The firm that automated itself
Tacitude is an automated consulting firm. We kept what makes a top-tier firm worth its fee and changed who carries out the work.
Its own model rationed top-tier consulting
For half a century, the best consulting work has been sold the same way: a brilliant method, carried out by a pyramid of people, billed by the week. Companies paid for judgment. Most of the invoice paid for hours.
Hours are expensive and people do not scale, so the standard reached few companies, and inside them only the top and a handful of projects a year.
The firms that own the method cannot automate it
Today machines can carry out most of that method: the research, the models, the synthesis, the stress tests. The firms that master it are the least able to let it go, because their economics are the hours.
In 1975 an engineer at Kodak built the first self-contained digital camera. Management, whose business was film, asked why anyone would want one, and the prototype stayed in the lab. In 2012 Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection.
We changed who carries out the method
We kept everything that makes a top-tier firm worth its fee, the method, the expertise, the rigor and the discretion, and changed who carries it out. Machines do the work people used to do. The standard stays and the pyramid goes.
Without the pyramid, the standard can reach every team in your company, at every level, on one annual retainer.
Sources: Steven Sasson, interviewed by Marketplace, 30 December 2016; Engadget, 19 January 2012, on Kodak's Chapter 11 filing.
What stays, at the top-tier standard
- The method
- The question first, then hypotheses, evidence and synthesis.
- The expertise
- Senior judgment, codified.
- The rigor
- Every claim sourced, every number traced.
- The discretion
- A private data room for every client.
What changes, because machines carry it out
- The cost
- One annual retainer.
- The scale
- Every project of the year.
“We can know more than we can tell.”
The name holds two promises
That is tacit knowledge: the judgment senior advisers carry and never write down. It is what clients buy from a strategy firm, and it is what never scaled. Tacitude makes that knowledge explicit and puts it in the hands of every team.
Tacit also means unspoken: what you share with us stays with us. The name holds both promises, expertise and discretion.
We choose to be judged as a firm
Tacitude is a new kind of consulting firm: an automated one. Software products are judged on features and price. Firms are judged on judgment, discretion and outcomes, and that is the standard we hold ourselves to.
The consulting practice of Firefly Software
Tacitude is the top-tier consulting practice of Firefly Software, delivered as Service-as-a-Software. The client buys an outcome, software does the work, and nothing is implemented on the client's side. Firefly delivers two outcomes under one roof.
| Tacitude, Firefly's consulting practice | Firefly Software | |
|---|---|---|
| The outcome | The deliverable | The change |
| What it covers | Consulting projects, from the objective to the deliverable | Software, transformation and operations |
| What the client gets | A recommendation, design, roadmap or plan, with its evidence | The change, run for the client as a service |
| What the client does | Its teams frame the questions and upload what each engagement needs | Nothing to implement: Firefly runs it |
| How it is bought | An annual retainer | As a service |
Tacitude works out what to do and how. Firefly gets it done for you.
The independence rule
A deliverable backs what the evidence supports, whoever the supplier is, Firefly included. If you want help to carry it out, Firefly is one option and the choice stays yours.
This rule is what lets your company trust the deliverable.