Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight...

There are way too many industry analysts covering the game of outsourcing that don't understand how it works. As Infosys shifts to what it labels as its 3.0 model, Gartner and Forrester will take the bait of the melodic words of a snake oil salesman especially when combined with factual numbers that do not necessarily represent the facts.

Infosys has declared to the marketplace that going forward, 1/3 of its future revenues shall be derived from strategic business consulting. This is an ambitious target that is ripe for industry analysts who want to believe to be exploited. What happens if you simply do a little bit of slick accounting trickery and label anyone that is a business analyst now is an individual contributing to the revenues of strategic business consulting? After all, business analysts even though they usually are only focused on project-level concerns do interact with business customers in their daily activities. Likewise, many projects are strategic. Combine these two truths and you can successfully con industry analysts into believing that you have made the transition into strategic business consulting.

We understand how easy it is to con industry analysts but what about all those CIOs who listen to their sage wisdom? Will they too fall for the trickery of rapid growth in this space while being redirected away from understanding the details of the past engagements that contributed to such profound revenue growth? Don't get it twisted, I have the utmost respect for Infosys and their marketing prowess. I simply question whether analyst firms will look at see that revenue growth is not all it is cracked up to be especially since the believe that strategic business consulting is of higher margin, yet they probably won't drill into the numbers.