Effective Business consulting has given rise to a new breed of ...

Article by Arun Gupta

Business consulting has grown quickly, with growth rates of the industry exceeding 20% in the 1980s and 1990s. As a business service, providing consulting solutions remains highly cyclical and linked to overall economic conditions. The consulting industry shrank during the 2001-2003 period, but has been experiencing slowly increasing growth since. In 2007, total global revenues for business consulting exceeded the 0 billion mark.

A number of specializations have come into existence, namely information technology consulting, human resource consulting, and others, many of which overlap, and most of which are offered by the large diversified consultancies listed below. So-called ?boutique? consultancies, however, are smaller organizations specializing in one or a few of such specializations.

In the current scenario, these types of consulting firms can be divided broadly into four categories:

1. Large, diversified organizations that offer a range of services, including information technology consulting in addition to a strategy consulting practice (e.g. Accenture, Deloitte). Some very large IT service providers have moved into consultancy as well and are also developing strategy practices (e.g. Satyam) 2. Medium-sized information technology consultancies that blend boutique style with some of the same services and technologies bigger players offer their clients.3. Large management and strategic consulting specialists that offer primarily strategy consulting but are not specialized in any specific industry 4. Boutique firms, often quite small, which have focused areas of consulting expertise in specific industries or technologies. Most of the boutiques were founded by famous business theorists. Small firms with less than ca. 50 employees are often referred to as niche consultancies. If they have a unique concept and market it successfully, they often grow out of this segment very fast or are bought by larger players interested in their know-how.Business consulting is becoming more prevalent in non-business related fields as well.

As the need for professional and specialized advice grows, other industries such as government, quasi-government and not-for-profit agencies are turning to the same managerial principles that have helped the private sector for years. One important and recent change in the industry has been the spin-off or separation of the consulting and the accounting units of the large diversified firms. For these firms, which began business as accounting firms, management consulting was a new extension to their business. But after a number of highly publicized scandals over accounting practices, such as the Enron scandal, accountancy began divestiture of their management consulting units, to more easily comply with the tighter regulatory scrutiny that followed.

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Source: http://www.sasparilly.com/2011/07/effective-business-consulting-has-given-rise-to-a-new-breed-of-leaders/

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