How digital is re-writing the rules of competition for consulting firms

By Fiona Czerniawska

It was an innocuous question, the kind we ask clients every day: which firms did you consider for this project? The project was digital transformation – the kind of project we hear about every day, but the answer made me sit up and pay attention: “We’d invited a range of strategy and technology firms to bid, but in the end it was Accenture versus BCG.”

There are many things about this response I found interesting. Who’d have thought, five years ago, that a client would bracket these two firms so closely together? The fact they do is testimony to the convergence between what’s hitherto been regarded as the opposite ends of the consulting spectrum: strategy and technology. We have digital to thank (blame?) for that: a client that’s assessing how to digitise their business is as much interested in how to change their business model as they are to take advantage of new technology, so strategy and technology (and, by extension, strategy and technology firms) are more on a par than they’ve ever been.

This anecdotal feedback reinforces something we’ve been hearing about more generally in our research into client perceptions. The graph below shows the proportion of clients (we’re just looking at the US here) who rated the quality of consulting firms’ work around digitisation ‘high’ or ‘very high’, with the highest-rated firm scoring a heady 69% compared to a rather underwhelming 42% for the lowest-rated. Even more interesting than the range is the distribution of firm types. The top four are a mixture of strategy firms and technology firms, while the Big Four are the bottom four.

While strategy and technology firms are seen to be leading the way, the Big Four have been squeezed out and are perceived to offer neither the vision and industry knowledge of a strategy firm, nor the in-depth understanding of a technology one. Caught between two stools, the Big Four may be in danger of falling down the middle – and missing out on the digital opportunity as a result.