Accenture Interactive
Insight Enabled Interactions
Accenture Digital Diagnostics
Competitive Position
White Paper
Background and Accenture
Digital Diagnostics Advantage
As websites become
increasingly mission critical,
quality and compliance are
increasingly important and
challenging to maintain.
Accenture Digital Diagnostics’
High Performance Site
Analytics solution provides
fast, flexible, efficient and
detailed verification and
management of website
quality and compliance
with well over a hundred
actionable reports to
choose from right out of
the box. Accenture Digital
Diagnostics satisfies the
diverse and increasingly
dynamic requirements across
the enterprise with a single,
coherent and fully integrated
solution. Accenture Digital
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Diagnostics discovers and
validates traffic, advertising,
and survey tags. It also covers
privacy, accessibility, usability,
link integrity, searchability
metrics and search coverage
analytics, screening for
offensive content and
inappropriate links, and
provides custom compliance
criteria, implementation
standards, alerting and issue
management capabilities.
The Accenture Digital
Diagnostics Advantage
As websites become increasingly
large, complex and dynamic, and
as market conditions, regulations
and business priorities change,
Accenture Digital Diagnostics’
solution readily adapts with
changing needs. This is in sharp
contrast to conventional site
analytics approaches based on
relational database architectures
which require considerable time,
effort and investment to install,
configure, maintain and reconfigure
over time. Accenture Digital
Diagnostics’ unique architecture
and approach, built with a single
software code-base and an
advanced spatial data architecture
from the high-performance
computing industry, are
fundamentally different, providing
superior performance at a fraction
of the cost, time and effort, and
with reduced infrastructure costs
as compared with conventional
relational solutions.
Accenture Digital Diagnostics’
architectural differentiators
deliver a variety of tangible costperformance advantages for our
customers and partners. Among
these, we believe there are five
imperatives that are essential
to the successful management
and control of website quality
and compliance, and which have
profound implications for on-line
performance optimization. These
Accenture Digital Diagnostics
imperatives include:
1) Complete Site Discovery
2) Full Functional Verification
3) Multi- Attribute Analytics
4) Fast & Flexible Customization
5) Dynamic Reporting with Integrated Issue Management
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Complete Site
Discovery
Reliable quality and standards
management and control, whether
for verification of tags, privacy
protection, accessibility, usability,
links, or content, requires a
complete scan of the entire
website (or targeted portion
thereof), and not just an arbitrary
subset. Conventional website
scanners or spiders typically
capture between 40 to 60 percent
of a website.
In addition to its unique spatial
data and single software
code-base architectures,
Accenture Digital Diagnostics’
core competencies include
advanced dynamic site scanning.
Accenture Digital Diagnostics is
unique in its ability to execute
complex scripting along with
form submittal, authentication
and credentialed execution of
transaction sequences to allow
a full capture of web domains.
This has been made possible
through years of intensive
focus on the advancement of
its intelligent scanning agent,
coupled, with a collaboration
with SUN Microsystems to refine
JavaScript execution. Naturally,
site scanning solutions can only
validate what they can “see,”
and they don’t know what they
don’t know. Accenture Digital
Diagnostics is unmatched in its
ability to provide a complete view
of the web environment without
“blind spots”.
Full Functional
Verification
Accenture Digital Diagnostics’
tag verification solution not
only discovers the presence or
absence of tags (including any
and all traffic tags, advertising
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tags, survey tags and custom
tags), it executes tag scripts to
verify their proper operation. This
allows the solution to generate
and report on corresponding
script variables, and examine and
report on beacon parameters, and
supports a complete, accurate,
and reliable implementation.
Without full verification, errors
can (and often do) creep into
the implementation (including
syntax errors that cause script
execution failures, inaccurate or
inappropriate variables, and faulty
or missing beacon parameters).
This is relevant in any scriptrelated criteria, including traffic,
advertising, surveying or customer
verifications.
Multi-Attribute
Analytics
Because Accenture Digital
Diagnostics addresses the full
scope of quality and compliance
metrics with a coherent singlecode-base software architecture,
it provides unmatched speed,
flexibility and efficiency in
addressing multi-attribute criteria
or non-linear reporting. Examples
of linear analytics include only
reporting on the status of tags and
related variables; or only reporting
on privacy compliance; or only
reporting on third-party links,
etc. Accenture Digital Diagnostics
easily addresses more sophisticated
non-linear or multi-attribute
requirements. One example
of non-linear, multi-attribute
requirements: pages that have
forms to collect personal data,
which are identified through tag
variables as product pages, which
are non-secure and link
to third-party domains. These
criteria would require substantial
time to construct with a
fragmented solution.
Fast and Flexible
Customization
Accenture Digital Diagnostics’
Spatial Data Architecture provides
tremendous speed, efficiency and
flexibility to support on-the-fly
search and data interrogation,
ad-hoc reporting, and fast, flexible
report customization. Flexibility is
critical considering how quickly
the digital space, regulatory
requirements and business
priorities change.
Because Accenture Digital
Diagnostics captures all structural
data characterizing a website,
it can report on and provide
exception testing to any and all
relevant criteria. That includes
passive or active objects, content
or links, images or files, scripts,
forms, or documents. Accenture
Digital Diagnostics offers well
over a hundred standard reports
out of the box, and quickly
delivers custom criteria and report
packages tailored to the unique
requirements of its customers.
Accenture Digital Diagnostics’
Spatial Data Architecture retains
the relationships between
and among all of the data
elements, whereas relational
databases effectively sever
these relationships by dissecting
the data and storing it in a
series of tables. In order to
answer questions of the data,
disparate data elements and the
relationships between and among
them must be reconstituted
through table joins, compound
keys and composite queries. This
requires extensive knowledge of
both the website architecture and
database architecture, resulting in
costly and time-consuming efforts
to configure and reconfigure the
solution as requirements change.
Dynamic Reporting
with Integrated Issue
Management
Accenture Digital Diagnostics
solution provides fully integrated,
cascading reports from executive
dash boards with click-through
and drill-down all the way to
the offending objects. It includes
built-in issue management to
help prioritize, assign and track
remediation, with object-level
and aggregate issue management
capabilities. This allows companies
to readily establish and maintain
high quality implementation
standards.
It is Accenture Digital Diagnostics’
intention that integrated object
level and aggregate issue
management fully support core
issue management functions, while
stopping short of crossing the line
into more sophisticated workflow
management, bug tracking
and other similar applications.
Based on feedback from leading
customers, organizations which
require more advanced workflow
applications typically already
have such platforms, and
prefer not to introduce another
redundant platform into their
environment. Accenture Digital
Diagnostics supports integrated
XML-based downloading for
those organizations that make
use of workflow management
applications. That way, they can
readily incorporate identified
issues within existing solutions.
The issue management capabilities
supported within the solution are
designed to be simple and effective
for those organizations that do not
have established workflow systems
or that otherwise manage and
remediate issues natively.
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The Competitive Landscape
Accenture Digital Diagnostics competes against three principle types
of competitors: the status quo; open source or home-grown scanning
solutions; and conventional site analytics solutions.
The Status Quo
Historically, organizations have
relied largely on manually
intensive efforts to address
quality and compliance
management for their web
environments, approaches that
can be labor intensive and
costly, and produce inferior
results. Competitively, the
challenge is to further raise
awareness of the need for and
availability of the alternative
methods supported by
Accenture Digital Diagnostics’
solution. And we’ve made
progress. Accenture Digital
Diagnostics has established a
very large, loyal and rapidly
growing client base of leading
online organizations.
Open source or
Homegrown Scanning
Solutions
Accenture Digital Diagnostics
competes against homegrown
solutions that, in the absence
of advanced, enterprisegrade solutions, are a
cobbled-together series of
modules leveraging available
scanning technologies. These
homegrown solutions typically
access only 40 to 60 percent of
target websites. Worse, these
solutions are limited in scope,
addressing only a narrow
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subset of structural attributes
or quality and compliance
metrics. As a result, the
complexities and costs
associated with deploying,
maintaining, and managing
disparate solutions become
prohibitive as usage expands.
Conventional Site
Analytics Solutions
Conventional site analytics
vendors offer solutions
that mitigate many of the
disadvantages of open source
or homegrown solutions. They
may offer a more expansive
scope of analytics in a single
solution set, or in some
cases, a composite solution
consisting of various analytics
modules which collectively
offer a wider range of reports.
Such solutions may be
effective in relatively stable
environments where report
content is generally stable
and unchanging. However,
because such solutions rely
on conventional relational
database technologies, they
often suffer significant
penalties whenever quality
or compliance criteria and
related reports are adapted
for the reasons noted above.
And the use of fractional or
modular code-bases inhibit the
flexibility required to support
efficient multivariate analytics
whiles likely increasing the
costs and time required for
report customization and
ongoing development and
maintenance. Because of these
fundamental architectural
differences, Accenture Digital
Diagnostics is able to offer
significant cost -performance
advantage over such solutions.
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About Accenture
Accenture is a global management
consulting, technology services
and outsourcing company, with
approximately 204,000 people serving
clients in more than 120 countries.
Combining unparalleled experience,
comprehensive capabilities across
all industries and business functions,
and extensive research on the world’s
most successful companies, Accenture
collaborates with clients to help them
become high-performance businesses
and governments. The company
generated net revenues of US$21.6
billion for the fiscal year ended
Aug. 31, 2010. Its home page is
www.accenture.com.