By Fiona Czerniawska.

Rome might not have been built in a day, but it was built in concrete. Indeed, it was the invention of concrete, not its civic values or imperial ambitions, that gave the Romans their roads, aqueducts, and extraordinary structures, such as the Pantheon, that still amaze us today.

By Fiona Czerniawska.

You don’t need a crystal ball these days to prophesy the death of the conventional audit process.  Just about anyone who can scrape some tea leaves together has looked into their cups and seen the future: the people-less audit has become the expectation du jour.

By Fiona Czerniawska.

One of the things I’ve always liked about Accenture (and I like quite a lot of things about them) is its apparent capacity to reinvent itself on a fairly regular basis. ERP, outsourcing, offshoring: Accenture has often been the first mover, prepared to go out on a limb in the market, often, I suspect, at the cost of turmoil behind the scenes. It puts a strategic stake in the ground, then expects the organisation to catch up.

So what are we to make of its campaign around “new”?

By Zoë Stumpf.

It must be very irritating to be Canadian and be constantly taken to be American—at least by foreigners unfamiliar with nuances of accent. The good news for the Canada consulting market is that there’s no real danger of that type of confusion happening: Not only is the market a fraction of the size of that of its southern neighbour, it’s also very different in its make-up. Take digital transformation as an example. In the US—arguably the world’s most digitally mature consulting market—digital has become a vast behemoth accounting for a huge 25% of the total market, driving work across all service lines and encompassing all industries. In Canada, it’s a different, rather more modest story, with digital work accounting for less than 6% of the market and the largest share of the work falling to strategy consultants. Indeed, the fact that digital projects now account for a very large proportion of all strategy work in Canada suggests that digital is something people are talking about a lot more than something they’re acting on.

By Fiona Czerniawska.

Consultants often talk about pain points, but it’s hard to find one that’s either more painful or more pointed than Diabetesville, the name given by the media to Cameron County, Texas, where almost a third of the population has Type II diabetes.