Scient's Near-Death Experience

Scient will dedicate more resources to "big-S" strategy consulting of the sort normally associated with McKinsey or with Bain & Co. "We have a better picture of the next 'land' than anyone else has," Komlofske argues -- and so Scient's consultants are better prepared to help clients get there. Scient wants to help companies assess the speed and direction of technological change, and to figure out how customers will behave -- how they'll live, work, and play. It wants to guide clients in creating business visions and architectures to compete in the next economy.

Finally, since organizational dynamics will be altered dramatically, Scient expects to consult on "enterprise mobilization" -- the soft stuff around talent and organizational development. If success is all about the ability to continue to create and to self-transform, businesses will have to rethink the ways that employees work and interact. Clients will have to win commitment in new ways, and they will have to design strategies for coping organizationally with constant change.

In itself, that's not such a startling strategy for Scient. Bigger projects yield more revenue for consultants -- and one way to win big projects is to offer clients everything from high-level strategy to nuts-and-bolts systems integration. As much as that, having a hand in setting strategy allows a consultant some say in deciding which implementation services a client will need down the road. The prospect of such soup-to-nuts service is sort of the Holy Grail of consulting -- and historically, it's been difficult to pull off.

Mostly, though, Scient wants to position itself at the point of maximum business impact. If the new economy was about using technology to transform departments or functions within a company, Scient argues, the next economy requires transforming the entire enterprise. Ultimately, as technology creates value at ever-higher levels, the stakes will grow even higher.

To play at that level, Scient first must change its talent mix. Today, about half of its consultants are pure technologists, focused on digital design and implementation. Within the next few months, Scient expects to hire 40 traditional strategists to bolster its high-level architecture services. It also must attract consultants schooled in human resources and in organizational design to fuel its new offering in enterprise mobilization. And it has to reeducate existing employees: "We need people who are pathological learners," Lochhead says. "People who have no fear."

Scient also must refine its knowledge-management systems. "The Internet is going to commoditize technology faster than anything we've ever seen before," says Scott Frisbie, Scient's chief technology officer. That means that any technological innovation that Scient's engineers come up with will retain value as a custom offering for a mere few months. After that, it becomes infrastructure for new innovations. An effective knowledge-management system has to be able to package innovations for rapid reuse across the company.

Finally, Scient must continually produce innovations that keep it at the technology vanguard. It does that through 20 "neighborhoods" that operate outside the formal organizational matrix, each one focused on a specific technology domain such as Internet security, database management, or application architecture. Employees from all parts of the company participate voluntarily in those neighborhoods, typically in addition to their day jobs working on client projects. The groups are more or less self-managed and create ideas and solutions either proactively or in response to specific client requirements.

For example, Scient has no formal consulting offering in wireless technologies -- a discipline in which other firms have invested heavily. But Scient does have several hundred people around the world collaborating in its wireless-technology neighborhood. Small, nimble teams within that neighborhood have rapidly built applications for, among other things, airline information, purchasing management, and mobile consumer banking. For many of the young participants, it's a jazzing experience. "This is the startup that we have going on the side," says Kyle Forster, the 23-year-old strategist who helps steer the neighborhood. "We're young, we have energy, and we want to have an impact."

The Death (and Life) of the Internet Consultant

On the morning of December 7, Scient's top executives gathered at their San Francisco headquarters to confront the future. The company was still in shock, and many of their employees felt blindsided. Until a few weeks before, after all, business had seemed true to the accustomed trajectory. There had been few hints, within the firm or on Wall Street, of any fundamental weakness. Scient had felt confident that it was adapting effectively to the new reality.