What are some of the services that will be provided to clients? The most obvious starting place will be an assessment. We'll go in and do interviews and surveying and come back to companies with their maps, put together workshops to describe what they mean and put together a plan of action. We're also going to help companies with interventions, to carry out a plan of action -- and one of the forums that will play out of this is executive education. We'll do executive education, with people including Dick Nolan from the University of Washington.

Who do you see as the primary clients? IT managers? Business executives? I think it's a mix of both. In our early days here, we've found early involvement with IT groups, but the methodology is certainly broader than that. In some cases, the CIO wants his organization to focus more on innovation.

What are the primary challenges these clients are facing? IT kind of got hammered in the aftermath of the [dot.com] bubble and Nicholas Carr's article caused IT to focus on the cost side of the income statement. It seems to me that this is changing in the last year; I'm hearing from more CIOs who don't feel that their entire mission in life is to reduce headcount and improve efficiencies. They're seeing opportunities to grow the business.

Frequently in business we overshoot equilibrium and then stagger back. We did that during the Internet craze and overshot. We then came around and cut too much in the aftermath.

After years of cost reduction, we're seeing this as a way of turning the ship around.