The COVID 19 pandemic has brought about many changes that has overturned world order across nations, sectors and peoples. For one, never before had people imagined a time when the handshake, a globally recognised and acceptable greeting and gesture of goodwill and camaraderie would be abandoned. Like the old adage goes, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’, industries that previously presented a lukewarm approach to the adoption of technologies such as virtual communication, cloud computing and other SAAS services among other solutions have had an increased impetus to adopt the new technologies.
According to McKinsey , recent data show that we have vaulted five years forward in consumer and business digital adoption over the duration of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Companies have transitioned to remote sales and service teams and launched digital outreach to customers. Banks have rolled out solutions for customers to make flexible payment arrangements for loans and mortgages, grocery stores have shifted to online ordering and delivery, some making it their primary business, schools in many locales have pivoted to 100 percent online learning and digital classrooms, doctors have begun delivering telemedicine, aided by more flexible regulation, manufacturers are actively developing plans for “lights out” factories and supply chains and the list goes on. In fact, one CEO of a large tech company stated, “We are witnessing what will surely be remembered as a historic deployment of remote work and digital access to services across every domain.” The management consulting industry is no exception to these changes, several trends have been observed and are expected to continue growing at a high rate, if not exponentially.
One of the clear early winners of the Work From Home (WFM) boom has been the videoconference and team collaboration platform providers and those companies providing related tools and services. Remote Workforce Collaboration has been an active trend for some time as companies have increasingly sought to decouple their human assets (employees) from their physical assets (expensive offices.) This desire by enterprises, traditionally focused on cost containment. However, companies are recognizing more of the strategic advantages, not simply the cost advantages, in spinning up remote teams — i.e., speed to market, employee flexibility, collaboration, etc. This trend is expected to continue.
In addition, the Covid-19 crisis has enabled firms witness the rapid speed at which work can be moved online with minimal friction. So much has been moved into the virtual sphere that it has unquestionably caused a reappraisal of what being “virtual” means and its value to both consumers and enterprises. For decades, “telecommuting” was often viewed sceptically by many traditional corporations, with employees that telecommuted, either for necessity or lifestyle reasons were often viewed suspiciously by management and even fellow employees. Were they really working the hours they insisted they were working? How effective were they outside the office? How could they possibly be ‘in the loop’ when not physically in the office and privy to the water cooler conversations that often sets a company’s culture? Would their ‘virtual’ status hurt them when promotions were on the line? Etc. The crisis has lent legitimacy (and, now, urgency) to telecommuting and is elevating the practice. More seriousness is be given to virtual work and virtual teams. Millions across the globe are, at this very moment, upgrading their Work From Home (WFH) set-ups and more people are finding that they have been surprisingly productive in a WFH context and are rethinking the traditional ‘5 days a week in the office’ routine which defined much of their professional lives. Across the country, companies are evaluating how when the crisis lifts whether it makes sense to reconstitute their teams entirely back in their offices as they existed pre-quarantine or, perhaps, shift to flexi-time.
An impact of the covid-19 crisis that cannot be overstated is the requirement to Establish a digital presence. While digitally native brands, i.e. those born on the web untethered from brick and mortar origins is not a new phenomenon. For traditional brick and mortar, there is an increasing requirement for firms to establish digital presence through the social media platforms, e-conferences and so on due to the inability to undertake in-person meetings, events etc. This trend is expected to continue, with a rapid expansion of digitally native brands that will sweep across dozens of categories and sectors where, such brands were hitherto not considered viable, and more consumers are expected to prefer the convenience and cost effectives of transacting and connecting online.
Among the key trends being witnessed is the use of analytics to deliver real time information and vale. Using big data and analytics has always been on a steady growth trajectory and then COVID-19 exploded and made the need for data even greater. The need for data to make all business decisions has grown, but this year, we saw data analytics being used in real time to make critical business and life-saving decisions, with companies and institutions like Johns Hopkins and SAS created COVID-19 health dashboards that compiled data from a myriad of sources to help governments and businesses make decisions to protect citizens, employees, and other stakeholders. This is expected to continue with companies making investment into data and analytics capabilities that power faster, leaner, smarter and more effective operations in the wake of economic strains caused by the public health crisis.
It is worth noting that most consulting services rely on humans as the fundamental source of research, analysis, recommendations, process definition, process management, and facilitation. In addition, the Billable time-based business model where the fee structure underlying most consulting services is tied to billable hours or days, which may at times encourages lengthy, overstaffed engagements to maximize revenue by some firms.
With the increasing pace of change, the moment a research report, competitive analysis, or strategic plan is delivered to a client, its currency and relevance rapidly diminishes as new trends, issues, and unforeseen disrupters arise. This therefore requires firms to adopt fast paced and effective delivery of products and services to maximise on the time bound value of the product and service.
Traditionally, the models, templates, and tools of the consulting trade have historically been kept “secret” by consultants and locked away as intellectual capital. The adoption of online services and tools, i.e. the “democratization” of just about everything, including management information and knowledge, so that anyone can access and apply “best practices” on their own will continue, requiring consultants to devise new models to derive value in the looming era of knowledge commoditization.
Finally, as discussed above, the rapid migration of so much of what we do and how we interact to a virtual context is stretching our notions of what can exist virtually and what cannot. It will also lead to new categories of experiences that will exist only in a virtual context.