One-stop-shopping, GCC-style

Our recent research on the views of consulting clients in the GCC turned up one particular nugget that has lodged in my mind.

One of the questions we asked was around clients’ preference for using one firm to do lots of different pieces of work or to use a multitude of different suppliers.  Overall, we found that clients in the GCC are slightly more comfortable with the idea of one-stop-shopping than their equivalents in Western Europe.  64% said they’re willing to use the same firm to provide both advice and implementation, compared to 60% in Europe, and 52% said they get IT strategy and implementation from one firm, while the equivalent figure in Europe is 42%.  The chief exception to this is regulatory-driven work, which GCC clients are more concerned to keep separate.

However, the picture changed dramatically when we looked at what senior directors said in detail.  “We look for specific technical expertise,” said a typical CFO. “Occasionally firms bring us best practice which we think may have a wider application through our organisation, but generally we tend to work with a firm in just one area.”  “To my way of thinking,” commented an equally typical CIO, “the advantage of management consulting firms over IT services providers is that they can give me an independent view. Why would I risk that by asking them to step into the technology space?”

So how do we explain this apparent contradiction?

Part of the explanation stems from the fact that GCC clients have a particularly narrow definition of what is meant by implementation.  In Western Europe, almost 40% of clients want joint client-consulting teams to implement, roughly twice the proportion in the GCC.  By contrast, a third of GCC clients want their consultants to provide advice around implementation but to do the work themselves, three times the proportion in Europe.  Implementation in the GCC is really an extension of advice; it doesn’t necessarily – as it tends to in Europe – mean involving consultants in the hands-on delivery of a project.

But the other factor here is NIMBY-ism.  A CIO tends to be quite comfortable with the idea of using a single firm to formulate a strategy and then play an active role in implementing it, but will use different firms for different pieces of IT-related work.  Similarly, strategy directors think it is fine to use one firm for all aspects of IT, but will break any consulting work they buy into discrete areas to be done by different firms.  One-stop-shopping is good, providing it’s not in my back yard.

This has some significant implications for how consulting firms in the region sell work.  There may be a significant and growing opportunity offering bundled services to clients, but they’re probably being bought by different people, people who may have oversight of a particular but are not responsible for it.

And then, of course, there’s the question of whether the same is true in Western Europe...