Data, Information and Knowledge: Re-Engineering the Intellectual Value Chain

Abstract

In Profit Patterns: 30 Ways to Anticipate and Profit from Strategic Forces Re-Shaping Your Business, a team of consultants from Mercer Management Consulting argue that

Industry value chains used to be incredibly stable. Today, those value chains have been compressed, broken up and put together again… Within this context, companies are using new, non-traditional criteria for value chain moves — moves driven by improving return on capital employed, achieving strategic control, creating business design innovations, and capturing the customer relationship.¹

The big threat we see is distintermediation … If you put together several trends — the greater availability of information, the rise of the ‘free agent’ worker, the role of talent agents — the traditional consulting model could find itself under a lot of pressure.

Christoper Meyer, Director, Centre for Business Innovation, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young