Blue Chip Firm Enters For Fee Portal Market
January 5, 2010
Short honk: Navigate to “New Booz Allen Analysis Site Persia-House.com Launched”. The government spin off of the consulting firm is now in the for fee portal market. The idea is to apply real intelligence techniques to information and allow anyone to purchase access. You can take a peek at the portal until January 31, 2010, here. With the commercial database world struggling to keep revenues from sagging, the emergence of a consulting firm as a for fee information service is not good news. The idea is that Booz Allen’s consultants will deliver insight that cannot be found in Web logs or other online information services. As a former laborer in the Booz Allen vineyards, I think this is an interesting move for the company, but it runs into the revenue targets the company has to hit in order to pay bonuses, attract high potential recruits who are lured by outfits like Google and Goldman Sachs, and maintain the editorial continuity a publishing operation requires.
Several other thoughts:
- No fee services deliver high value information that may lack a Booz Allen comment, but the core information is easily accessible. Examples range from RSS feeds in Google Reader to Silobreaker.com
- These types of services, even when endorsed by a high profile wizard like Nouriel Roubini are tough to convert into big buck operations. The information is expensive to produce and has to be wrapped with analytic services that do not take days or weeks to generate on point analysis
- In the intel sector, the US government provides a wealth of services that are both public and restricted
- Commercial services like Ebsco offer useful for fee content that is arguably as good or better than other services.
My take on this innovation is:
- Outfits like Gerson Lehrman Group and Guidant may be cutting into the blue chip consulting firms’ revenues and a for fee portal is an innovation that shows how tight the tasseled loafers have become
- The sell through from the portal is likely to be very different from other thought leaders plays; that is, the margins of traditional publishers are likely to haunt this initiative. Blue chip firms need to bill much more than an associates’ annual salary plus benefits, a whole lot more
- Consulting firms experience brutal turnover, so establishing continuity will require a different business method from fielding a team of one senior person and three junior MBAs. Very expensive. Booz Allen created its answer to the Harvard Business Review, but that journal has been a marketing tool, not a money maker based on what I have heard. This portal strikes me as a marketing play just like this Web log. I do the Web log because I learned at Booz, Allen how important thought leadership was to a service business. Maybe this lesson was the wrong one and today’s Booz Allen experts know something I don’t?
Will Booz Allen make this portal the intel home run of 2010? The addled goose thinks that this unit of Booz Allen will have to work extra hard to make Persia-House.com a winner that meets the firm’s revenue and margin targets. This new initiative has the makings of a useful business school case.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 5, 2010
A freebie. I must report this to the MTA because some folks are going for a for fee ride.
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
