Monday 3rd Dec, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Consulting firms are in a dilemma about how to organise their data & analytics capabilities most effectively: Should they have a stand-alone business unit, or should this expertise be embedded right across the organisation? The former has the advantage of signalling to clients that it’s an area of investment for the firm concerned, but the latter will help the firm differentiate itself on a tactical basis, by using evidence-based insights in proposals and in all its consulting work.
But this debate isn’t confined to consultants: It’s mirrored in their clients too. Earlier this year our Intelligent Analytics report featured several case studies from clients. “We're a small central team,” said the head of analytics in a French insurance company. “Up until a year ago, we reported to the CIO, but now we're part of the marketing and digital innovation function team.” And moving out of the IT function is only part of the organisational shift going on: There’s also pressure to take a more integrated approach to the way analytics work is carried out.
Monday 12th Nov, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Our recent report on how the consulting delivery model could change from being an often uncomfortable and suboptimal mix of advice and implementation to a combination of deep expertise, smart software, and proprietary data (something we’ve reluctantly—in the absence of anything better—termed “managed services”) has triggered more conversations with more firms than anything else we’ve written this year. So what have we learnt?
Monday 22nd Oct, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Many years ago, I took part in a panel debate about consulting at London Business School. An hour or so into the discussion, a tentative hand went up in the audience. “I’m sorry,” the student said. “This is all very interesting, but I still don’t understand what consulting is.”
It’s a question that’s being asked again today, but this time behind the closed doors of senior partners’ offices. For consulting firms, contemplating their strategy, how they answer this question will determine their future success.
On one side, there are people who see consulting work as a cerebral activity, done by smart, creative people working with smart, creative clients, which helps organisations adopt and adapt best practice and innovative ideas, all in pursuit of better performance. This is, of course, the classic view of consulting—one that would be recognised by the original James O. McKinsey back in the 1930s and one that was nurtured by his illustrious successor, Marvin Bower, who ran McKinsey from 1950 to 1967 and remained a highly influential figure into the 1990s.
Tuesday 16th Oct, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
It sounds as though it should be a movie, a grim account of an unravelling dystopia. And, for some consultants, that’s probably exactly what it feels like.
The origins of the consulting firm, as an institution of collective activity, lie in fragmentation. Individual experts, working autonomously, built up small teams of more junior people around them who could leverage the partner’s expertise across a number of projects. But it was a hunter-gatherer model that allowed little opportunity for investment: Every expert-team combination was constantly on the move, either working on existing projects or looking for new ones. With the arrival of larger, longer projects, often centred around technology, these small teams needed to start to work together. The key experts, accustomed to independence, found themselves part of an emerging hierarchy—and they weren’t happy. To solve the issue and salve their egos, they came up with the partnership structure.
Tuesday 2nd Oct, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
My husband, a mild-mannered but physically imposing man, once ripped up an IKEA catalogue in front of the store’s checkout assistant.
To be fair, we’d been waiting in the queue for two hours, having inadvertently visited the store on a morning when it started a major sale, but in our defence I’d plead that only a small number of the checkouts were manned, and that it was a long time since we’d had breakfast. We’d done the usual things—eyeing up the shelves of lingonberry jam, discussing whether that pot plant was just what was needed for the study, wondering why Swedish is the language it is. But two hours was still two hours, and by the time we started to load our heavy boxes on to a conveyor belt clearly designed for professional weightlifters, my husband had clearly had enough. “There’s no way we’re ever going to shop in Ikea again*,” he said, letting rip literally and figuratively.
You’re probably thinking that this doesn’t have much to do with consultants. Premium consulting, all expensive suits and business travel, seems a world away from cheerful flat packs, but pause for a moment.
Monday 17th Sep, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
We recently asked around 100 senior people in large US-based organisations whether they’d be interested in converting traditional consulting work (short-term advisory work, paid on a fixed price or time and materials basis, measured on inputs rather than outcomes) into an on-going service, aimed at delivering a specific and concrete outcome, and involving a combination of software, data and analytics, and consulting expertise. Ninety-one percent said that they found that suggestion attractive, and three-quarters said they could envisage buying consulting in this way and that this could represent the future of consulting.
Perhaps that level of positive engagement shouldn’t have surprised us.
Wednesday 27th Jun, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Regular readers of these blogs will know that I’m quite a fan of Talking Politics, a podcast orchestrated by David Runciman, Professor of Politics at the University of Cambridge. Professor Runciman and his panellists have been discussing the middle ground as well. They’ve hypothesised that, although politicians often continue to talk about owning the middle ground, recent events suggest that the middle ground in politics is being hollowed out, that in these days of divisive issues and hyper-partisan parties, there are very few issues that people agree on in the centre. You’re either for Trump or against him; keen to keep the Affordable Care Act or desperate to do away with it; a Brexiteer or a Remainer. In this environment, politicians can’t and don’t win by being in the middle, but by being at the edge; they have to take an extreme position, rather than find consensus. To win an election, so many of which seem to be on a knife edge because the electorates seem almost evenly split between the extreme points, you have to find issues that cut across the spectrum, not because they’re in the middle, but because people, who might otherwise hold utterly conflicting views, agree on them. Sitting here in the UK, those issues are probably student loans and the National Health Service. You can hate Brexit or love Brexit, but if you’ve university-aged children then you’re probably outraged at the level of debt the latter are having to live with. Similarly, the idea of healthcare, free at the point of need, is so deeply engrained in our national psyche that any government endangering it faces genuinely massed revolt.
Tuesday 19th Jun, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
In 1610, after months of painstaking work grinding his own lens, Galileo Galilei finally held his new telescope up to the night sky. What he saw astonished him: instead of a few hundred stars, he could see thousands, even millions.
The consulting “universe” has long been populated by a small number of large “planets”–strategy, technology, operational improvement, and so on–but if you were to carry out an equivalent of Galileo’s exercise in today’s market, then you’d see something that looks more like the Milky Way than a simple solar system.
The consulting market is fragmenting. Centrifugal forces are breaking up our familiar planets, based on the precise expertise required, on a changing sense of what a “reasonable” price is, and on a new generation of clients who know that the way they want to buy from consulting firms isn’t necessarily how the firm wants to sell or deliver to them.
Tuesday 15th May, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Consulting around business and digital transformation markets accounts for around a sixth of all consulting in the world today, fuelled by clients’ deep-rooted desire for fundamental change and technology that’s making new things possible. At the same time, we hear senior executives being increasingly concerned about the need to deliver concrete results. “Transformation is all very well in theory,” they tell us, “but we want more proof about what it can deliver in practice.
None of this is surprising: Every “new” consulting service passes through a stage in which consultants need to make good on their glorious promises, and the failure to do so heralds decline and eventual extinction. As a service, digital transformation has technology on its side: There’s plenty of evidence of tangible change all around us, but the challenge for consulting firms is to demonstrate whether these changes have translated into the substantial increases in business performance that organisations are looking for.
Wednesday 11th Apr, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
You don’t need me to tell you that digital transformation is big. It’s already a massive market ($44bn by our latest estimates), it’s growing rapidly, and it’s right at the top of the corporate agenda. What’s more, by being multidisciplinary by nature, and requiring a breadth of consulting services to be truly transformational, it’s particularly big news for big firms. Which, if anything, makes it even bigger.
But what does that mean for mid-sized strategy firms? Several barriers to these sort of firms playing in this space spring up, at least in theory: They’re not big enough to have the global reach many clients require; their breadth of services is unlikely to be as wide as the biggest firms; and they may simply not have enough people to deploy, particularly when it comes to turning strategies into action.
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