Digital

By Fiona Czerniawska.

Once upon a time a group of consultants came up with a whizz-bang idea. “Let’s help cut clients’ procurement costs,” they said, ricocheting off the walls of their meeting room in an excitable fashion. Over the years that followed they criss-crossed the world doing just that: replacing distributed, uncontrolled purchasing with formal, centralised processes that scrutinised, then slashed, hundreds of millions of dollars of expenditure. Happy, even smug, the consultants retired to their luxury penthouses delighted to have added value in such a concrete, measurable fashion. So imagine their surprise when they found themselves some years later subject to these same controls. Go through procurement? Eugh! E-auctions? Eek! Meanwhile the new breed of chief procurement officers rubbed their bureaucratic hands with glee: yet more savings for the corporate coffers.

By Edward Haigh.

Stockholm’s much vaunted start-up scene is having little direct effect on the fortunes of Swedish consultants, but its indirect effect could yet prove significant.

Not that Sweden’s consultants need much of a leg up at the moment: The Swedish consulting market, already the Nordic region’s largest, grew by a respectable 4.9% in 2015 and shows few signs of slowing. Cross the Oresund, Svinesund or Torne river bridges (connecting Sweden respectively to Denmark, Norway and Finland) and you find a starkly different situation.

But the presence of what many are calling Europe’s Silicon Valley within their midst raises interesting questions for consultants in Stockholm because of what it says about the willingness (or not) of a new breed of digital businesses to turn to them for help.

By Fiona Czerniawska Nothing lasts for ever, certainly not upswings in the economic cycle. Yet the US consulting market, despite its size and maturity, has been growing faster than the average global rate for the last five years – and looks set to exceed the latter again in 2015 (our latest report on the US market predicts 10% growth, led by risk and regulation, and technology).