The Economist recently published an interesting article, Strategic moves: Big consulting and accounting firms are making a risky move into strategy work, about what seems to be a new consolidation movement amongst the major strategy consulting firms and operations specialists in a effort to offer both strategy and execution services. Traditionally, within enterprises and throughout the consulting industry, strategy and operations initiatives have taken shape completely apart from one another. The author of the article paints a fairly stark contrast between strategy consultancies, which he characterizes as companies with highly-paid partners who whisper counsel into the ears of CEOs, and operations specialists – such as outsourcers and big consulting and accounting firms – who “employ armies of lower-paid grunts and tend to answer to the client firm’s finance or tech chiefs.”
At Troux, we’ve always viewed this type of thinking as problematic. In order to run the most effective, agile, and productive organization, it is critical to bring business and technology decision makers together. By creating arbitrary divisions between ‘strategists’ and those actually responsible for execution, businesses risk potential inefficiencies, or worse, losing sight of the common goal.
Back to the article. The author notes there is some regulatory risk in this movement to consolidate; however, the fact that the world’s largest accounting and consulting firms are now performing acquisitions and developing plans to bring these disciplines together is important. Perhaps we were on to something after all. Enterprises the world over are now demanding a model that we’ve believed since our inception; one in which strategy and execution work hand in hand.
Troux has partnerships with consultancies and outsourcers large and small around the world, including ATOS, CSC, KPMG, Logicalis, PwC and many other well-known firms. These partners rely on Troux Enterprise Portfolio Management (EPM) solutions to connect business context to IT and help business leaders make smart strategy decisions. The result means executives gain clear line-of-sight across the entire IT landscape, better understand which assets are needed to function, operate and grow their business, and make well-informed investment and divestment decisions.
As consulting firms and IT outsourcers strive to evolve the business value they deliver and meet the demands of an increasingly complex enterprise customer, they are pointing to Enterprise Portfolio Management as a significant differentiator. EPM uniquely provides the contextual insight for the ‘connected enterprise’ enabling a sustainable way to improve agility, optimize investments and reduce risks – all benefits demanded by global enterprises today.
We knew all along that bringing the strategy and execution discussions together was a wise thing to do, but it’s always nice to see our approach validated by the biggest names in the industry.
Check out our on demand webinars and see how Troux customers such as Cisco have successfully coupled business strategy and IT operations.
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