I was asked this week, what I thought would be the most critical issues for consultants, vendors, and outsourcers for 2009. Here are my bullets (with a great deal of facts behind them). Contact me if you have any questions.
•Organizations, aka clients (e.g., CFO, COO, CAO), are seeking pragmatic and incremental solutions / advice that can be leveraged into longer-term sustainability – they are tired of the siloed vendors, consultants, and outsourcers all pushing their individual agendas.
•On-going advice coupled with process and technological sourcing will be the “rule of operations” for firms seeking to profit from the market chaos. Pure-play origins must yield to radical changes in client and household (i.e., end consumer) “health” during severe recessionary pressures including FS, insurance, healthcare, and telecommunications.
•Quantitative delivery techniques and methods must support the new provider offerings across the forward and reverse value chains using repeatable analytics, mining, and disparate data sources for legitimacy / value.
•Size is not a guarantee of success – in fact it is a weakness in today’s market. Moreover, the small and middle sized providers who embrace Globalization 5.0 will be able to not only deliver exceptional value for their clients, but also for themselves – ST and LT.
•Knowledge Orchestration (KO, beyond traditional collaboration) is more important for c-levels and their firms in 2009-2011 due to consumer demands, behaviors, and real wealth. Organizations must adopt – or perish.
•Consultants, vendors, and outsourcers must link together to exceed client expectations, while ensuring they themselves are able to survive the deep business model shakeouts that the next year will bring – using orchestration as their expanded collaboration techniques for profit. Today, each has a unique and different role, and only together can the brightest prosper against tomorrow’s survival demands.
•Government, political, social accountability and responsibility will permanently change the “valuation” models and assessments used to define structured arrangements and gain sharing – see w4.