2.2The current consulting scene

Thanks to the progress outlined in the previous section, and to the numerous challenges faced by businesses worldwide, management consulting has become an important and highly visible professional service sector in terms of size, structure, sophistication, range of services offered, standards applied, results produced and overall influence. Consultants have become acknowledged and often indispensable advisers in major business decisions and transactions. Leading consulting firms are respected and solicited thanks to their broad knowledge base, diversified resources, innovative spirit and capacity to cope with complex and novel situations.

Sector growth

The growth of the consulting sector reflects the high and steady demand for consulting. The estimated value of the world consulting market was US$102 billion in 1999, up 260 per cent from 1992, when the total revenue attained some US$28.3 billion. The 1999 estimate for spending on consulting in Europe was US$33 billion. Average annual growth rates of the world market attained 25 per cent in 1990–94 and 18.9 per cent in 1995–99. At present, the total number of management, business and IT consultants, including e-business consultants, may well be in the range of 650,000–750,000. These figures can only be estimates, because the scope of consulting has not been precisely delimited and data are collected from various sources. Yet the figures give a clear indication of orders of magnitude and trends.