Evan Vitale Consulting: Transcript: How the cloud is shaking up the consulting business

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Transcript: How the cloud is shaking up the consulting business – The Globe and Mail

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KARL MOORE – This is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, Talking Management for The Globe and Mail. Today I am delighted to speak to Bill Currie, who is the Managing Director of Deloitte for the Americas, the worlds largest professionals services firm.

Bill, what is the future of consulting? Where is it going from here?

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BILL CURRIE – If you look at our world we have advisory and implementation businesses. I think in our implementation businesses, big SAP (systems, applications and products in data processing), big ERP (Enterprise resource planning) packages, are being challenged by [the] cloud. So we are seeing organizations like Salesforce.com come out and others who are actually challenging the traditional SAP Oracle packages with a cloud-based, easier to implement [programs], and those kinds of things.

So SAP is anything but gone, or Oracle or any of the big ones, but they are for sure challenged and we are seeing very high growth in some of these other ones. So that is the technology piece where we are seeing new entrants leveraging new technologies and capabilities to be interruptors.

I think in the advisory businesses, what we are seeing are similar things. Technology, crowd sourcing, and other things are sort of challenging some of our historic paradigms around strategy consulting and around some operations consulting. So those businesses will be disrupted over time and we will have to evolve into new businesses, based on new technologies to support our clients. So understanding what the trends are in the marketplace and what new technologies are going to come out and what impact they will have both on us but more importantly on our clients becomes key because that is what our future holds.

KARL MOORE – How do you spot the next trend?

BILL CURRIE – We try to. First we have smart people, but we are inward like everyone else. So we work very hard to build partnerships and to look for the most innovative, brightest, interesting people outside of our firm. We look for acquisitions that bring us new capabilities to challenge our thinking or even the way we manage. We are pretty traditional in our history and even in our consulting business, even though it’s not anything like white shirt and blue ties – there are disciplines that go with that.

We look for people who are doing new and creative things in ways we have never thought about. And we either partner with them, or we buy them if it makes sense for us, often to learn about how to manage in that environment – a new environment – and to see whether we can, with our disciplines which are strong, or whether or not that is not for us and [instead] alliances would be better in the future.

Today it is ecosystems, right? So what alliances do we need, etc. So we look for education, institutions, we look at academic literature, we look at startups, we look at private equity firms, we look at a portfolio of things and we try to stay connected with those markets in as broad a way as we can.

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