Is there such a thing as independence?

Client-side or supply-side? It seems such a simple question, but in practice the response is much more complicated.

Consulting firms can be notionally divided into those that offer independent advice and those which have obvious ties, perhaps to a specific vendor if they’re an IT consultancy or to a parent company in the case of the consulting arm of an outsourcing company. In theory “tied” firms have a vested interest in selling the services of their partners or parents and therefore cannot be trusted to act in their clients’ best interests.

But this logic falls over in several ways.

It implies that independence is the ideal and that any firm that’s “tied” is somehow second best. Yet, for a client who has already decided to implement an SAP system, going to a supplier that has strong links with SAP itself makes perfect sense. An “independent” IT firm can be at a disadvantage here: because it works with multiple hardware and software vendors, it may have less practical experience of a specific one.

It also ignores the fact that every firm, large or small, independent or tied, has an agenda. A tied firm may want to encourage its clients to buy a particular software package or outsource a specific function, but an independent firm has just as much of a vested interest in getting clients to buy more of its services. Indeed, if you quiz private sector clients about this issue, they either shrug their shoulders in puzzlement and indifference or darkly remind you that no one is independent. As they see it, independence is more an attitude of a consultant’s mind than the characteristic of a firm.

But in the public sector, organisations tend to be more concerned about the tied/independent distinction, driven by a combination of wanting to ensure fair and open competition and by a desire for oversight and governance. Thus, public sector organisations will use a tied supplier to deliver a service and an independent supplier to oversee delivery, but this can end up with a situation in which a firm that doesn’t know much about a subject supervising the work of one that does.

And that’s the nub of the problem with the independence question: that consulting firms and their clients tend to conflate “independent” with “generalist”. That doesn’t make sense any more than asking a GP to oversee the work of a cardiologist would. Getting a second opinion can be a good move, but only if you go to another expert.