EY hosted its 2018 Technology Summit at one of its flagship wavespace innovation centers in Toronto, Canada to update industry analysts on recent strategic initiatives undertaken by EY's technology consulting practice. This was the second of such meetings with the inaugural event held in 2017. The summit highlighted how EY is adapting to a discernable trend change in client expectations for consultants to not only arrive with formed or semi-formed ideas and solutions that solve their commercial and operational problems but also to be able to collaborate with them in co-creating and activating solutions that result in measurable positive outcomes.
"In this environment," says Dan Higgins, Global Lead for EY's Technology Consulting practice, "client expectations rapidly evolve and services and products increasingly converge, we need to become more proactive in bringing innovative solutions and ecosystems that address real client challenges. This necessitates a change in the way we as consultants organize to deliver our services." Over the next day and a half, Higgins and his colleagues highlighted several initiatives EY is taking to meet client needs.
Sector-Based Solutions
The most important initiative, however, is the increased focus of the Technology practice's strategy on developing and delivering sector-based, client-oriented solutions that accelerate the implementation and realization of positive client outcomes. The premise is simple; it is to start with a challenging real-world business issue then introduce technology to solve the problem, but it required EY to undertake a major reorganization of its technology organization over the last year into three groups comprised of client-facing product managers, internal technology developers, and client/product support teams. It then altered the way it went to market, assigning product development managers to accompany client service partners to bring back their understanding of client or industry issues to their tech teams who then unleash their creativity and knowledge of cutting-edge technologies to develop innovative solutions. It also rolled out a common, standardized technology platform to host and scale these solutions across EY's global network. The firm highlighted how it overcame practical issues to this new model such as in creating an agile, start-up culture within a large, global enterprise, attracting non-consulting talent, and creating alternative career paths and reward systems for product managers, architects, designers, and developers.
Crowdsourcing
Harnessing ecosystems and crowdsourcing is another initiative the firm is using to drive innovation, industrialization and infusion. To this end, EY is leveraging Cognistreamer, an acquired collaboration management platform that supports the innovation process via a secure portal which facilitates internal and external colleagues, partners and clients to share, enrich and assess innovative ideas. Cognistreamer, in turn, supports access to other ecosystem partners and assets, such as Girls Who Code, Datascience.net and Nimble Bee. The latter being a crowdsourcing platform that invites students and universities to submit ideas that can be purchased by the firm or its clients and complements EY's existing university collaborations where students can apply their learning to solve real-life client problems.
These initiatives require the firm to accept higher risk regarding its commitment of resources as it increasingly partners and co-invests with clients and alliance partners in developing products and business models. Managing this risk necessitates experimentation with new business arrangements that favor the sharing of risk and reward in the form of value-based billing or retained ownership of core intellectual property that the firm can reuse to accelerate value creation at other clients. Another scenario involves expanding client conversations beyond the CIO to the CFO as clients seek to take costs out of existing businesses to fund new technology-enabled business opportunities.
Concerning risk, EY is not only adopting its strategy to help clients harness technology to reduce the cost of risk functions (legal, regulation, and compliance), but is also incorporating the consideration of risk as an integral part of the innovation process. The idea is to avoid the all-too- common experience where new products get killed at the tail end of the commercialization process as they make their way through legal, regulation and compliance hurdles. The challenge here is retraining risk professionals to adopt a mindset that seeks not to avoid risk but instead optimize risk and reward in creating differentiated products and services.
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