As anyone who has worked in a consultancy, law firm, accountancy practice, or the like will know only too well, to keep your position you have to bill as many hours as possible. Managing a firm that runs a consultancy or partnership model relies on balancing order intake, sales, utilisation, and margin. Order intake and its…
With all of the publicity around insurance or legal referral fees earlier in the year it won’t surprise many people that the insurance industry is one of the largest spenders on legal services in the UK, about £5Bn pa, 20% of the market. Unless you’re in the legal services industry though it’s likely that the…
I listened to an interesting interview recently about a new service which brings airline style ticket pricing to restaurant booking. We are all used to seeing the cost of an airline ticket fluctuating with demand. What is going on in the background in simple terms is that the airline, with a fixed supply (i.e. number of seats), …
There have been many column inches spent over the last week discussing General Motor’s decision to move from an outsourced model to an insourced model in relation to its IT. What drives much of the debate is the skills agenda and can GM manage the transition. If you look at the reasons that GM gave…
Ofcom, the UK telecoms regulator recently published its annual review of the UK communications market. The report is 400+ pages of analysis of the nation’s usage of communications mechanisms from social networks, to mobile voice and texts, to post and face to face. It’s data rich and a great snapshot of the nation in this rapidly…
We are constantly reminded that we live in an increasingly connected world. If you believe the projections with regards to the number of devices connected to the internet then it will increase from just under 2bn today to over 5bn by 2014. A more than doubling in two years. In terms of business models, the…
“Agility” is a much written about topic. If you do a search in Amazon in “agility” it lists 18,000+ books written on the subject. Admittedly most of the top 10 relate to “dog training” and are nothing to do with commercial agility. Interestingly, I struggled to find too many books on “commercial agility” and most…