Management consulting as an industry is going through a lot of change mainly brought about by digital transformation. In fact these days no firm is formulating its corporate strategy without aligning the same with technology. Thus the acronym SMAC has emerged to notify Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud. Cognizant being a technology company at heart has been among the first movers and thus growing at great pace in consulting. Clients no longer accept the traditional hierarchy bound model but instead demand a system based on agility. 

HR has for long promised to become a strategic partner to businesses yet parameters have not been conclusively defined. In South-East Asia, certain parameters have been defined to gauge efficiency of HR. These parameters were finalized post a management consulting report by Michael Page. Nearly 80% of respondents in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia feel that staff turnover is most important indicator to assess HR’s performance followed by employee engagement. Employee performance is third most important. Talent management is also given top priority in India and Turkey in addition to South East Asia.

Firms often flounder at employee engagement and this leads to a high attrition rate. On-boarding for new hires is a very difficult task and thus some firms are doing the same in unique manner. Achievers is one such example. The moment a person accepts a job offer, the next day the person is sent a token gift. Post joining every thirty, sixty and ninety days job feedback must be provided by them. Talent management is further boosted by the fact that for senior employees ‘stay interviews’ are conducted periodically.

Business consulting giant Gartner has come up with a list of organizations doing best at providing talent management suites. Cornerstone On Demand, Oracle and SAP have been singled out for bringing out best portals. As per their market research, more than a third of firms were using some such software or the other. Magic Quadrant and Taleo are two other very useful such suites. SuccessFactors is one such software which is most compatible to the Cloud. Infor, Ultimate and Workday can also avail consolation prizes in this line for their commendable work. 

A number of organizations these days are exploring the opportunities of open innovation. This approach seeks to experiment with business innovation beyond the firm’s industry. One of its major advantages is transparency as firms need to collaborate with the external world in order to pursue this. Also clarity becomes important as organizations need to be clear as to where and for what they are looking at the outside world. Else this may become a wild goose chase. Crucially open innovation requires commitment as there may be failures and challenges along the way before arriving at the intended result.

Data scientists have become invaluable in conducting valid business analysis in the present business world. Certain key traits have been identified by business research which they must possess in order to benefit the organization. First of all they must have a sound understanding as well as appreciation of data. They must have some base knowledge of engineering to best utilize metrics and correlations. However data science is not an exact one, it has elements of art and that is something the concerned person must realize. They must be able to communicate effectively with the various stakeholders. Finally, the data scientist beyond being a number cruncher must have business acumen to derive meaningful results for the organization.

Business research conducted by the Hackett Group has found out that organizations with the best of HR departments end up spending nearly two-fifths less than their peers. In fact they operate with about thirty percent lower workforce by numbers. This is possible due to effective workforce planning during the corporate strategylevel. Their processes are also all well aligned to overall group needs and technology is increasingly used for automation purposes. This results in average savings of about US $ seventeen million annually for organizations worth around ten billion in yearly revenues.