Two years ago, a couple of thoughts struck Stephen Pratt, then a partner with Deloitte Consulting, as he scanned a high-tech client's office filled with 200 of his consultants pecking away on their laptops: Our consultants are miserable from the standard cross-country commute and hotel existence we subject them to. And, Our bills are making our client miserable.
"I thought, 'Boy, this is a really antiquated way of doing consulting," says Pratt. "We committed to try to do things differently in the future. But that didn't work out very well."
So, in April 2004, Pratt started a new firm, the strategic consulting arm of Infosys Technologies Ltd., the technology services and business process outsourcing company based in Bangalore, India.
"I think that consulting has fallen behind its clients in the use of global resources, and it's time for us to take a leadership position," says Pratt, the CEO and managing director of Infosys Consulting. "There is no reason a client should pay a premium for location. They should pay a premium for skills. The traditional model of consulting engagements was developed before modern communications: Everyone gets on an airplane and sits in a conference room at the client site."
Infosys Consulting's "location-optimized" model leverages modern telecommunications and access to the burgeoning consulting labor market around the world. The approach moves work to workers rather than workers to the work, which is the problem that festered in Pratt's mind as he listened to his itinerant consultants' clicking keyboards two years ago.
The technology work involved in an Infosys Consulting assignment typically takes place in India and China. Other support and expertise is piped in via telephone and the Internet from all over the world. The vast majority of strategic counseling — "the real collaborative stuff," says Pratt — is conducted face-to-face on the client site.
The model sounds a bit like a consultative version of Dell Computer's signature approach, a point Pratt discussed with Michael Dell in Davos at the World Economic Forum.
"Clients love it," says Pratt. "They receive world-class on-site business consulting and world-class technology. And, overall, it costs less."
Pratt says that the global services delivery model enables his team, which consists of top dogs formerly with Capgemini, IBM, A.T. Kearney, and other leading firms, to get back to the roots of management consulting. It presents an interesting paradox: traditional management consulting enabled through New Age technology deliver.
"If Marvin Bower were creating McKinsey today," Pratt ventures, "I think that it would look a lot more like Infosys Consulting than McKinsey Consulting."
That may be a big claim, but it remains a challenging position to bet against: Infosys Consulting has grown by more than 50 percent from quarter to quarter in its first year of existence, Pratt reports. The parent company receives 1 million applications annually, and each year hires a little more than 1 percent of the top applicants, schooled primarily at India's best learning institutions. The toughest lesson may be for the profession Infosys Consulting now calls its own. — Eric Krell
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