ent sectors, the common theme will continue to
be how organizations use technology to connect
with people, deliver power, innovative trans-
portation methods, and create smarter, healthier
communities.”
While the following forecasts are a bit less
certain, the next 12 months seem bright for the
following service areas, given the favorable
odds of certain policy and legislative changes
occurring:
TAX AND COMPLIANCE: Tax planning has
steadily become more strategic in the past
decade as more companies venture into overseas markets and as global tax reform activities have taken center stage. Nancy Manzano, director, chief tax office, with global tax
software company Vertex, notes that recent
developments in international fiscal, government and tax policy – such as Brexit, the
U.S. elections, the European Union’s state
aid investigations, and the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development’s
(OECD’s) sweeping Base Erosion and Profit
Shifting (BEPS) actions—will have potentially lasting impacts on the global economy. “The impact could lead multinational
enterprises to unwind or restructure some
of their tax planning strategies, especially
international tax planning,” Manzano notes.
Domestically, the President’s focus on tax reform and trade tariffs would seem to ensure
that tax planning becomes even more important in 2017. “I think tax advisory services
will grow significantly,” Iler says, pointing
to growing need for tax expertise to be integrated with other service offerings. For
example, EY’s “Tax Effective Supply Chain
Management” offering blends tax and supply
chain expertise. “When you start looking at
re-engineering your supply chain, a big piece
of that work relates to taxes,” Iler adds.
GROWTH STRATEGY: Given the extent to
which rock-bottom interest rates fueled
growth through acquisitions in the past
several years, leadership teams may be a bit
rusty when it comes to that other form of
growth. “How many companies can really
grow organically?” Iler asks. “How many
know how to take an offering to the market-
place and make it successful when the ev-
idence shows that more than 70 percent of
all new offerings fail to meet expectations?
I think this is a huge opportunity for the
strategy consulting firms to help companies
with their growth strategies.”
SUPPLY CHAIN: If new trade policies impose
new tariffs on imports, many U.S. manu-
facturers will need to develop new sourcing
strategies and find new sourcing partners. “If
the tariffs we’ve heard about become a reali-
ty, almost everybody’s going to change their
supply chain,” Iler says. “If there’s a theme
running across all of these possible policy
impacts, it would probably be supply chain.”
The industry and service forecasts above are
the product of second-level tea-leaf reading—
projected impacts of projected policy changes
that may or may not come to pass. If these
policies are implemented, they also will cause
ripple effects: a major fiscal stimulus could re-
sult in much larger deficits along with spikes to
inflation and interest rates.
In a November column questioning the incoming President’s “muscular” social media interactions with Apple, Boeing, Carrier and other
companies, The Economist reminded readers
that, “American capitalism has flourished
thanks to the predictable application to rules.”
The column warned that if this rules-bases
system were to be replaced with an ad hoc approach dictated by the president, the economic
damage would be grave.
So far, predictability does not appear to be
a high priority of the new presidential admin-
istration. Late last month, a Republican politi-
cal strategist from the George W. Bush White
House described the president’s approach to
The Wall Street Journal as “deliberate chaos,”
and a “type of chaos that preserves maximum
control for him.”
Hopefully, the next 100 days will be less
chaotic and reduce the uncertainty as to whether
the implications of the new administration’s
governing approach will be grave—or gravy—
for businesses and their consulting partners.
