In a culture known for bureaucratic lingo and abbreviations, one acronym crystallizes the nature of the service that public sector organizations need from their consultants right now: BHAGs.
"We need more BHAGs (big, hairy, audacious goals) to meet today's complex challenges," asserts Robert N. Campbell III, vice chairman and U.S. state government leader for Deloitte. "Big, bold ideas can alter the course of history. That's especially true when those ideas come in response to tremendous problems."
Unlike funding, talent and new infrastructure, there is no shortfall of tremendous problems among government organizations at the local, state and federal level in the U.S. or overseas, according to public sector practice leaders. "None of our clients asks us to solve easy problems," asserts Steve Shane, Accenture's managing director of Public Service North America.
Nor is their a shortage of public sector work, which currently represents one of the strongest areas of consulting and promises to surge in coming years. "Our nation is starved for problem solvers," notes former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge in the forward to States of Transition: Tackling Government's Toughest Policy and Management Challenges (Deloitte, 2006).
That hunger is great news for public sector practices, which are thriving. The demand also appears to be driving major change. Nearly all public-sector practices emphasize the importance of an integrative approach—blending commercial and public-sector expertise on public-sector engagements. Thanks to defense and homeland security investments, the U.S. government is re-establishing the "technology first-mover" credentials it enjoyed during the space race 40-plus years ago. "We're seeing the government-driven technology R&D starting to spin back into commercial industry," notes Robin Lineberger, BearingPoint executive vice president, global public services.
Another change relates to the emergence of a new generation of consultants eager to do well by doing good. "I've never seen so much excitement around the public sector in my twenty-plus years of consulting," says Charles Prow, chief operating officer of IBM's Global Business Services' public sector business. "We have people who are really interested in the public sector as a sector because it's a way to combine business and the notion of improving society for people … Our business is in really, really good shape."
Public Bragging Rights
Prow's competition enthusiastically agrees. Campbell reports that Deloitte's state and federal government practices have enjoyed double-digit growth at a time when public-sector consulting is growing at about 6 percent annually. Despite—or perhaps because of—the massive and complex nature of problems confronting public service organizations, practice leaders appear excited by their prospects (even a bit feisty) and eager to tell you how they're uniquely, and better, positioned compared to their competitors.
Val Lyons, president and CEO of Capgemini's Government Solutions, emphasizes that her firm's approach enables clients to "accelerate change without introducing additional risk." Lineberger promotes BearingPoint's deep and lengthy relationship with public-sector clients; the firm's consultants essentially serve as a knowledge data bank, he notes, which is valuable given the regular turnover that occurs among many governmental positions.
Nearly every senior public-sector consulting partner and executive promotes the importance of bringing to bear private-sector consulting expertise on public-sector problems. Larry Kamener, The Boston Consulting Group senior partner who heads the firm's public sector practice, asserts that an empathetic touch is crucial when delivering this sort of solution blend.
"My experience is that government clients are very keen to tap into private-sector experience," he explains, "except that they want to ensure that the experience is not delivered naively. They want it delivered [by a firm] that understands the constraints of government. I, like many others at BCG, served in government prior to joining the firm, and that helps us understand those constraints."
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