Denis O'Brien

VISION Consulting, the Dublin-based international management and IT consulting company, today hosted a business seminar with Denis O’Brien, Chairman of Digicel, to discuss the emerging issues for businesses operating both in the local and international markets.

With the global market environments becoming increasingly complex and competitive across all main industry sectors VISION CEO Billy Glennon highlighted the opportunity for companies to differentiate themselves by providing the customer with what they want – a simple promise that is consistently delivered.

“Irish businesses are facing a turning point in how they choose to operate in the knowledge economy” said Glennon. 

“Choice and flexibility has overloaded consumers with too much information, and to make sense of this they will naturally move towards companies which help them find their way.  Simplicity is the key, and companies who combine valuable insight and coaching with their goods and services are managing to differentiate themselves to information-weary customers”.

According to Glennon, Amazon.com is one of the first to adopt this approach: the company started with the simple promise of product diversity and fast delivery.  Now it competes through offering buying-pattern related reviews which assist buyers in navigating their selection and finding the book most suited to them, without wasting time. 

The downside for organisations is that they increase their own complexity through constant innovation, which brings an information overload of its own, and can negatively impact on organisational culture.   

VISION worked with both Digicel and Esat Telecom in building service innovations while ensuring internal complexity didn’t increase as a result. 

Commenting on the results achieved through this work O’Brien said: “As Digicel grew in new markets the organisation was being stretched and was not working the way it should have been. We realised if we let this go on we would turn ourselves into our competitor and suffer from slow decision making, high levels of bureaucracy – the original DNA that had got us to where we were was being obliterated.”

“The VISION team came up with an organisation structure that changed the way we did things. We could deliver service innovations and cost optimise at the same time.  The entire company is structured in such a way that allows us to focus solely on execution.

“This approach has really worked for us: Digicel has grown at a rapid pace, with VISION’s help we have managed to maintain the culture of an innovative, hungry and passionate start up.”

In addition to customers like Digicel, VISION’s other client success stories include the delivery of a solution to Lloyds TSB Scotland which increased its market share from 4% to 15% over a 3 year period, and last year VISION introduced service innovation solutions which helped Scottish & Southern Energy to grow its customer base by 25%. 

VISION has also worked with Patrimonio Hoy to introduce an award winning model which reduced house-building time from 5 years to 70 weeks for socially disadvantaged families and produced 250, 000 houses in the Guadalajara region within 5 years.  This project won the 2006 World Business Award presented by the International Chamber of Commerce, the United Nations Development Program, and the International Business Leaders Forum.  

VISION Consulting is an international management and IT consulting company with offices in Dublin, Edinburgh, New York, Mexico City, and Santiago, Chile.  It started in Dublin in 1984 as a systems integrator.