I caught up the other day with Jason Tavaria, recently appointed as CEO, Europe for Brazil-headquartered 'design thinking' consultancy MJV (see MJV gets creative with ‘Design Thinking’). Tavaria has a rich background as an IT entrepreneur, having founded e-tailer Dolphin Music and Digital Catalogue and Order Management System firm Zillion.
While it's still early days for MJV in the UK, Tavaria is hoping to build on the company's longstanding relationship with SAP in Brazil. He sees design-led consulting as an ideal tool to develop leading edge 'big data' analytics applications such as those based on SAP's HANA technology (see SAP boldly takes HANA to the cloud and related UKHotViews posts).
Regular readers will have spotted (perhaps before I did) that design thinking seems to have broken into the big time, most recently signalled by Accenture's acquisition of London-headquartered international design consultancy and digital media agency Fjord (see Accenture gets 'design thinking'). Other IT services firms are also jumping on this bandwagon (e.g. see NTT DATA seeing the ‘design light' from RMA).
I can rather relate to the view put to me recently by James Appleby, founding CEO of Chiswick-based consultancy Bluefin Solutions (very much in the 'Little British Battler' mould), who posited that "the market agency piece is the sizzle that gets you the customer mindset, but the bulk of the revenue will come from the business transformation work behind it". Expect to see more deals like these.
