Wednesday 16th Jan, 2019
By Fiona Czerniawska.
My husband likes the music of Conlan Nancarrow, who was one of the first composers to write music for machines rather than people. His work for the player piano, a piano with no pianist, where the music is “played” by feeding in a roll of punchcard data, is extraordinary. Extraordinary because the machine can do things that a pianist can’t: It has more than 10 digits, and its “hands” can stretch to wider chords and play impossibly fast.
It’s also a good metaphor for how technology is expected to change what consultants do. Our recent report found that consultants are broadly positive about the impact technology has had on their everyday working lives and that they’re optimistic about the future.
Monday 10th Dec, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
THE SCENE: A bar in midtown Manhattan. It’s late and two men in their 50s sit hunched over their beers. Matt is the corporate risk officer for a major pharmaceutical company. Greying and a little broad around the middle, he no longer aspires to be a professional ping-pong player. He simply wants to get through the week without another crisis. Sandy is his drinking partner of many years, since they met up at business school and discovered a common liking for burritos. Sandy is the financial controller of a well-known arts and craft magazine, a job Matt would happily trade for any day of the week. MATT runs his finger down the droplets on the side of his glass.
Monday 26th Nov, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Estimating the size of the digital transformation market isn’t easy. What do we mean by digital and how is this different to other, more established types of information technology? When is something labelled transformation actually transformational in practice?
We’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years tracking the size and growth of one part of the market: the work done by consulting firms. That’s not the whole picture, of course—it doesn’t take into account the amount of money clients spend on hardware and software, and it excludes systems development and implementation. Nevertheless, it’s a big number. In 2017, when the global consulting industry grew at around 7%, we estimate that demand for digital transformation consulting almost doubled in size.
Thursday 22nd Nov, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
We’ve written before about the ‘magnetic middle’ effect, in which clients of consulting firms struggle to differentiate between firms based on the quality of their work alone. Very little separates the top-rated firms from the bottom-rated ones, with firms deliberately making acquisitions and investments to ensure they provide the full suite of services their clients need to a high standard. If this is the case, why are we even talking about quality anymore?
Well, looking at how individual firms performed this year versus last in our annual survey of consulting clients* shows that there’s no room for complacency, particularly when it comes to digital transformation. Firms may have ended up scoring very similarly to each other for the overall quality of their work this year, but some have taken great strides forward in digital, while others appear to be moving backwards.
Wednesday 14th Nov, 2018
By Julie Ahadi.
“Overall, a customer-centric focus is the biggest change in the financial services market in recent years” …said a consultant we spoke to for our 2018 financial services sector market report. And we don’t disagree with her: In fact, the general realisation that putting customers first is key to winning—and staying in—business is spreading like cross-sector wildfire.
With the likes of Amazon, Facebook, and Google leading the charge in delivering A-grade customer experience, the general population has, in a very short space of time, come to expect this level of service as standard. Technology players in other sectors—such as retail—are adopting cutting-edge approaches to improve the customer experience, and this is forcing financial services players to up their game considerably. And there are no exceptions to this rule: Got a huge, immovable legacy system that makes changing existing IT architecture and implementing new systems painful, slow, and expensive? Too bad. Lack the agility to make far-reaching changes in your culture or operations? Boo-hoo. Customers’ insatiable appetite for a simple and immediate banking experience isn’t about to go away anytime… well, ever.
Thursday 11th Oct, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
“Transformation is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think strategy consulting is a big deal, but that’s just peanuts to transformation."
If Douglas Adams was alive and well today, and writing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Consulting, he’d probably have said this. Indeed, one of Adams’ most brilliant ideas, the infinite improbability drive—a faster-than-light drive based on quantum theory—would almost certainly have been deployed whizzing consultants from one side of the transformation universe to another*.
We’ve written before on this blog about the dangers posed by the extent to which transformation, like the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal—another Adams invention—has been gobbling up traditional consulting services.
Friday 5th Oct, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
2017 saw a huge leap in the proportion of consulting work that was badged “digital transformation”. Some of that is genuinely new work, fuelled by technology that does, sometimes, appear to make our lives at work and home miraculously better. But most of the growth is coming from the reconfiguration of existing consulting services—strategy, operational improvement, even HR and risk. You don’t improve supply chains anymore, but digitally transform them; your HR function isn’t streamlined so much as transformed.
We could waste a lot of time arguing whether all this work is actually transformative, but that’s not the point I want to focus on here. My worry—and I always find something to worry about—is that it feels as though transformation is getting too big in conceptual, rather than material, terms. Some of the clients I’ve spoken to recently seem dazed, almost paralysed, by the scale of what might be achievable.
Friday 28th Sep, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
I recently interviewed a consultant who was telling me about a digital transformation programme he’d worked on with one of Britain’s police forces. As part of the programme, each front-line officer was given a tablet to replace the traditional policeman’s notebook. The technology would mean accurate digital records, fewer hours lost to paperwork, the ability to update cases on the go, and myriad other benefits. Except that it didn’t. The consultant went out on the beat one day and watched as an officer took out his tablet … and proceeded to use it as a clipboard to lean his paper notebook against while he jotted down his notes with an old-fashioned biro.
It’s just one of many examples that illustrate how the success of transformation depends on people, not just new technology. So what do HR clients—the people in charge of the people—make of the consultants trying to help them?
Tuesday 14th Aug, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
We’ve talked before on these pages about the merits and limitations of sub-brands. While they may help to raise awareness of new capabilities, they may also underline that the sub-brand isn’t core to what the firm does. Nowhere is that debate more pressing than in a discussion about digital sub-brands. What’s next for those firms with separate digital sub-brands, if digital is becoming fundamental to everything clients do?
It’s tempting to say that digital sub-brands are reaching the end of their shelf life, and should be integrated back into the parent brands of the firms that spawned them. But recent conversations with clients have given me pause for thought.
Referring to two firms with digital sub-brands, one client says: “They’re still a bunch of number crunchers and geeks.” The digital sub-brands haven’t changed his opinions about the parent brands. Another client used the word “stuffy” to describe the culture of another firm—the opposite of the more innovative and digital image the firm’s sub-brand seeks to convey. “They realised that they can’t attract the people they need for digital,” says the CIO of an energy company in Germany, “so they had to open a new ‘digital’ office up the road that felt different.” It’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the parent brand’s ability to succeed in the digital world on its own.
Friday 3rd Aug, 2018
By Lindsay Stark.
Last year, we wrote about the relatively slow spread of digital transformation across Canada. This year, we’re pleased to say that the tortoise may well have come into its own.
With the consulting market presenting overall growth of 4.9%, 2017 was a good year to be a consultant in Canada—but it was even better if you were able to offer digital services. Canada’s digital market is now almost four times the size it was in 2016, with digital work now accounting for 20% of all consulting happening there. To put that in perspective, the US digital market—arguably the most dynamic in the world—remains much larger, but grew just 77% over the same period. If you’re a consultant wanting to sell digital solutions, Canada must look like a very nice option.
Fuelled by attractive new-technology use cases pouring in from the US, Canada’s clients were eager to learn how they could replicate the successes being enjoyed south of the border. For those clients asking how they could use new technologies to improve back-office efficiency, Canada’s consultants had an answer: cloud-based ERP systems.
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