OREANDA-NEWS. IBS once again confirmed its leadership in the consulting market having taken the first place in the “100 Largest Russian Consulting Companies” list compiled by Kommersant-Dengi magazine and the first place in the “Russian Consulting” list compiled by Expert RA as based on the results of 2006. The company's proceeds from consulting services increased by 42% and amounted to 4,452,100,395 rubles, reported the press-centre of IBS.


Corporate sector: In 2006 the largest number of projects was aimed at optimizing corporate management systems to make them more transparent for the shareholders and potential investors. Those were projects to set up IAS, develop internal control systems, and certify quality management systems. The majority of such projects were associated either with a planned attraction of investments or placing of shares with a stock exchange. The effected mergers, takeovers and reorganizations of businesses became another cause to bring consultants in.


Public sector: In this sector the 'wave' of demand for the consultants was largely caused by higher learning institutions that received funding under the priority national projects aimed to implement innovations. Here, the most demanded service was deployment of projects management systems.

Services Structure:
IT consulting still dominates in the structure of IBS consulting services. They include such services as IT audit, creation of concepts for IT systems development, IT strategies development, consulting when deploying business applications. The demand for the services of justification of investments in IT, evaluation of return on investment, evaluation of the cost of IT ownership, IT services cost, etc., has considerably increased this year. Trends associated with evaluation of information risks are becoming more topical.


For 2006 IBS' proceeds from IT consulting amounted to 3,766,566,905 rubles, from financial consulting – 364,909,000 rubles, HR consulting - 81,783,000 rubles. Practice of financial consulting of IBS has risen by 50%. Large enterprises keep improving their financial control systems and the projects are becoming more complex. “Nowadays the first wave of informatization is expiring and most companies have had time to store up histories of their activities in their information systems, which allows them to move to higher levels of financial management and to use more sophisticated analytical systems,” comments Dmitry Sadkov, Director of Management Consulting Department, IBS.


Consulting in the area of human resources management has been enjoying heady growth. Changes in the structure of demand for such services are quite evident. Previously only deployment of easily formalizable HR elements (such as human resource accounting, incentive systems, grading) was in demand but now demand is rising for complex projects, which are connected with deployment of HRM systems and include staff appraisal, individual assessments, etc.


”Among the trends in IT consulting in 2006 we can single out its integration with other kinds of consulting, and development of 'intermediate' services, such as integration of business applications and automatic process control systems, IT human resources management with subsequent automation of HR functions and so on. Rendering of such services requires cross-industry competence. Moreover, continual development of innovative methodologies and management tools is impossible without IT support, which drives the IT consulting growth and is ever challenging IT consultants," notes Dmitry Sadkov.

A few 2006 projects by IBS:
Two projects were launched at I. M. Sechenov Moscow Medical Academy: development of an academy management information system and development and deployment of an on-line distance education system.

Methodology and budget control system were developed for Rolf Group. IBS experts described the budget system and financial structure of the holding company, and developed models for data collection and consolidation. Deployment of unified model of budgeting for the whole Group was the result of the project. The project for improving HRM system as a basis for planned automation of HR systems was launched at MIEL Real Estate, one of Russia's largest real estate companies. The project provides for development of effective target model for human resource management aimed at achieving long-term business purposes of the company. IBS jointly with the international consulting company SAIC worked out a concept for development of information systems for TNK-BP oil refineries including a plan of IT architecture development in the period of 2006-2010.