Consulting News

Hospitals are choking on paper. The endless trail of treatment orders, signatures, prescriptions, and yet more signatures can force a physician, it often…

wanted to respond to your interview with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, "Larry Ties the Knot" (July, p. 18), and say that inevitably both sides are right. However, Oracle's claim seems somewhat self-serving. Of course, they want to move out of being a consulting company and move to being a pervasive enterprise-wide product vendor — the margins are much higher. Also, the collaboration between companies like Oracle and Bain is suspect for the reason that it is self-serving and takes away the objectivity of the strategy company.

For an industry built on the concept of strategic change, consulting hasn’t changed much since Marvin Bower took the reins at McKinsey & Co. back in 1937. Now, as then, consultants talk about working cases, as if we are defense lawyers distancing ourselves from an unsavory client. Like the early acolytes of time-and-motion studies, we profess a detached, scientific objectivity, analyzing our corporate specimens the way entomologists pin butterfly wings to a board. And we still communicate in our own Esperanto, only now it’s written in Power- Point. Worst of all, we’re still brains for hire. Have contract, will travel — expenses reimbursable, of course.

Wireless, the eight-letter modifier carrying powerful new meaning in the consulting world, now describes an escalating cluster of client opportunities looming on the horizon. But just how far away those opportunities lie remains anyone’s guess.

Even before the Internet exploded on the scene, the financial services industry was in turmoil. Regulations that kept banks separate from investment firms and insurance companies were crumbling. Customers were demanding services and convenience and were growing increasingly restless, jumping to whoever offered the lowest rate or the highest return, as the situation demanded. New financial services competitors appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Then it hit. Suddenly, customers, already fickle enough, could competitively shop conventional and nonconventional financial services at the click of the mouse, comparing rates and terms with ease. New players from completely outside the financial services industry — telecommunications companies, Web portals, even software companies — were offering to do things that financial services firms had long considered their exclusive franchise.

Once upon a time in the early days of the 21st century, a technology slumber swept across the land, causing consultants to explore some lesser-known--yet indeed most vibrant-- corners of the tech world.