An interesting perspective on the increasing overlap between traditional consulting firms and agencies, both of which are helping traditional businesses transform themselves to cope with the digital age.
Consulting firms and design agencies are converging into a common industrial arena, according to IBM iX executive Matt Candy. Amid an age of disruption, designers are thought by consultants to be at the heart of many solutions for business problems of the future, and as such Candy anticipated that the boundaries between management consultancies and digital agencies is likely to shift, blur and eventually disappear. In line with this, in what Candy termed an “arms race to fill the skills gap” created by the digital revolution, top consulting firms broke out multi-million war chests last year in order to fulfil targeted acquisition campaigns in the design space during 2017. This saw the MBB strategy firms and the Big Four of the professional services world quickly building digital arms, alongside Accenture which made the most notable spend of $1.2 billion.
