The relentless pace of the digitization of the business world is only accelerating as new technologies enable ways of doing things that weren't thought possible before. But the break-neck speed of innovation has created a bevy of consulting opportunities for firms who are already fluent in digital. Dee Burger, newly minted CEO of Capgemini Consulting North America, says that digital is no longer simply a service offering or part of their business—it is their business. Consulting sat down with Dee to talk about how Capgemini is recalibrating to help clients meet these new challenges and more.
Consulting: You've been with the firm more than 25 years, what's been keeping you busiest so far as North American CEO?
Burger: We've had a very good consulting business for a long time but we've got a vision to take it to an entirely new place now. My first five months in the role we've restructured the team, narrowed our focus to place our bets in fewer places more intensely and are really working to make sure we're maintaining the consulting business' unique identity but also getting much closer to the how do you become great at consulting around businesses using technology angles, which is really where our sweet spot is.
Consulting: What sort of digital transformation initiatives are clients undertaking?
Burger: It really runs the gamut. Digital has become such a big word that digital itself has almost lost meaning. Consultants have probably played a great role in doing that. We've focused our digital initiatives. First of all we made the decision that digital isn't some service line we do, it's everything we do. Every one of our customers and their industries is going to go through profound changes in the next 3 years, 5 years, 10 years based on companies being created, technologies being introduced, ideas that are being asked on a constant basis. We've basically decided that our business is digital. It isn't digital and some other thing; our consulting business is really around digital.
Consulting: What are some of the biggest market opportunities you're seeing?
Burger: Cybersecurity is obviously a huge one. We're making sure we're in that market in a big way. From my vantage point I see it as a fantastic consulting market. If you look out a decade from now it's not hard to imagine keeping companies secure becoming a bigger business than integrating their systems. There's a whole legion of people who are not in that market who will need to be to make even the smallest predictions of where it might grow. Going and figuring out how to get value from SaaS implementations as IT and systems become more disposable, tools you may use temporarily may ultimately unsubscribe to, how do you create the right process context and think of it from a value realization aspect rather than just a technology implementation aspect. We have a big business in digital customer experience, that's roughly where we're seeing about half of our clients' investment, so there's a whole lot around rethinking how a customer is relating to you with all the modern channels and how they need to integrate. Changing business models and creating various revenue models in new ways that haven't been thought about. Finally change management is the other piece. There's a fairly well-established body of knowledge and people in the industry that are good at going in and figuring out how to do a three-year change program. But what happens when the three-year change program is really 36 different one-month change programs? And how do you build in the knowledge inside a client organization so they can change more on a constant basis rather than an event basis? The opportunities in this world are all over the place.
Consulting: What are some of the biggest challenges for companies undertaking digital initiatives?
Burger: You can miss on either end. By ignoring it, 'our industry's not changing, we're doing fine.' The initiatives become more like hobbies. There are companies that treat this as a side thing to pay attention to, not central to the change. The other end of it though is there are clients that dip into a bit of everything and don't necessarily tie it down to who they are as a business. They go almost too far and have a distraction problem. The world's changing so fast you catch up pretty quickly by just being the one paying attention today. There are opportunities out there in every industry and every market that are changing. The advantage from knowing the difference between what's noise, what's opportunity, what's a threat and what to do about it I think is going to really differentiate our clients. That's the center of our positioning now.
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