Thursday 29th Oct, 2015
By Fiona Czerniawska Finding points of difference between consulting firms is something clients have always struggled with, but there’s one characteristic that’s coming up again and again in our conversations with clients: knowledge of their industry.
Thursday 10th Sep, 2015
By Fiona Czerniawska 26%. That’s the proportion of clients in the energy and resources sector globally who think that strategy firms deliver poor-quality work, twice the level of clients on average, and three or four times as many who say this about Big Four or technology firms. Indeed, attitudes about technology firms move in the opposite direction, being more positive in this sector than on average.
Wednesday 2nd Sep, 2015
By Fiona Czerniawska Nothing lasts for ever, certainly not upswings in the economic cycle. Yet the US consulting market, despite its size and maturity, has been growing faster than the average global rate for the last five years – and looks set to exceed the latter again in 2015 (our latest report on the US market predicts 10% growth, led by risk and regulation, and technology).
Monday 17th Aug, 2015
By Alison Huntington The headline of our Client Perception Study in the French consulting market is that 59% of clients are willing to pay more for the services of the leading consulting firms. Yes, you read that right. This news may come as a surprise – France is still a tough market, where every percentile of growth is fought for, tooth and nail. And they may wonder where all these clients are hiding. We can’t tell you that, but what is important to know is there are far more clients willing to pay more for some firm types, and far fewer for others.
Monday 4th May, 2015
By Fiona Czerniawska Technology companies* have always had a problem with consulting.
Monday 2nd Feb, 2015
By Fiona Czerniawska Consulting services are linear, right? We’re all familiar with the upstream/downstream model that has strategy consulting on the left (or at the top, if you’re a strategy consultant), technology consulting on the right, and everything else in between. This standard model is as convenient as it’s simple: everyone knows where they stand, and it’s easy to imagine all the players neatly lined up along a single piece of string.
Monday 28th Jul, 2014
By Edward Haigh You can divide IT expenditure, slightly crudely, into two camps at the moment: The first is about upgrading, repairing and replacing existing IT systems. It's what a lot of people would think of as the old world of IT. It's about big, enterprise-wide, centralised, systems. The second is about digitisation: it's about big data and analytics, social media, mobile, cloud, the internet of things, and all that sort of stuff.
Tuesday 22nd Jul, 2014
By Fiona Czerniawska Will it get off the runway?
Wednesday 16th Jul, 2014
By Edward Haigh My frequent trips across the North Atlantic over the last year or so have served to illustrate many things: it really ought to be simpler, by now, to get from Kennedy airport into Manhattan; Texas has more private medical centres than cowboys; you don’t need a whole Chicago deep-pan pizza to yourself; technology rules.
Friday 30th May, 2014
By Fiona Czerniawska Twenty years ago Gavin Potter and I wrote a book called Business in a Virtual World. Its thesis was that the increasing conversion of ‘stuff’ into digital information paved the way for a new way of doing business. The book garnered some nice reviews, earned the praise of people we respected – and sold a couple of thousand copies. How times change: today, digitization books pepper the top of bestselling business book lists. After years of speculating what the next big thing in consulting will be, I think we’ve found it.
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