Good ideas can come from anywhere, especially when informed by real world experience, a fact that some firms are leveraging to source new solutions from field staff, which serves to rapidly expand their available tools and upskill their professionals.
Processing Content
While the specific approach varies from firm to firm, those that empower staff accountants to take an active role in technology development report they have found new versatility and flexibility against the practical client engagement challenges, as well as increased engagement and enthusiasm.
However, much like any other project or initiative, success is not just a matter of throwing together a program and calling it a day. Regardless of how someone decides to pursue it, taking a deliberate approach is essential to ensuring the effort does not become a monumental waste of time and money. While different firms do so in different ways, they all stressed the importance of intentionality, oversight and a willingness to recognize when something’s not working.
Accounting Today will be looking at how accountants are being empowered to contribute new solutions at three different firms. Today we will examine the decentralized approach at Top 20 firm Armanino.
Armanino
Rather than base it in a central group that people join from various parts of the organization, Armanino has a decentralized structure where each business unit has its own dedicated AI expert who looks at the tools and solutions people are building for their own individual workstreams and determines which ones might be scaled up for use division- or even firm-wide.
While they had once worked through a single firm-wide group, they found there were challenges in managing the needs and priorities of so many different business units, and last year shifted to the more decentralized structure they use today, according to Carmel Wynkoop, partner-in-charge of AI, analytics and automation at Armanino. Members of this group collaborate closely with business unit leaders to figure out use cases, implementations and processes. She said that while staff can be very excited about developing new solutions, often made with AI, they’re accountants, not professional software engineers, and generally have other responsibilities besides app development. Even if they had the technical ability, they may not necessarily be interested in the long-term maintenance to keep their solutions safe and functional enough for division- or firm-wide use.
Wynkoop raised an example of an auditor, “Susie,” who built a tool that generates board meeting summaries. It works very well to the point where the person sitting next to her asks if he could use it too. And then a third person and a fourth and “pretty soon you’ve got 30 people using this tool. And no controls.” If the solution starts to drift or otherwise stops working how it should as more people use it, people ask Susie, who made the tool, to fix it.
“Susie says, ‘Listen, I’m busy with a different thing.’ You don’t want Susie to have to manage that. That’s what this innovation program is for and why you want to move it up for them to manage because they also have the tools and capabilities to monitor and manage and look at the background and data and infrastructure and that whole setup, where Susie does not. Susie’s not a Python developer. She just had a good idea and now she’s able to execute that AI because she’s got AI capabilities at her fingertips,” she said.
This process serves to not only guide development in the individual business unit but to contextualize it within the entire firm. Wynkoop said that, before Armanino formalized its program, you would see many people doing the same thing unaware of each other, which would produce multiple copies of the same kind of solution that each required its own maintenance and support. This would largely cancel out any efficiency gain from the apps themselves.
“Everybody was talking about ‘how do we increase our sales.’ We had 17 people building sales agents. I don’t need 17 people doing that, all building the same thing,” she said.
This isn’t just about using time wisely, but keeping costs low too. Cloud hosting costs money, even more so if what you’re hosting is being used by a lot of people. As all these AI tools are hosted in the cloud, which Armanino pays to use, economizing on what ultimately gets made and distributed is an important budget priority. Wynkoop said the group has made a cloud spend analysis tool to track all this.
“We’ve actually built a cloud spend analysis tool that can hook up and tell you what you’re spending on cloud services, which is really great. We plugged it in for Armanino, and we were able to save $700,000 because we were able to turn off the things that people weren’t using. We now offer that to our clients,” she said.
This all feeds into one of the most important parts of programs of this kind to Wynkoop: governance. While, on the one hand, you want to encourage creativity and experimentation, on the other hand you also need to make sure whatever is produced won’t be a cybersecurity vulnerability or major cost center.
“You have to have a governance framework that you can work in and say, ‘OK, we know that this is happening. So, who’s building what? How do we know what they’re building? What are we looking at here?’ And so as you think about rolling something like this out, it’s [about] putting some guardrails in place, and a policy and a process,” she said.
Staff are empowered to use AI tools to create their own solutions, but she said this comes with a responsibility to let the firm know what they’re doing so experts can consider how it impacts the organization, then process it to fit security and quality standards, and finally take ownership of the maintenance and upkeep of the solution.
“Typically, I think of this as an IT role,” she said.
Education and training are also an important component, as she said one cannot just assume everyone is at the same stage of knowledge and everyone will get the same things out of what this program produces. Indeed, different roles will have different levels of expertise, comfort and experience with using, and making, AI tools. Staff need to understand the tools they’re using, as well as have a place to experiment. “Fail fast, move on, but if you try stuff, it won’t break anything.”
This, she said, serves to train them in the principles she discussed above, which makes it easier when it comes time to scale up their solution. Education feeds innovation, which feeds governance. “That education piece then leads into the innovation piece that then leads into the governance piece. We think about those three kinds of things not as independent things, but as things that work together. You continue to get the innovation that you want, but you can have the governance around ensuring that everybody’s playing in a safe spot, and that we still have some level of control and reliability on the tools that we’re giving folks,” she said.
This is a reflection of the broader approach Armanino takes to citizen innovation. Much as education, innovation and governance are connected, the program itself is connected to wider firm strategy. Wynkoop recommended those seeking to implement a similar initiative take this same kind of organization-wide approach.
“We’re looking at this holistically, and we’re thinking about this from a strategic initiative perspective. We believe that AI is going to fundamentally change the way that we work, and we want our people to be enabled, and we want to empower them to do that,” she said.
This was the second in a three-part series. Join us tomorrow for our final part, where we look at how Top 10 firm Grant Thornton does things.
Credit: Source link
