Unisys Draws Yet Another Consulting Hand
Over the past 18 months, Unisys Corp., the IT services behemoth headquartered in Blue Bell, PA, has quietly beefed up its management consulting ranks with nearly 180 seasoned consultants — a hardy mix of principal and senior managers lifted largely from former Big Five consulting outfits.
It's a recruitment feat the company's management likes to chalk up to "good timing" — a phrase consulting leaders have used sparingly in light of the challenges consultants have faced over the past two years.
Still, Joe McGrath, president of enterprise transformation services for Unisys, says that the slowdown in consulting services produced a recruiting opportunity unlike any Unisys had seen before. What's more, that opportunity was further enriched by Big Five consultants, who began evaluating career options outside their firms as new accounting independence regulations obscured or limited their firms' consulting career paths.
"This is a people business, and the single biggest challenge remains recruiting," says McGrath, who admits that he was not the first executive tasked with building a management consulting organization within Unisys.
Back in 1992, Victor Millar arrived at Unisys for what would be a three-year tour of duty within the firm's quickly evolving IT services organization. Millar, who had been credited with being an architect of Andersen Consulting, was charged with, among other things, building a management consulting capability at Unisys.
"At Millar's time, the size of the gap may have been too big," says McGrath, alluding to the chasm that once separated the IT world from the strategy world. Here too, McGrath believes that "good timing" is paying off. According to Unisys's top consultant, the Big Five consulting firms of the 1990s helped mass-produce a new and original consultant — one who had a "double major" in industry expertise and IT competency. Unlike the Unisys of Millar's time, McGrath says that the Unisys of today is well positioned to leverage the profession's talent bench, which is currently filled with Big Five "double majors" hungry for new opportunities.
Of course, a more meaningful indication of Unisys's "good timing" may be the 11 percent growth rate it enjoyed during the second quarter of 2003. "Few consulting firms came close to that," explains McGrath.
Sidebar: Mickelson Becomes BearingPoint's Trojan Horse
Poor Phil Mickelson can't get away from golf tournaments supported by his sponsor's competition. Not only will BearingPoint's visor-clad promoter find himself playing at the Accenture Match Play Championship this February, but he can now add the Booz Allen Open to his calendar for next June.
That's because Booz Allen signed a three-year agreement to serve as title sponsor of the PGA Tour's Washington, DC, event — which is the largest single sporting event in the DC metropolitan area, attracting more than 180,000 fans annually. To date, the tournament has distributed nearly $8 million to more than 150 local and national charities in the DC area.
Three Questions for Bain's David Shpilberg
A little more than 18 months after his arrival at Bain & Company, David Shpilberg is busy hopping from one continent to the next as he seeks to elevate the IT aptitudes in every corner of Bain's world. The former architect of Ernst & Young's technology strategy is today tasked with helping an army of generalists earn its techie stripes — no easy feat, considering that IT consultants have in the past been thought of as "the poor relations" to Bain's haute band of generalists. But times have changed, says Shpilberg — and so must Bain.
CM: What happened to make Bain add this IT component?
Shpilberg: What we set out to do is act on a realization that Bain had, which was that IT has become a topic of conversation at the executive suite. While we all projected this 20 years ago, the reality is that this did not become a CEO-level discussion and most CIOs did not report to the CEO. But in the last few years, the tipping point has been reached, and whether it was expense-driven or revenue creation-driven doesn't matter. The point is that suddenly CEOs were saying, I need to talk to you about IT.
CM: Does this mean that every consultant is now required to gain IT expertise?
Shpilberg: Now, this doesn't mean that we will all be extremely proficient concerning IT, just as we're not all highly proficient at market segmentation or organization. But we are all proficient in having business conversations and at identifying the issues, and then we see which consultants — in addition to having a broad generalist orientation — have the deep vertical expertise that may be relevant. So what we've done is injected the IT gene into Bain's DNA.
CM: What percentage of Bain's consulting population should we expect to have IT expertise?
Shpilberg: The model we're pursuing is one in which 30 percent of our people, in addition to being business generalists, are actually enabled to manage and run projects where IT is a critical component. We are calling these people IT leaders. These are people who can express a point-of-view when it comes to IT. There is no alignment around the understanding of how you measure the value of technology. If you look at IT projects that have failed, they have failed not because the technology didn't work, but because the alignment of the responsibilities between business and technology was not delineated sufficiently, and there was an imbalance in which IT took too much of the responsibility and business accepted too little. Here at Bain, we now understand how to correct this.
Sidebar: AMS Boosts Homeland Security One Foot at a Time
Taking their commitment to the military a step further than just business, American Management Systems recently collected over 1,000 pairs of "regulation" socks,
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