McKinsey has been named a Leader, the highest designation possible, in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Transformation Services, Q4 2023 report. Forrester evaluated 15 firms, assessing them on 21 criteria in three categories. McKinsey also received the highest score on the ‘current offering’ axis out of all the vendors evaluated.
According to the Forrester report: “The oldest of the big three strategy consulting houses, McKinsey has articulated its superior transformation vision following its Rewired concept. Acknowledging the need for multi-dimensional change, the firm drives transformation across strategy, talent, operating model, technology, and data.”
The report further notes that “QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, has become a powerful differentiator for the firm as it innovates in data science and AI.” “We are very honored by this recognition and continue to focus in driving sustainable and inclusive AI impact for our clients by developing the most distinctive end-to-end AI offering in the market,” Alex Singla, a senior partner and global leader of QuantumBlack. “Over the last few years, we have been enhancing our capabilities through a combination of world-class AI talent, organic innovation, plus a combination of thoughtful acquisitions and an open ecosystem of partners.”
QuantumBlack
McKinsey has helped 'rewire’ or transform some 200 clients over the past five years. “Leaders who have truly begun to rewire their businesses understand it’s more than executing on a set of discrete projects,” shares Rob Levin, a senior partner who leads our Digital and AI Transformation Practice. “It’s building the long-term capability to consistently innovate, adopt, and scale technology-led solutions wherever there is value to be had in the business.”
The Forrester report also states that the firm has “strong organizational design and change capabilities to drive transformation across the enterprise.”
One reason is that on day one of a project, our leaders start planning how a solution will scale across the business. A laser focus on design thinking—how the end users will be interacting with and applying the solution—also differentiates our work. “There is no transformation unless the intended internal users change how they work or the external users change how they interact with our products and services,” says Rob. “In this sense, enterprise technology isn’t different from consumer technology; when a technology truly solves friction in our day to day, we adopt it. No amount of corporate mandate can force true adoption if the utility isn’t there.”
For example, a McKinsey team helped a mining company adopt AI-powered ways of working in their copper-processing operations. Everyone, including metallurgists, mining engineers, and data scientists, changed the way they worked across every aspect of production, and then scaled the solution across seven sites. We also collaborated with an insurance company to transform their middle and back office operations with a state-of-the-art digital platform. It could be implemented across all countries in record time—and then the teams iteratively built up consumer use of these new digital channels.
As AI adoption accelerates, businesses can't afford to wait a couple of years before experimenting. They need to make progress now for competitive reasons, even though nearly every company has imperfect system, data or talent foundations.
Rewired in Action
According to the Forrester report, the client references they interviewed “appreciated [McKinsey’s] focus on getting more value out of the existing architecture before jumping into implementation of new solutions.”
“When it comes to the core technology stack, technologists, and practices, our experience has shown that we can have our cake and eat it too,” observes Aamer Baig, a senior partner and global leader of McKinsey Technology. “We can create new high quality and scalable capabilities for data and AI in the cloud, while bridging to the company’s existing tech stack. Moreover, we can thoughtfully build and deliver these capabilities in parallel without waiting for large enterprise IT programs to launch or complete. This is a cultural challenge for many traditional tech organizations but one that is well worth pursuing.”