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CONCURRENT-CONVERGENT
STRATEGY in IT Consulting
The concurrent-convergent strategy in IT consulting can be exploited to
increase client efficiency, to draw conceptual and practical lessons for other
information-based applications, and to develop synergy between
IT consulting and business process reengineering.
THE concurrent-convergent strategy in IT con- procurement, analysis, communication, and use
sulting, as practiced perhaps most prominently by of information to efficiently implement the out-
Cap Gemini Ernst & Young (CGEY) [8], can be comes. In particular, CGEY offers concurrent-
interpreted to follow from concurrence or parallel convergent consulting in the design,
attention, convergence or integration, and their construction, implementation, and support of
joint application to information systems design, information systems in business process solutions,
development, transformation, and management. customer needs analysis, and performance bench-
It seeks to increase client efficiency by imple- marking, under technical environments ranging
menting parallel and integrated information- from PC networks to mainframes, and local to
based solutions in business process development, global configurations. To ensure efficiency after
customization and enhancement, dedicated ser- systems installation, the strategy seeks to mobilize
vice support, and context-oriented R&D. The client resources in such a way that the effects of
concurrent-convergent strategy represents an external consulting are endogenously enhanced
essential element in the CGEY group’s efforts to over time. A maximized percentage of the firm’s
expand business horizons in manufacturing, human and physical resources is therefore drawn
telecommunications, finance, and other sectors. into the ambit of the concurrent-convergent strat-
In addition to enterprise resource planning, the egy, mainly by means of systems application man-
group has been extensively involved in communi- agement and reengineering. Given the role of data
cations and wireless Internet access, using its processing in modern business, emphasis is placed
expertise in channels and protocols involving the on application enhancement in central and dis-
Internet, email, interactive kiosks, and telephone tributed computing services at all levels. As a
networks. With the introduction of consultant corollary, high importance is attached to long-
certification procedures, training centers, skill term support. In the case of CGEY, its service
groups, and the Rapid Application Development contracts are typically comprehensive in scope,
initiative, it has established itself as an important covering both maintenance and enhancement.
business ally and partner of such market leaders as Applications have been consistently developed to
Cisco Systems, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Sun ISO 9001 standards and tailored to meet firm-
Microsystems [2, 4–7, 10]. specific requirements, with concurrence-conver-
During its evolution, the idea of concurrence- gence being efficiently exploited to interface
convergence has been applied to the relationships between clients and consulting teams.
and interactions between consulting and the Under the context-oriented R&D component
development, transformation, and management of the concurrent-convergent strategy, new and
of information systems. Concurrent consulting is advanced IT is continuously but selectively trans-
focused in parallel on information-based plan- mitted from laboratories to consulting teams.
ning and decision making: Simultaneously, the CGEY has implemented an innovative Applied
principle of convergence guides integration in the Knowledge Management (AKM) protocol to allo-