IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Digital Strategy Consulting 2019

The IDC MarketScape chart is a scatter plot with the y-axis labeled "Capabilities" and the x-axis labeled "Strategies." The chart is divided into four quadrants: Leaders (top right), Major Players (center), Contenders (bottom left), and Participants (bottom right). The following companies are plotted:

• Leaders: BCG, McKinsey, Accenture
• Major Players: EY, IBM, PwC, Publicis Sapient
• Deloitte: Positioned between Major Players and Leaders
• KPMG: Positioned between Major Players and Contenders
• Globant: Contenders
• Capgemini: Participants

Please see the Appendix for detailed methodology, market definition, and scoring criteria.

The content for this excerpt was taken directly from IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Digital Strategy Consulting Services 2019 Vendor Assessment (Doc # US43700818). All or parts of the following sections are included: IDC Opinion, IDC MarketScape Vendor Inclusion Criteria, Essential Guidance, Vendor Summary Profile, Appendix, and Learn More. Figure 1 is also included.

This study represents the vendor assessment model called IDC MarketScape. It is a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the characteristics that explain a vendor's current and future success worldwide. The study assesses the worldwide capabilities and business strategies of 11 prominent digital strategy consulting suppliers, using a comprehensive evaluation framework that includes parameters expected to be most conducive to vendor success in providing world-leading digital strategy consulting services for clients in both the short and long term.

A significant component of this evaluation is end-client input: the inclusion of digital strategy consulting buyers' perception of the key characteristics and capabilities of consulting providers. This input was gathered primarily from direct interaction with vendors' reference clients, supplemented with the findings of a large-scale (710 responses) worldwide field survey of digital strategy consulting buyers.

The majority of the vendors assessed in this study are among the largest business consulting providers globally, measured by 2017 revenue. As one would expect, these firms performed very well on this assessment, with most falling into the Leaders category. An evaluation with a larger spread of vendor sizes might have included more vendors in the Major Players and Contender categories.

Digital strategy consultancy addresses both the enterprise "cost agenda" (the need to drive efficiency, increase profitability, and reduce costs) and the "growth agenda" (the need to increase revenue, strengthen cash flow, and build the organization's brand). These two types of strategic objectives are currently evenly matched in importance, according to IDC's 2019 Worldwide Global Buyer Perception of Digital Strategy Consulting Services Providers Survey (April 2019):

• The most cited response (21% of respondents) for the most important strategic business objective was "make our business more efficient and profitable."
• The second most cited response (15%) was "attract, retain, engage, and monetize our customers better."
• Overall, just over half (53%) of survey respondents worldwide chose growth-oriented themes as their top strategic objectives, while just under half (47%) chose themes related to cost and efficiency.

This fine balance between "growth" and "cost" is reflected in the actual work that digital strategy consulting vendors are asked to carry out. When asked about a key recent digital strategy consulting project:

• The most cited strategic objective (22%) was "make our business more efficient and profitable" (cost agenda).
• The second-most cited response (20%) was "attract, retain, engage, and monetize our customers better" (growth agenda).
• Overall, 52% of organizations cited a "growth agenda" strategic objective as the driver of their digital strategy consulting project, while 48% cited a "cost agenda" objective.

Digital strategy consulting work therefore reflects the mixture of strategic business objectives among buyer organizations.

Overall, digital strategy consulting services buyers are satisfied with what they are buying. IDC asked buyers to rate their vendors on a scale of 1-5 across a range of capabilities and strategies. On average, reference clients (both those put forward by vendors and those from the anonymized field survey) gave these service providers generally high marks.

Key findings include the following areas where digital strategy consulting vendors are performing well (and not so well), according to input from reference clients:

• Challenging the client to accept new approaches or solutions was the area where reference clients were on average most satisfied. This suggests that consultancies are still doing best what they traditionally do best – bringing objective fresh thinking and new best practices to the client.
• The next best-performing areas were providing digital-focused business strategy capabilities and the quality of their professional staff. These are "bread and butter" areas where clients expect high proficiency, and satisfaction is high.
• The area where reference clients rated their vendors lowest was in the transfer of knowledge/skills to clients' employees. This has long been a recurring complaint among consultancy buyers.
• Two other areas with relatively lower ratings were the provision of supporting capabilities in technology usage/implementation and the provision of value-creating innovation. For more analysis, see the Advice for Technology Buyers section.

This research includes analysis of offerings from firms with digital strategy consulting and agency offerings worldwide, including those with broad portfolios and specialty services spanning IDC’s research coverage.

This assessment is designed to evaluate the characteristics and buyer perceptions of each vendor, as opposed to its size or the breadth of its services. It mostly considers vendors with very large business consulting businesses (more than $1 billion in business consulting revenue in 2017) whose digital strategy consulting capabilities exist alongside a broad set of business consulting and IT services capabilities and offerings.

Other vendors with narrower services portfolios and/or smaller business consulting businesses may also be capable of providing the breadth and quality of digital strategy consulting services required by clients. An organization’s specific objectives and requirements will play a significant role in determining which firm should be considered for any engagement. This evaluation should not be considered a “final judgment” on the firms to consider for an engagement.

Buyers should use this IDC MarketScape as one tool in their qualification and selection of potential digital strategy consulting providers. All the vendors in this study have capabilities to help you create a successful strategy for using digital technologies to create business value. The choice about which services you buy from an external vendor, and which vendor or vendors you buy them from, should be driven by your unique opportunities and challenges at any time.

Key lessons from buyers of digital strategy consulting services include the following factors to look for, over and above the “table stakes” of digital strategy capabilities:

• Look for evidence that the vendor can help you build innovation at scale. For leading organizations, the focus of digital strategy has moved from creating the capabilities and environment for experimentation to building the structures, organizational behavior, and culture that allow innovation to happen at scale. Innovation should be continuous and organization-wide, not limited to elite teams or isolated skunk works. It should be supported by structure, financial systems, and cultural attributes that encourage collaborative, innovative thinking and relentless customer centricity.
• Look for cultural and personal fit with your digital strategy consulting vendor. Consulting is still a “people business,” and it’s important for consultants to work well with their clients on a personal level. Buyers who rated their vendors most highly tended to have a strong personal connection with their lead consultant, built on empathy, respect, and professional commitment.
• Look for the same commitment, vision, and relentless drive among people at all levels of the consultant’s organization. A traditional criticism is that consultancies field their best people for the pitch but then assign less experienced staff for the actual engagement – the “school bus syndrome.” Some clients noted that the quality, proactivity, and commitment of senior staff were not always replicated among junior staff. While consultancies cannot clone their best people, and talent wars make it difficult to ensure all employees embody the consultancy’s values, some clients felt vendors could do more to ensure staff at all levels embody the best characteristics of the organization. As one client put it, “Every consultancy brings in the big guns for the pitch, but when it’s time for the actual implementation and for the long haul, those guys tend to disappear. The junior guys have a ton of potential, but I want to see them learning less on the job and learning more from their senior peers.” Some buyers marked their vendor down for this reason.

When considering a digital strategy consulting vendor, pay special attention to four areas where buyers were on average less satisfied:

• Transfer of vendor knowledge and skills to the client’s employees. This has long been seen as a weakness in the consulting industry. While it has improved, it was still one of the two lowest-rated areas. One client had to extend the project to spend more time on training, feeling the consultancy was “capable of doing this, but could be better at it.” When contracting, ensure that transfer of knowledge and expertise is explicitly built into the agreement before work begins.
• Differentiation among vendors. Consultancies tend to offer similar services, and innovations are quickly copied. Longer-term differentiation often resides in the vendor’s way of doing things, in the “how” as much as the “what,” and in its intellectual property (methodologies, frameworks, tools). When selecting partners, press them for what really differentiates them from their peers.
• Supporting capabilities in technology usage/implementation. It is increasingly difficult to separate digital-focused consultancy from implementation. Corporate strategy is now created and refined on a continuous, real-time basis, using iterative cycles in which insights from digital implementation feed back into strategy. Strategy development often involves prototyping MVPs and testing new technologies. Technology expertise almost always plays a role in strategy creation. Buyers should look for proof of capabilities and experience in technology implementation and ensure these will be available during engagements. However, the technology “tail” should not wave the strategy “dog.” Many consultancies have excellent specialized digital implementation capabilities without needing a high-volume IT services delivery machine.
• Delivery of value-creating innovation. Innovation for its own sake creates no lasting value – the point is to achieve business goals. Five years ago, buyers wanted evidence that vendors were on top of disruptive new technologies and innovative in their application. Today, innovation is taken for granted; it is part of the organizational fabric. The challenge is to ensure innovation is continuous, scalable, and addresses the right issues with measurable effect. Buyers should press vendors for evidence of helping clients carry out continuous innovation at scale and focusing on innovation that matters strategically.

This section briefly explains IDC’s key observations resulting in a vendor’s position in the IDC MarketScape. While every vendor is evaluated against each of the criteria outlined in the Appendix, the description here provides a summary of each vendor’s strengths and challenges.

Publicis Sapient is positioned as a Leader in the worldwide 2019 IDC MarketScape for digital strategy consulting services.

Publicis Sapient is the digital business transformation arm of Publicis Groupe. The group does not publish revenue for Publicis Sapient, but overall, the group reported revenue of just under €10 billion in 2018. Publicis Sapient has a history of digital and web-based consulting dating back to the 1990s.

Publicis Sapient has more than 20,000 employees across 53 offices globally, increasingly servicing clients in Asia/Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa.

Publicis Sapient goes to market through industry-focused groups within countries. The company produces insights and intellectual assets to support digital strategy consulting capabilities for these industry groups through Global Capability Groups, Practices, and Shared Service Teams:

• Global Capability Groups: Responsible for talent development and creating methodologies, intellectual property, and industry benchmark data, stored in the company’s Knowledge Management function.
• Practices: Small teams assembled to incubate new high-growth, cross-industry propositions in collaboration with industry teams and to build the skills/crafts needed to deliver and maintain strategic alliances. Current practices include AI and Data Science, Customer Experience Platforms, Salesforce, IT Modernization/Engineering Transformation, Cloud, and Consumer Data Platforms.

Strategy & Consulting is a core capability group within Publicis Sapient. Each member is pegged to a craft area (e.g., corporate strategy) and aligned to an industry group (e.g., retail). Crafts include:

• Corporate Strategy: Helps clients define enterprise and business unit-level digital strategies
• Consumer and Experience Strategy: Creates the end-state consumer and/or colleague experience
• Technology Strategy: Identifies, assesses, and defines the required technologies to enable digital strategy and customer/colleague experience
• Data Strategy: Identifies data and analytics use cases, AI/ML and robotics strategy, data modeling, data sourcing and cleansing, data governance, and more
• Innovation: Helps clients assess the opportunity and scope for new business model innovation

Publicis Sapient has an innovation center network, including Emerging Experience Labs in Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Paris, and Munich; dedicated "P-Lab" Incubators in Atlanta, Boston, and Chicago; Mobile Centers of Excellence in Atlanta, Boston, and Stockholm; and Digital Design Labs in Atlanta, NYC, and Portland, Oregon.

Publicis Sapient's go-to-market strategy leads with expertise in industries including financial services, retail, consumer products, transportation and mobility, telecommunications, media and technology, travel and hospitality, energy and commodities, healthcare, and the public sector.

Clients include Nissan, Carrefour, Carnival Corporation, Walmart, and Samsung. Key technology partners include Salesforce, Adobe, Google, IBM (Watson Customer Engagement), Microsoft, and SAP.

Publicis Sapient has processes for developing bold innovations:

• Exploring and understanding stakeholders' needs (framing opportunities and gaining insight into possible solutions)
• Idea Generation (working with clients to create fewer, bigger ideas, not hundreds of small ones)
• Idea Development (taking innovations from concept to in-market pilots ready for scale)
• Scaling Innovations (taking innovations from pilots to new businesses)

The company typically begins a client engagement using its Publicis Sapient Way for DBT strategy, a multidisciplinary approach combining Experience, Strategy, and Technology. The resulting road map is managed as a mixed backlog of epics (customer/client experience, capability/process, organization/training, strategic enablers, etc.). After the strategy phase, the company manages the epic backlog using its Continuous Exploration process.

Publicis Sapient has proprietary assets including Synapse, a platform for rapid data lineage assessments and planning, and Marcel, the parent group's proprietary AI-powered personal assistant for practitioners that combines research, intelligence, and proprietary knowledge with the ability to find expertise and build connections across the firm.

Publicis Sapient partners with faculty from academic institutions including Singularity University, the University of Oxford, MIT, and Stanford University. The company also maintains a network of venture capital firms and start-ups to challenge executives to spot opportunities for disruption and advise clients on internal and corporate venturing, as well as to reflect on their organization’s digital strategy.

Publicis Sapient rated highly in six areas by clients: transferring knowledge and skills to clients’ employees, functional-specific digital strategy capabilities, supporting capabilities in technology, delivering value-creating innovation, differentiation from competitors, and client willingness to recommend the vendor to any company. Clients also noted digital-focused business strategy capabilities, the quality of its digital strategy professionals, and willingness to recommend the vendor to industry peers.

Client comments included:

• “Publicis Sapient took a very challenging brief and clearly articulated the strategy in a way that is customer focused, credible and believable.”
• “Their focus from strategy to product design and delivery is a clear point of differentiation.”
• “Their team learned about a complex industry and delivered a vision for our strategy within a very short period of time.”

Publicis Sapient has no obvious areas of necessary improvement, according to clients.

IDC divides potential key measures for success into two primary categories: capabilities and strategies. Positioning on the y-axis reflects the vendor’s current capabilities and menu of services and how well aligned the vendor is to customer needs. The capabilities category focuses on the company and product today. IDC analysts look at how well a vendor is building/delivering capabilities that enable it to execute its chosen strategy in the market.

Positioning on the x-axis, or strategies axis, indicates how well the vendor’s future strategy aligns with what customers will require in three to five years. The strategies category focuses on high-level decisions and underlying assumptions about offerings, customer segments, and business and go-to-market plans for the next three to five years.

The size of the individual vendor markers in the IDC MarketScape represents the market share of each vendor within the specific market segment being assessed.

IDC MarketScape criteria selection, weightings, and vendor scores represent well-researched IDC judgment about the market and specific vendors. IDC analysts tailor the range of standard characteristics by which vendors are measured through structured discussions, surveys, and interviews with market leaders, participants, and end users. Market weightings are based on user interviews, buyer surveys, and the input of IDC experts in each market. IDC analysts base individual vendor scores, and ultimately vendor positions on the IDC MarketScape, on detailed surveys and interviews with the vendors, publicly available information, and end-user experiences to provide an accurate and consistent assessment of each vendor’s characteristics, behavior, and capability.

Digital strategy consulting (DSC) services are project services that help clients define how they will use “digital” (3rd Platform) technologies and services to achieve their strategic objectives. DSC services show the client how to derive business value from deploying 3rd Platform technologies and services, including cloud services, big data and analytics (BDA), mobility, cognitive/artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, social business, next-generation security, the Internet of Things (IoT), and other next-generation technologies such as blockchain and quantum computing.

DSC services are chiefly composed of business consulting activities, including strategy consulting, supplemented with technology consulting activity. They do not include the actual implementation of digital technologies and the actual transformation of business processes and organizational structures that accompany the deployment of new digital technologies and services. However, they may, on occasion, contain a small element of software development services and product engineering services to produce proofs of concept, prototypes, or minimum viable products (MVPs).

Related Research:

• IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Digital Strategy and Agency Services 2017 Vendor Assessment (IDC #US41462717, August 2017)
• IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Digital Strategy Consulting Services for Digital Operations 2016 Vendor Assessment (IDC #US4063416, January 2017)
• IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Digital Strategy Consulting Services for Digital Product Innovation 2016 Vendor Assessment (IDC #US40634716, January 2017)

This IDC study uses the IDC MarketScape methodology to provide an assessment of 11 major providers of digital strategy consulting services worldwide. It bases this evaluation on a comprehensive framework and a set of parameters that assesses providers relative to one another and measures vendors according to those factors expected to be most conducive to success in a given market during both the short term and the long term.

"Worldwide, digital strategy consulting demand continues to mature, with enterprises moving on from their initial focus on creating the capabilities for experimentation to building the enterprisewide structures and the culture to allow innovation to happen at scale – continuously and right across the organization," said Douglas Hayward, research director for Digital Strategy Consulting and Agency Services.

"Clients are generally satisfied with the digital strategy consulting services that they buy, but there are some areas where vendors should up their game. These include the transfer of vendor knowledge and skills to the client's employees, supporting capabilities in technology usage/implementation, and the delivery of value-creating innovation – as opposed to innovation for its own sake."

International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community make fact-based decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,100 IDC analysts provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries worldwide. For 50 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help clients achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology media, research, and events company.

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Relevant Links

• IDC MarketScape 2019: Global Digital Strategy Consulting Services Assessment
• Industry Cloud Transformation: How Publicis Sapient Drives Value Chain Disruption in Regulated Sectors
• The Generative Enterprise: Accelerating Business Transformation with GenAI and Publicis Sapient
• Customer Data Platforms and Intelligent Experience: Enabling Real-Time Personalization in Retail and CPG
• Liderazgo en Transformación Digital: Implicaciones para Ejecutivos de Negocios en América Latina (LATAM)
• Industry Cloud: Un motor de transformación para empresas latinoamericanas (LATAM)
• Liderazgo en Transformación Digital: Implicaciones para Ejecutivos de Negocios en América Latina (LATAM)
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