Community Service
CGE&Y's Hat Trick: Client & Community Both Win
When Cap Gemini Ernst & Young last year decided to give something back to the community, it sought out the help of one of its more team-oriented clients.
Together with the National Hockey League, CGE&Y conducted six 3-hour sessions from 4 to 7 p.m. on weeknights to teach a group of 20 New York City high school students the ropes about IT consulting — with the end result being the creation of a real-time box score accessible from the league's Web site.
"We're kind of boring, but when you intersect with a client who's got a real business application, then it starts to get interesting," says Ken Nowack, vice president and New York Area People Leader of CGE&Y. Nowack, the executive sponsor of the firm's efforts, hopes they will participate again next year.
The two companies worked as part of the Exploring Program, which helps students gain insight into a career field of their choice. There are currently over 7,000 New York City high school students enrolled in the program. CGE&Y, in their first year on board, had 10 consultants participate and is the only consulting firm to take part.
Auditor Independence
As Deloitte Consulting, soon to be Braxton, prepares to break away from its doting parent, Deloitte & Touche, it may want to ask for a few pointers from a lesser-known one-time sibling.
Resources Connection, Inc., a consultancy that largely specializes in the deployment of accounting and finance professionals on a project-by-project basis, was in a position similar to that of Braxton only three years ago. The firm, which underwent a management buyout in 1999 and sold shares to the public in 2000, is now challenging the current rocky economic times by continuing to plot a smooth revenue climb. RC went from $71.4 million in 1999 to $181.7 million in 2002.
"Clients have often been faced with 'I can do it myself, bring in a big consulting firm, or have temp agencies fill the need,'" says Karen Ferguson, co-founder and EVP of Resources. "Those were the only choices for how to get things done. We're kind of a new player to professional services as a whole."
With roughly 1,500 employees, the six-year-old firm has served over 1,400 clients on projects ranging from host implementation work to compensation program design and implementation. Ferguson, who touts Accounting & Finance as the firm's bread-and-butter offering, sees opportunity for the firm increasing for the first time in two years.
"You'd be surprised how big this space we are in actually is … and just keep in mind that we were a very successful venture for Deloitte," says Ferguson, a former senior manager at Deloitte & Touche who notes that they have no financial stake in Resources. "We were always profitable, with virtually no capital investment at all. They've done some other ones that haven't been quite as lucrative."
The Consultancy Query
Since 1993, Mark Bruneau has been making his presence felt as CEO and founder of Adventis, a $50 million strategy and management consulting firm with a focus on the global information industries. Bruneau sat down with Consulting recently to reflect on his firm's 10-year history and discuss some of the upcoming opportunities he sees for his Boston-based company.
CM: Unlike some of your peers, Adventis promotes itself as not being generalists — how has that helped you weather the recession, and how does that help your firm going forward?
Bruneau: One of the things that prevented us from being hurt too badly in 2001 and 2002 was that we were never dependent on work from the dot-coms. We avoided the disastrous contraction of many of our competitors by focusing on the big guys, not the new guys. We did good work and delivered a lot of value. With the likes of Sony or Disney increasingly needing more electronic distribution of their content and products, telecommunications will have to play a major role in that.
It will be good for the telcos because they need to be a content gateway lest they continue to shrink and offer more and more connectivity for fewer fractions of pennies. The natural connectivity part between communications, computing, and media & entertainment is very strong. The fourth leg of the stool, information industrials, is really people like General Electric or General Motors pulling us into a space that wasn't traditional to us.
CM: What has the nature of your work in this telecommunications and technology space been as of late?
Bruneau: Well, realize that telecom and technology is who we serve, not what we do. We address strategy issues, mergers and acquisitions, target markets, and classic strategy and management issues. But while it's easy to bash the telcos, they are remarkably good at two things: reliability and customer experience. When you pick up the phone, there's a dial tone — always. And, you have to realize, the complexity of the technology that goes behind that is huge. The other thing is billing. With no other group of clients will you find details by call, date, duration, etc., but the telcos are very good at that kind of thing. There may be other issues they need to work on, but those are some positives.
CM: Dell Computer is probably a good example of a company that has implemented this well. Would you agree?
Bruneau: Dell had a terrible customer experience up until about three years ago. If you ordered a PC through them, one day you would get the keyboard, three days later the monitor, two days later the CPU, and then a day later the cabling.
We actually worked with Dell for about a year to improve that customer experience. The whole customer diagnostic of what do you need your computer for — let's build it to your needs and send it to you in one box. At the time, three or four years ago, Web buying hadn't become as big as it is now. Therein lay the magnitude of the problem. We told them they needed to fix this customer experience and do it now. We could have, like other firms, developed paper reports on pen-based computing in the year 2009 and all that strategy, or we could help them dominate and be the market share leader in PCs.
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