Disruption in the consulting industry moves into Act 2

ACT 1 has played out according to script. As predicted by industry watchers, the world of consulting has experienced a significant disruption over the past few years. Enterprises have roped in former consultants for internal strategy groups. At the same time, technology has gone mainstream. Businesses are demanding more comprehensive consulting services and want results, not just reports.

In response, consulting firms can be seen adding implementation services to their bouquet of offerings, evolving into end-to-end service providers. Pure-play strategy consulting houses have moved left, enhancing their portfolios with analytics, technology and programme-management capabilities and service lines; on their part, top-tier technology-services providers have moved right, by beefing up their management-consulting capabilities via accelerated hiring and merger-and-acquisition (M&A) activity.

In the last few years, many leading industry analysts and thought leaders have dwelt upon these developments, foretelling a phenomenon at work today in most top-tier consulting firms, where erstwhile strategy houses as well as IT-services consulting players have moved to the centre, holding out an end-to-end proposition, spanning strategy through implementation.