By JJ Sendelbach
We continue to get good and frequent feedback from you on all of our KIA Corners. In fact, we just sold two projects triggered by our article last August about client profiles. As consultants to the consulting industry, we never tire of coming up with new insights and stories. But, after all, we write this closing remark of Consulting magazine for you, not for us. So in this installment, I'd like to list our Top 10 thoughts, predictions and ideas and invite your feedback and input on which ones you 'd like us to expand on in one of our upcoming KIA Corners.
Here we go:
1) Consulting means "thinking in the head of the client." What does this really mean and how does it work? It's not telling somebody the time after you checked their wrist watch.
2) Consultants always must pick their sides in arguments and battles because compromises don't cut it in most instances. As much as diplomacy and politically correct business conduct brings your career forward within corporate America, consultants are expected to dare to be different.
3) Consultants must get more ahead of the curve and be more pro-active than their re-active variation of the past. The best consultants don't respond just to an RFI/RFP or beauty contest. Instead, they must approach the prospective client with what the client truly needs. You need to blow away the prospect's mind in a positive way with what you know about them before even being asked for advice on something.
4) Some consultancies are already doing much better than they admit and what they want their clients to know/believe. In fact, there are consultancies that are almost back to normal workload and fees (from before the crisis), but when they talk to the financial analyst community, or make noise in newspapers, or other media, they still like to sing the "oh how tough has it gotten" song.
5) Methods- tools- and expertise-based consulting will disappear and be replaced by hard facts, evidence-based and analytical consulting. Although it's still a small percentage of the total consulting market, it grows faster than any other discretely identifiable segment and even the big boys (IBM) are making lots of headway in this regard.
6) Business Advisory Services (BAS), the construct invented after Sarbanes-Oxley and in the meantime perfected not only by the Big Four, but by many upstarts and newcomers, will disappear again soon and be folded back into the traditional strategy and operations consulting categories. The latest involvements of all sorts of consultancies in advising on strategic and risk management matters regarding CDOs (collateralized debt obligations being commonly recognized as the culprit of our financial crisis) seem to warm up old thoughts, but will this old school thinking support or kill BAS as a discrete consulting segment?
7) Sustainability, green and environmental consulting is the business to be in: "Green sells."
8) The Future of Consulting 2020. Consulting as we know it today will disappear. In fact, KIA just launched its study, "Future of Consulting," which will be co-authored by the world-renowned consulting industry & future scenario experts, (in cooperation with DSI, Decision Strategies Inc.) which consulting industry leaders can access to help them plan for the future.
9) Onsite delivery is vanishing, offsite consulting is the way to go. Not only do consultants like the new delivery models, since it awards them a better work/life travel balance, but also clients start loving it as it appears to allow cutting project cost and saving internal project time, as well.
10) And last, but not least, a hotly debated issue at KIA is the question of whether IT consulting (which took on so many facets over the years, from apps dev to SI, from ITO to BPO, from IT cost cutting to IT strategy, from IT org to IT skills work, just to name a few) should be re-categorized more "fashionably." As a consequence, buckets could be defined around IT staff augmentation, IT project management, IT outsourcing and true IT strategy consulting.
Just let us know via email, or any other form of comment, what interests you most, and we will dedicate future KIA Corners to your needs, wishes and priorities. However, we believe that by even just putting out a couple of provocative statements above, we most likely created already some food for thought internally at your fine firm. We look forward to hearing from you.
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