IBM Getting PwC Consulting for $3.5 Billion

MoThugz writes: "This Yahoo! News article reports that IBM will be buying PriceWaterhouseCoopers Consulting for a cool $3.5 billion in cash and stock. From the page: 'The purchase is aimed at boosting slowing revenues in the computer giant's large services business, which now accounts for more revenue than its well-known computers and mainframes. ... The merger gives IBM, the world's largest supplier of computers and computer services, the consulting arm of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the world's largest accounting firm. The combined IBM-PriceWaterhouseCoopers will rank a close second to top consultant Accenture Ltd. , formerly Andersen Consulting.'"

Comments

Re:Ha!

[medcalf]

This is basically true of all the large consulting firms (PWC, KPMG, E&Y, etc). The methodology, from my dealings with them, seems to be:

1. get the CIO well-fed and well-laid, and if possible the CFO and the CEO or COO (whomever has responsibility for the CIO and CFO)
2. now that the contract is yours, hire a bunch of people off the street - they should have good college degrees and no practical experience. These monkeys must be able to speak and write effectively, and must have no ability to think critically at all. They are just there for documentation
3. get the monkeys to ask the client's IT guys what problems they are facing, and how they would solve them if they didn't have to do what upper management told them to do
4. without doing any fact checking, error checking or even prima facie review (these are critical to the program - not doing them, that is), edit the interviews into a single document. It doesn't matter if the document is not internally consistent (and it won't be, coming from many sources), as long as it's what the CIO has already heard from his people (and it will be, because it came from his people to the consultants). This validates the CIO's excellent hiring and promotion strategies, six-sigma ho-shin plans and whatever.
5. after making sure that step 4 takes as long as the client will tolerate, charge $200 per consultant per hour
6. brag in ads and so forth about how you helped a $6bn/yr company fix all its IT problems, but you can't say who they are because it would violate the non-disclosure you insisted on in step 1

Basically, the big 6 (or 4 or whatever they are today) are worthless piles of crap. On the other hand, independent consultants and IT services companies tend to be pretty good. IBM was odd in that they charged $400 per hour for good people, but they could actually get good people (who they paid $70 per hour at most). Maybe they ran out of good people to get, and decided to hire the monkeys.