Penelope Prett led major tech and cultural transformations as Accenture’s CIO, championing agility and cloud migration, and prioritizing employee input to shape new systems.
Julie Colwell
Principal Strategist
Workday
For more than 30 years, Penelope Prett has had a front-row seat to the relentless pace of technological change at Accenture. It’s a tenure that has seen computing evolve from the first mouse-based graphical interfaces to the democratized power of generative artificial intelligence (AI).
But for Prett, technology isn’t just about systems and code, it’s about empowering people, fostering joy, and reinventing how work gets done. Her journey is a masterclass in change leadership, demonstrating how curiosity and courage can transform not just a company’s processes, but its entire culture.
One lesson crystallizes her entire experience. “Be willing to try anything,” Prett says. “One of the great things about Accenture is it's never the same company from year to year, which gives us a unique opportunity to try new things.”
This mindset has been the driving force behind some of Accenture’s most significant internal transformations, where Prett has championed change by inspiring people to see new technology not as a threat, but as a tool for their own empowerment.
“Be willing to try anything. One of the great things about Accenture is it's never the same company from year to year, which gives us a unique opportunity to try new things.”
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Prett became Accenture’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) in 2019, and like others before her, she took on the role as part of a rotational leadership model. In her other positions, Prett had executed many complex projects, but the CIO chair was the first time she had to thread “each of those project pearls onto a single string, and then wear the necklace for four straight years.”
Over those four years, she guided one of the largest enterprises in the world through rapid change, ensuring Accenture’s own technology capabilities mirrored the advice it gave to clients. “Our IT organization is the first and best living credential of what we talk to our clients about— applying technology to transform their businesses.”
This perspective was critical when she led a massive internal transformation of Accenture’s IT shop. At the time, the department operated on a schedule of two major releases a year, which included a two-month code freeze before each one.
The rigid process was incompatible with the company's new CEO, Julie Sweet, who was making weekly business decisions. The technology stack didn't align with the leader's strategy.
“Our IT organization is the first and best living credential of what we talk to our clients about—applying technology to transform their businesses.”
Prett spearheaded the difficult shift to a more nimble and agile footing—one where the team could pivot quickly and test new ideas. “If something didn’t work, we threw it out and tried something else.”
It was a profound cultural and operational change that ultimately built a more resilient and responsive organization. “We're always ready now,” she says of the company’s current state. “We know how to do it. We can respond and move fast.”
During her tenure, she led Accenture’s migration to the cloud, bringing about 95 percent of operations onto public cloud platforms.
Nowhere was Prett’s focus on the human side of technology more evident than when she oversaw Accenture’s global deployment of Workday for over 700,000 employees in 120 countries.
The project had an ambitious goal to give every employee a transparent, self-directed career experience. Prett knew that even the most powerful platform would fail if people didn’t use it. The key was getting buy-in from the very beginning.
Instead of having leaders dictate employee skills from the top down, Prett’s team took a revolutionary approach. “We asked every employee to think about what skills they had, and we told them, when we load this system, we're going to load what you tell us,” she explains. It was a direct invitation for employees to co-create their own professional identities within the company.
The result was extraordinary. “We had an overwhelming response, and we got great data,” Prett recalls. With people personally invested in the platform, the rollout became the single smoothest install Accenture has ever done.
“We asked every employee to think about what skills they had, and we told them, when we load this system, we're going to load what you tell us.”
After her four-year tenure as Accenture’s CIO, Prett moved into the role of Global Lead of Accenture’s Workday Business Group, taking charge of one of the world’s largest enterprise-ERP practices. With her CIO experience, she stepped into this new role ready to guide clients in harnessing the very transformation she led internally.
Today, Prett is focused on solving the next great challenge, managing an integrated workforce of people and machines. She notes that companies are often siloed. The CIO manages technology and the CHRO manages people, but no one is managing the combined output. “What we lack is the ability to manage an integrated workforce. The human plus the machine component,” she says.
To solve this, Accenture is turning to external innovation and using AI to manage this hybrid workforce. The goal is to give a business owner the ability to see how their department is performing based on the combined efforts of both humans and machines, and then adjust the balance to achieve a specific outcome.
“It’s exciting to see new capabilities in human-machine collaboration. We’re now able to create metrics that map to a common business outcome and rally our entire workforce to achieve it,” she says.
“It’s exciting to see new capabilities in human-machine collaboration. We’re now able to create metrics that map to a common business outcome and rally our entire workforce to achieve it.”
Underpinning all of Prett’s professional achievements is a deeply personal philosophy shaped by a battle with cancer in her 30s. “The one lesson I took away from that is that every day is a precious thing, and you better use it that way,” she shares. This conviction is why she encourages everyone to find what brings them joy and purpose.
It’s a philosophy she puts into practice as a leader, finding immense satisfaction in identifying people with untapped potential and nudging them into roles where they can thrive. As she looks to the future, Prett is unabashedly optimistic.
She believes that as people move past their fear of technology, they will unlock unprecedented innovation. “When they're able to collaborate with a glad heart and do good things,” she says, “there is literally no limit to the amount of human innovation that can be brought to the table.”
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