Last week I enjoyed a particularly interesting luncheon meeting with a practice head partner from IBM Canada where we discussed the launch of their new consulting practice in the Business Intelligence space.
After years of struggling to figure out the optimal way to combine the acquired talent and experience of PriceWaterhouseCoopers Consulting with the deep technical and process experience of "big blue" it appears that they may have found a winning formula.
The business intelligence space is particularly well suited to the combination of business and technology consulting, as a truly useful BI solution necessarily leverages industry expertise and technical expertise.
In our experience few companies have really been good at delivering both. Either they had great insight and experience gained by working in the trenches of the industry or they had spiffy tools and no idea what constitutes useful management information. Rare indeed is the case where both were available from the same vendor and rarer still is the vendor who will admit their weaknesses in a truly forthright manner.
I am hoping IBM has it together on this venture because it is a model that I really believe in. For most banks, the power of fact-based intelligence is still amazingly underdeveloped. My sense is that efficiency runs about 25% or more off optimum as a direct result (more on that later). Do you think this formula for packaging business intelligence will help you ?
