Analyzing Trends: An Index of Consulting Firms’ White Papers

Introduction: To provide insight into what leading consulting firms believe are the most important management topics relevant to the corporate world, BeckWay Group conducted a white paper index for Q1, 2017. 25 leading management consulting firms were selected and 429 white papers were analyzed for industry, functional, and geographical trends.

Industry View: The top 10 industry categories of healthcare, financial services, energy, government, banking, automotive, marketing, asset management, media/entertainment, and construction/infrastructure accounted for 59% of the white papers surveyed. As outlined in the table below, healthcare related commentary was the predominant industry, featured in almost 12% of articles. A spike in articles featuring healthcare can be partially attributed to the political debate over the repeal of Obamacare. The next most predominant industry was financial services. In reality, the finance sector was even more dominant because of the categorization of banking, asset management and insurance as independent industries (together these 4 categories represented 21.4%). Two recurring themes in the financial services articles were implications arising from regulatory and technology trends. Energy rounds out the top three industries, with articles featuring renewable and alternative energy themes (e.g. storage, wind power).

Functional View: Revenue growth was the most frequent functional theme in the white paper index and featured in almost 20% of articles. This was closely followed by digitalization, with themes featuring industry disruption and digital trends. In addition to digitization, the influence of rapidly evolving technology and its business and social impact is seen with numerous articles with themes of cyber-security, data analytics, and broader technology transformation. When combined, these 4 technology-related categories represented almost 30% of white paper articles.

Geography View: The analysis below provides insight into where white papers featured a specific geography as a core theme of the topic. As expected, the predominant geography was the United States of America (USA) with 52% of white papers, followed by the slightly broader focus of North America (i.e. USA, Canada and/or Mexico) with 14.3%. Rounding out the top five were Europe, United Kingdom (UK) and Africa. The UK articles featured numerous Brexit-related analysis.

About the Index: BeckWay Group conducts this index analysis to understand the trends and focus of the leading management consulting firms. By also providing links to the individual papers, we assist our clients and others to streamline their searches for more information.

The index is calculated reviewing the published white papers on the website of the management consulting sample set, which is listed below. Each knowledge paper is reviewed and a theme assigned. In a minority of cases multiple themes will be assigned, each receiving a proportional score such that each knowledge paper is only recorded as single entry.

We appreciate Empulse Global’s assistance in the analysis.

The list of firms included in the Q1 2017 are listed below:

About BeckWay Group: BeckWay Group provides operational capabilities through operating partners, proprietary execution software and talent management to private equity funds to support due diligence and enhance their portfolio investment performance. www.beckway.com

Contact Details: Danyell Lance, Director of Talent Manager, BeckWay Group, dlance@beckway.com