structure as possible. -I want to have the least number of layers between myself and the person who's actually hands-on on the ground delivering the service," he said.
-I run very much an open management style--there's no sacred cows or hierarchy people have to adhere to--I like to create an environment where people are stretched, they're challenged."
Hunter said he liked staff he worked with to be given the opportunity to take on ownership of areas they worked in. -I think a person or a team needs to feel that they are key stakeholder," he said.
Increasingly, Hunter said his new role would be about dealing with the company's senior partners, looking to take the skills it used internally to set up a model whereby it could start to supply those sorts of services to its clients as market facing offerings.
This, for instance, might be in an area such as production hosting. Accenture Australia internally has hosting servers with live applications on them, for areas such as HR systems or accounts payable. The idea would be to try and take these skills and apply them to client opportunities in order to enable the company to take on that sort of work externally.
And what technology areas is Hunter keeping his eye on at the moment?
He said he was having a look at Microsoft XP. -It's more question of when, not if, we go with that," he said. -[I] feel that some of the .NET stuff embedded in the product is going the direction we want to take the business."
Hunter is also keeping his eye on EAI, which he said could provide the means to more seamlessly merge its different data sources together to allow it to move into a true datawarehousing environment, and also fitting in with its vision of self-service.
Another view he has of the future is a time when each person has an electronic profile which could allow them to log onto a self-service site, where they'd be pushed all the information they needed for their role.
Hunter said he was also continuing to pursue wireless. Accenture Australia currently has wireless installations, and Hunter said he is keeping an eye on the business applications of wireless technologies.
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