| Topic Name: |
Strategy consulting at Accenture |
| Message Name: |
It's a shame about strats |
| Date Posted: |
03/16/2006 |
| In Reply To: |
Approx. 95 or 96% of ACN's client facing business is in IT services. This includes both short-term IT services (IT "consulting") and long-term staffing of IT services ("Services" or outsourcing). This 96% does not include any of ACN's partially owned (Avanade) or 100% owned (ATS) subsidaries, which are also in the IT services industry. If you add those companies, than ACN is more like 98 or 99% in the IT services industry.
However, like many companies, ACN has some products or services outside of their main line of products. (Microsoft, for example, owns a publishing business, but no one would think of Microsoft as a publishing company.)
Approx. 4 - 5% of Accenture's client-facing work is in management consulting. Accenture calls t "business consulting." This includes FPM (financial management), HRM (Human resource consulting), SCM (the business side of strategic sourcing and supply chain management), CRM (the analytic side of customer resource management, this group works very closely with the BI and CRM people on the main, IT, part of the company) and S&BA (strategy and business architecture, also known as "strat"). All of these practices, together, represent less than 5% of the professional staff, and "strat" is just one of five of these areas.
"Strat" does not have a bad reputation, despite what some folks may say on this message board. OK, compared to the old Andersen Consulting's strat group's reputation, ACN's reputation here is far less and, certainly compared to any of the Tier-1 firms or any of the tier-2 firms that are at the top of tier-2, ACN may not exactly shine. However, it IS solidly in the middle tier-2. Due to the sheer size of the ACN headcount, as a whole, the business consulting group has close to 4,000 people, with a large percentage of that in the "strat" group. It's basically a showcase business, allowing us to put the phrase CONSULTING * TECHNOLOGY * OUTSOURCING on the front of our home page. With out strat and the other 4 busines consulting groups, we could only say TECHNOLOGY * OUTSOURCING.
By the way, consulting (including S&BA) does sometimes overlap with the other two groups, technology and outsourcing. Sometimes, on an IT integration or new development engagement, someone from S&BA will be thrown on the team to provide some industry related knowledge to the requirement gathering. Outsourcing ("services") has an entire group of S&BA people who are dedicated to "transformational outsourcing", which is basically helping a client understand and achieve competitive advantage by using Accenture's Services group for technical resources and for cost-effective IT staffing.
The final breakdown, as of the end of last year, was approximately CONSULTING (4%), TECHNOLOGY (62%) and IT OUTSOURCING (34%). Keep in mind that the 4% in CONSULTING comprises of the same number of people as some of the small and mid-size consulting outfits out there. |
| Message: |
Vooter, if this board had a respected list, you'd be on mine.
Now, allow me rant on.
I think it's a shame that ACN doesn't have a larger strategy group. With the Wipros, Tatas, and InfoSyses of the world vying for a chunch of the ICT pie, ACN needs to start finding niches that it can leverage both its technology and business management knowledge and dominate.
ACN will always be a tech firm at its core, but it would not hurt to expands into strategy, brand management, etc. Maybe I'm pushing it here, but ...
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