Market conditions

By Julie Ahadi.

In a break to the norm, and to give ourselves a rest from barking on about digital, we thought it might be interesting to look at one of the major standout non-trends unearthed by our 2018 Australia Consulting Market report*: the flatlining and blink-and-you-may-miss-it performance of people (HR) firms. And it’s pretty dire.

Claiming just 1% of market share, it’s abundantly clear that traditional HR firms haven’t quite managed to acquire the agility needed to outmanoeuvre the Big Four and strategy firms—and anyone else with a killer instinct—to keep pace with the times and remain relevant.

Why? Well, both in Australia and around the world, HR consulting has seen relatively slow growth in recent years, as clients’ need for support in this area has either been piecemeal or generally just lower down the list than, well, pretty much anything else you can think of.

By Lindsay Stark.

The Eastern Europe consulting market experienced a solid year in 2017, resulting in every market in the region growing faster than in 2016, and overall growth of 6.7%. Although the region still continues to lag behind Western Europe in the digital space, digital transformation proved to be one of the major drivers of consulting demand, as clients strove to reduce costs and drive efficiency. Digital initiatives accounted for 23% of the region’s consulting revenues in 2017, up 13% on 2016’s numbers.

By Fiona Czerniawska.

In 1610, after months of painstaking work grinding his own lens, Galileo Galilei finally held his new telescope up to the night sky. What he saw astonished him: instead of a few hundred stars, he could see thousands, even millions.

The consulting “universe” has long been populated by a small number of large “planets”–strategy, technology, operational improvement, and so on–but if you were to carry out an equivalent of Galileo’s exercise in today’s market, then you’d see something that looks more like the Milky Way than a simple solar system.

The consulting market is fragmenting. Centrifugal forces are breaking up our familiar planets, based on the precise expertise required, on a changing sense of what a “reasonable” price is, and on a new generation of clients who know that the way they want to buy from consulting firms isn’t necessarily how the firm wants to sell or deliver to them.