Armanino is known for being innovative — it’s part of who we are and a cornerstone of our thinking and actions. It’s also something we focus on when we interact with clients and help them overcome challenges. But how does innovation function within the firm? How have we empowered our people to innovate, and what makes us different from our peers?
Let’s take an inside look at Armanino’s two-part approach to innovation.
First, everyone in the firm can innovate. In fact, we encourage it! As with most innovation programs, our starting point is listening to our customers and understanding their pain points, unmet needs, emerging market opportunities and key challenges standing in the way of growth. Our people are constantly bringing new ideas to the table thanks to strong client relationships and a focus on client needs, and this firmwide passion for connecting with clients and solving problems fuels our innovation engine.
We’re relentless in our drive to deliver more value for clients. Over the years, we’ve constantly pushed ourselves to find new ways to improve our service offerings, industry solutions and approach to engagements. It’s through collaboration and innovation that we’ve been able to do more and deliver more for our clients as we’ve approached challenges with curiosity, open minds and creative thinking.
We walk the walk and talk the talk by investing in innovation and working with clients to turn ideas into reality. In addition to our firmwide approach to innovation, however, we have a secret ingredient that sets us apart…
While some accounting and consulting firms have innovation committees or state their overall dedication to innovation, we chose a different path to ensure innovation is more than a promise.
Armanino has a dedicated innovation engine within the firm, a nimble team of innovators called Ideaticians. For them, innovation is a full-time job. They are the catalysts for innovation, providing expertise in ideation, design thinking, business analysis and agile product development. Our Ideaticians have implemented a rigorous innovation process that emphasizes speed to market, customer feedback and iterative product development. They believe in a “fail fast or go big” approach, with our clients playing a key role every step of the way.
Ideaticians are the “how” behind our innovation, as they deliver a new generation of proprietary solutions leveraging data analytics and the latest and greatest technology.
It’s important to note that our Ideaticians don’t work alone. They routinely spur innovation within Armanino by meeting with our internal teams and hosting ideation sessions to capture feedback, ideas and possibilities that can become something greater. Sometimes the ideas we hear from the field and our direct work with clients need specific technical expertise, software development or a few more rounds of thinking and design to become a reality.
In their gatherings with internal teams, Ideaticians examine Armanino’s current offerings and identify opportunities to do things in a new or better way. They hear about client concerns and challenges and think about ways we can harness information and address the challenges of not only an individual organization but also, sometimes, an entire industry.
Armed with technical expertise and design thinking, Ideaticians craft bespoke solutions for our firm and our clients. The result is the kind of magic where ideas become a reality.
Taking ideas from “what if?” to useful solutions requires our Ideaticians to be expert idea generators and listeners who are masters at their craft. They apply scientific approaches and proven methodologies to their development process, whether it’s in creating a tool that allows a client to benchmark themselves against the rest of their industry or one that will enable taxes to be prepared more quickly, shaving time off processes with artificial intelligence.
Ideaticians have impacted our processes in core service areas like tax and audit. Our clients feel the effects in the form of real-time data that helps them drive better decision-making for their businesses or address risk. Ideaticians have also helped us improve our own processes, making us nimbler and more efficient — as well as smarter — when it comes to analyzing data and assisting clients in putting the information to work.
Most of all, the things our Ideaticians create are unique to Armanino and represent our commitment to a singular client experience. We want clients to feel the value of our Ideaticians’ knowledge and creativity; it’s one way we can redefine what’s possible for them in their industries.
