Wednesday 5th Sep, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
“They’ve done it again!”, said a recent client we interviewed. “They’ve sold us on promises about brilliant new technology and streamlined processes, and they’ve ignored the fact that success depends on people.”
In case it’s not clear, the “they” he was referring to are consulting firms. With two years of digital transformation under the industry’s collective belt, clients are starting to ask for hard evidence of results (a point I covered here). They’re also complaining that consultants aren’t engaging sufficiently with what they have increasingly come to believe is the main obstacle to delivering genuine transformation in practice: changing people’s behaviours. And they’re worried that, as robotic process automation becomes embedded in transformation work, more and more investment cases will depend on reducing their workforce in some areas, and redeploying people in others. “I want to know how consulting firms are going to help deal with the collateral impact of new technology and processes,” continued my irate executive, “but no one is talking to us about that.”
New research by Proudfoot suggests that this client, and all the others who’ve talked to us in a similar vein over the last few months, are right to be concerned.
Tuesday 10th Jul, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Markets are what you make of them. Henry Ford knew it when he introduced the “any colour so long as it’s black” Model T Ford. Faberge knew it when he produced the first of his brilliant, bejewelled eggs. Big or small, high value or low cost: We get to decide.
For all the work we do in sizing the global consulting market (hint: it’s big), we’re acutely aware that there’s another, hidden market out there (hint: it’s much, much bigger. Where do you find this? First, you question your instincts; second, you re-think your value proposition.
Wednesday 4th Jul, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
Our recent report, Intelligent Analytics:Threats and opportunities in the global analytics market, reveals that, collectively, consulting firms currently only have a 25% share of the analytics market. The remaining 75% is being done in-house, by clients themselves.
That ought to bring the focus of most consulting firms—beating their fellow consulting firms to the analytics prize—into sharp relief. Instead of slogging it out with each other to work out how they divide up 25% of the market, perhaps they should be focused on the bigger prize that would come from persuading clients to do less in-house.
Wednesday 3rd Jan, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
Over the course of 2017, we’ve interviewed almost 400 senior consulting leaders around the world, usually the most senior person in a territory or industry, picking their brains about the trends shaping their clients’ businesses and the pressures being placed on the consulting model.
Having spent a lot of time writing about women in consulting—why so few make it to the top, the barriers to their progression, and what firms can do to change things—I thought it would be interesting to look at the gender balance of the consulting leaders we speak to.
Wednesday 22nd Nov, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Interviewed recently by the BBC on the impact automation is likely to have on the professional services sector, I was asked whether I thought that all the work done by professional service firms could be done by computers. The answer, to me at least, is clearly no.
Imagine the future of consulting—as we have in our report on the potential impact of robotic process automation and artificial intelligence—on the industry, as a partial eclipse. The sun is the work that conventional human consultants do today. It, and the rays emerging from it, represent different aspects of the consulting process: discover; predict; advise; decide; design; implement; run and report. Technology is the moon. But, even as the moon moves across the face of the sun it won’t entirely obscure the latter’s light: Around the edge, a corona of human activity will continue to shine.
Tuesday 21st Nov, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Seventeen percent. That’s how much we estimate the digital consulting market will grow in 2017 (and our number is just for consulting, if you include the systems implementation, hardware, and software elements, then growth will be even higher). But where is growth going to come from in more traditional consulting services? The key here will be to re-draw the boundaries of consulting.
Thursday 12th Oct, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Back in January this year we talked about five big numbers that, we felt, would define 2017. Nine months on it feels like the right time to revisit these and gauge the extent to which the year has—or hasn’t—lived up to our expectations.
Thursday 21st Sep, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
In our recent report on the size of the robotics and artificial intelligence consulting market we were somewhere between cautious and positive about the long-term prospects for growth. It’s easy to believe that the market will be huge, based on all the talking that’s going on at the moment. There’s plenty of alarmist media coverage, which has brought robotics to the public’s attention as well as to clients’ investment committees. At the same time, the technology itself is fragmented and there’s a dearth of hard data that would give clients confidence to spend.
Tuesday 8th Aug, 2017
By Edward Haigh.
I’ve spent enough time attending analyst summits and conducting telephone interviews with the Big Four in the past year, to know that ecosystems are a really big deal for them. Like, a really really big deal.
Along the way I’ve been genuinely impressed, not only by the network of relationships they’ve been building, but also by the humility they’ve shown in doing so. After all, humility may be a precondition for building a successful ecosystem in the first place, but it’s something for which the Big Four (or any big consulting firm, for that matter) haven’t hitherto been particularly famous. Frankly, trying to get a big consulting firm to admit that it doesn’t have all the capability its clients’ need in house, and might need help from someone else, has been like trying to get an alpha-male to read an instruction manual.
Thursday 13th Jul, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
In the corner of a cavernous office, Cindy is sitting at her desk, papers are stacked in heaps. Around her motes of dust dance in the early sun.
She blinks: “Dawn? Already?”
She runs her hands through her hair and rubs her eyes. “We’re just drowning in all these journal entries.” She looks across at two figures slumped, asleep at their desks. “Tim? Jeff? Where’s Megan?”
Immediately they’re awake. “She was here last night, going through that pile of invoices,” says Tim. “We can’t have… not again…” Ping! They all turn to look at Megan’s laptop, where the message ‘software upgraded’ is flashing.
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