Nokia hands Accenture its hot potato

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One of Nokia’s biggest challenges is to maintain its home-grown Symbian operating system, while simultaneously producing attractive Windows-run smartphones under its brand-new partnership with Microsoft. Exactly how that would be done was one of the questions I couldn’t yet answer in my recent two-part analysis of Nokia’s future.

It turns out the challenge will be met, in part, by offloading it onto Accenture. On Wednesday, Nokia announced that 3,000 staff – mainly Symbian software engineers – would transfer to the consultancy (an additional 4,000 jobs will be lost across Nokia).

I don’t know what the Finnish for “hot potato” is, but Accenture has been handed one.

Many of the 3,000 jobs moving to the consulting group are likely to be currently located in Finland. Many Nokians think of software as the soul of the company and many Finns think of Nokia as the soul of Finnish industry.

Symbian engineers were understandably the most nervous about the Microsoft deal when it was announced in February. As Jo Harlow, Nokia’s executive vice president for smart devices, told me last month, before these latest developments:

For people who have spent most of their Nokia career working on Symbian, the strategy is a difficult decision for them, because their pride…. has all been in the Symbian space. There’s intellectual momentum behind our strategy decision and I think the emotional commitment is building – it’s slightly behind the intellectual decision, which I think is human nature.

Accenture says that over time, it “will seek opportunities to retrain and redeploy transitioned employees” so that they aren’t stranded when Symbian comes to the end of its natural life, probably sometime in 2012. But maintaining the “emotional commitment” of Nokia veterans during that period – when some 150m Symbian smartphones still need to be sold – remains a delicate task.

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