Consulting covers for the gaps in customer’s business. These gaps extend to know-how and implementation capability. The way consulting covers these gaps is changing. There are three critical developments driving this change. These are one, the way business uses knowledge to make decisions, two, the way business operationalize’s these decisions into capability and three, the way knowledge and capability is accessed for the future. These three developments working in concert create possibilities driving change through the world of business and consulting.
To make these developments work for business and consulting, organizations must keep up with the times. Consulting houses will have to embrace these changes to regain credibility.
This document explores a new reality for consulting and business.

Consulting as we know it: Traditional consulting is delivered via people. The costs associated with consulting are mostly time related – not outcomes. A core set of consulting services owe their existence to global frameworks or standard bodies sanctioned by government and stock exchanges. Examples of these standards are ISO, Basel II, GAAP and Sarbanes-Oxley. These standards slow change down. As for other consulting services, change is driven by competition and technological capability. The pace is much faster. This need for speed is putting aspects of consulting under severe pressure. One of these areas is the organizational design assessment process. Consulting houses currently complete organizational design audits via manual, people intensive processes. There is a lengthy and costly process to follow before recommendations to take the business to the next level can be made. Implementation only begins following recommendation prioritization by leaders. Unfortunately, most businesses cannot afford the time or costs. They have to do something now! Knee-jerk reactions to crises or opportunities follow. It is therefore not surprising so many initiatives end in failure.

To close this gap, consulting must become faster and less expensive. The benchmark standard for speed is real-time organizational design and project recommendations. To achieve the real-time benchmark, knowledge will need to be packaged into accessible artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Operational frameworks will have to be implemented with very short lead times. Geographic and time constraints will have to be overcome.

Packaging knowledge into artificial intelligence systems is introduced next. We show how it is possible to fit consulting frameworks into artificial intelligence systems and drive real-time outcomes into business.

Knowledge systematization and artificial intelligence: The world’s knowledge is being systematized. Witness the Wikimedia phenomena. The Wikimedia Foundation (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/fundraising ) has the following to say: "Imagine a world in which every single person can share freely in the sum of human knowledge …". The Wikimedia Foundation is a not-for-profit organization "devoted to sharing free information with every person in the world. Our (Wikimedia’s) projects collect this content from people around the world, process it, and make it readily available online in over 200 languages. These efforts are supported through the generosity of people like you, who believe that knowledge means power and knowledge should be for free." Google is running a project to scan all the known publications in the world into an online accessible format. There are many of these initiatives taking place globally. For this knowledge to be effective in business it needs to assist our thinking, learning and our ability to create.

Traditionally, thinking, learning and creating has been the preserve of very smart people. Not today, artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly replacing people in these areas. Thinkquest.org (http://library.thinkquest.org/2705/ ) frames artificial intelligence as "the area of computer science focusing on creating machines that can engage on behaviours that humans consider intelligent." And in the words of Herbert Simon, it "is not my aim to surprise or shock you – but the simplest way I can summarize is to say that there are now in the world machines that can think, that can learn and that can create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until – in a visible future – the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied."

AI frameworks must be able to think, to learn and to create. Thinking means going through a process which models something so that we can make sense of it. When we think, we process information, we solve problems, we reason and we make decisions. Learning involves building memories of acquiring skills, understanding, knowledge and other things. We learn through experience. Creating is bringing something into existence that wasn’t there before. When we produce or bring about something we create.

For a consulting solution to qualify as artificial intelligence, it must be able to think, learn and create. When artificial intelligence is designed correctly, businesses have access to global information and the collective experiences from past organizations. They can profile their practices against the range of practices implemented by other businesses. This will enable artificial intelligence to think about the business. If the artificial system has benchmarks inside it as to what works and what doesn’t, it will be able to learn and build an understanding of the business’ effectiveness and its gaps. And if the system can recommend projects to close these gaps, it will be able to create. goNXTmove.com has created an artificial intelligence framework called NXTmove. It is an end-to-end organizational design audit that thinks about the business, learns about its strengths and weaknesses relative to what is considered best practice in the world and makes recommendations to leverage strengths and close gaps. NXTmove models the way your business operates to understand how you manage yourself towards success in the market. This is a form of thinking. NXTmove continually updates its understanding of what best practice is. It remembers best-practice behaviour and your businesses behaviour. It compares these behaviours in minute detail and learns about what is working and what is not. NXTmove then recommends projects to leverage your strengths and close your gaps. It creates a roadmap for leaders to take the business to the next level.
In short, NXTmove in thinking, learning and creating with you enables you to do the following:

• Compare your business practices against the full range of business practices in the world.
• Combine all the different parts working in your business into a single view against 19 benchmark categories. We call this the heartbeat of your business.
• Understand where you are strong and weak.
• Consider projects to build on your strengths and eliminate your weaknesses.
• Train your leaders to become aware of how their thinking impacts the business design.
• Train your leaders on the range of practices implemented by leading businesses across the world.
• Build a common understanding of the business’ future.
• Align different parts of the business to work in concert with one another.
• Learn from the best and identify significant opportunities to make the business more profitable.

NXTmove is an AI framework offering you access to real-time and systematized intelligence with unparalleled capability: the future of consulting.
With NXTmove as your consulting partner, your thinking is stronger, your learning much more intense and relevant and finally, you have immediate ability to create a roadmap towards your desired future.

Once the roadmap is in place, businesses need to implement. That is, operationalize the roadmap as quickly as possible. This is where Centers of Excellence are having a major impact on the world of business.

Outsourcing and Centers of Excellence: Outsourcing is delegating an operational activity to a third party specializing in that particular operational activity. Centers of Excellence are places with the highest possible standards in an activity. Today, application outsourcing, infrastructure outsourcing, business process outsourcing and manufacturing outsourcing are global realities.
Application outsourcing includes all aspects of ICT which includes SAP platforms, testing and Microsoft’s .NET platform for example. These Centers of Excellence have full business capabilities extending to research, development, innovation, project execution, sales and marketing support, customer relations, thought leadership and recruitment.

Business process outsourcing: Most business processes needing to work in a business today can be outsourced to global Centers of Excellence against short lead times. These processes include customer contact management, finance and accounting, global sourcing and delivery, human resources, learning and talent management, sourcing and procurement and more.

Infrastructure outsourcing encompasses any form of physical infrastructure such as IT, physical offices, warehousing and more. Remote infrastructure management – services delivered remotely from multiple global locations is a reality. The size of your infrastructure matched to how quickly your business grows. Managing costs are in the business’ hands. There is the added benefit of having rapid access to next-generation technologies. Most cities today have businesses offering individuals and businesses access to virtual offices that have physical office infrastructure situated at various strategic locations within the city.

Manufacturing outsourcing: China is the worlds outsource destination for manufacturing. They can manufacture premium branded products such as watches, clothes and leather products to a better quality than the original at a fraction of the price. On entry level products, there are few in the world to beat them.

Outsourcing and Centers of Excellence means that execution capability is rapidly shifting to real-time implementation frameworks. Operational platforms that include software applications, infrastructure, business processes and manufacturing can be implemented via outsource partners with very short implementation lead times. In fact, the majority of activities necessary to run a business can be outsourced to players with very smart practices and a core focus. Businesses designing themselves around global best practice have the luxury of investing all their energy into one core focus area to be the ‘best’. Consulting must follow suit and get their timelines down as regards implementation frameworks. Too much consulting energy is spent on understanding the business, compiling reports and making recommendations instead of helping the business to get on top of their challenges immediately and change on an operational level. It is one thing to consult and give advice that is relevant, accurate and objective. It is another thing to execute. Very few consulting houses get the first right quickly and cost effectively. Even fewer are sufficiently involved in implementation and operationalization of what is possible.

NXTmove achieves Center of Excellence status against the following:

• Organizational design assessment benchmark.
• Learning and training framework.
• Generator of business specific reports and project recommendations.
• Scoping project roadmaps towards achieving global best practice benchmark status.
• Delivering extreme focus interventions with half-day organization turnaround strategies.
• Break-away facilitation framework.

With NXTmove as your outsource and Center of Excellence partner, your organizational design is mapped and benchmarked in half a day, your executives and key people receive extreme training against future business design parameters, your break-away sessions are transformed into extreme focus events with detailed project maps. Your business has an eighteen to twenty-four month roadmap to take critical aspects of the organization towards global best practice standards. You can begin implementing projects immediately.

Systematized knowledge and artificial intelligence combined with outsourcing and Centers of Excellence go a long way to redefining consulting and its credibility. A WWW with ubiquitous access creates the opportunity for significant economies of scale to be achieved. This serves to significantly reduce the costs of accessing the best consulting can offer.

World-Wide-Web (WWW) and Ubiquitous Access: An eight year old, on being asked what she thought the WWW is, replied: "It’s a global computer". Ubiquitous access means the WWW is accessible via broadband from almost anywhere.

The WWW, as an exchange medium, is location and time free. The traditional constraints of geography and an eight hour day do not apply. Consequently, the WWW is facilitating global interpersonal exchange on a scale never seen before in human history. In Chinese, the WWW is referred to as wàn wéi wăng, which in translation into English means "ten-thousand dimensional net". This description hints at the power of the WWW to transform all walks of business practice as we know it.

The WWW is made up of infrastructure, processes and software applications. It is an effective hosting platform for systematized knowledge, AI solutions and outsource solutions around Centers of Excellence. It enables the best thinking and capability to be located in once place and subsequently sourced from anywhere in the world. It gives highly skilled individuals and smart businesses a platform off which to market, sell and brand their products and services. The result is that access to highly skilled individuals is no longer the dominant preserve of consulting houses. Smart skills are now freely accessible anywhere in the world as required. Tom Peters is on a crusade to reinvent business practice and travels the world driving new practices and thinking into business. His presentations are free off the Internet. His influence is global.

NXTmove is hosted on a web infrastructure and is accessible 24 x 7 x 365. If you need critical intelligence or insights into an organizational design dynamic at two am in the morning for a presentation the next day – simply source it. If a crisis presents today, access the AI intelligence in NXTmove with your team and begin project implementation within a day. WWW enablement offers goNXTmove.com the economies of scale to price specialist consulting interventions at extreme cost effective levels for business.

Access to virtual online artificial intelligence based consulting software hosted on a WWW infrastructure provides dual benefits of immediacy and objectivity. The subjective opinion of a consultant doesn’t count. Whatever information, advice or recommendations provided must be unfettered, clinical, correct and fully in line with the stated direction of the business. The advice must be significantly objective. This can only be done by either highly skilled people like Tom Peters or through using benchmark artificial intelligence solutions such as NXTmove. The intelligence in NXTmove continually learns and is updated so that anyone who interacts with the system works in a real time advisory space. So NXTmove learns once and everyone gets taught by NXTmove real-time without the limitations of time and space.

NXTmove as a WWW enabled, AI system with ubiquitous access offers you consulting solutions that are:

• Available 24 x 7 x 365.
• Location independent.
• Immediate.
• Objective and fully in line with the stated direction of the business.
• Continually updated against global best practices.
• Very cost effective and efficient.

NXTmove, doing for you what you cannot do for yourself.

In short, very short: Consulting must change. The confluence of knowledge systematization and artificial intelligence, outsourcing and Centers of Excellence and a WWW infrastructure with ubiquitous access introduces a new consulting paradigm: real-time objective intelligence. Consulting can regain credibility through these frameworks.
In summary and bulleted.

• Consulting must do for the customer that what the customer cannot do for themselves.
• Knowledge is freely available.
• Artificial Intelligence based consulting solutions that can think, learn and create exist. NXTmove is one.
• The majority of consulting practice is too expensive and too slow. In a changing world, by the time the consultant understands the business, so much has changed that it becomes a full time job just to stay on top of the business and still make recommendations.
• Highly skilled people are freely available. Fifteen years ago, the highest level of skills sat with the consultants. Companies can now hire the best brains in the world – so why use consulting houses?
• The majority of consulting companies have not kept up with the time themselves in terms of innovation and value on offer. Now the biggest challenge for the consulting industry is to regain credibility.
• It is one thing to consult and give advice. It is another thing to execute. Very few consulting houses are sufficiently involved in implementation and operationalizing what is possible. Far too much consulting energy is spent on understanding the business, compiling reports and making recommendations instead of helping the business to change on an operational level. NXTmove redresses this imbalance.
• Consulting must reinvent itself in order to add new value to business.
  
  • They must be able to add insights into the business that the business cannot get to on its own.
  • Consulting must get their timelines down. We are in a real time world!
    
    • Real time artificial intelligence based advisory systems will become the order of the day.
    • Operational platforms of a business must be implemented with very short lead times.
    • Consulting needs to stay with the pace of execution reality in the business.
• Consulting must be objective. The opinion of the consultant doesn’t count. The information must be clean, clinical and correct and fully in line with the stated direction of the business.