It's usually an internal research team, specialised in a vertical, say Energy or transportation that prepares the material for the consultant. Still, most good management consultants are good at creating docs, excels and ppts. And they are good reading/sifting through the data quickly; just like a senior software engineer can navigate and grasp code more quickly.
The larger issue that I find with management consulting approach though is that they use the same set of tools to create solutions for ALL problems. They will throw in some charts, finance numbers, pas research etc. to sell a 'story'. They usually don't work on implementation but to present the first part of the solution. That's not how every problem should be solved IMHO. McKinsey et al. can make things easy for bureaucrats or government people to grasp, but to be honest their suggestions seems pretty ridiculous at times. Just look at some of the articles they have written about software industry and how out of touch it seems. Most of their solutions on social issues and such fields are rather ridiculous too. So I would hire an ex-consultant as an employee, no problem. But I wonder if I would ever want to outsource work to a Management Consulting company.
As it was explained to me the purpose of the management consultant is not to solve the problem, but to take the blame for solving the problem.
The Internal politics of most reasonable sized corporates are Byzantine to say the least. Senior management might not have the political capital to drive change through an organization, don’t want to take the blame if the change does not work, or just want to signal that they are doing something, without taking responsibility for said something.
Hence...management consultants... and the pricier and the more prestigious he better.
The cynic in me reads the headline and thinks at least half of the commissions they take from authoritarian dictatorships and dubious corporations will have a neutral or negative impact on those dodgy clients anyway, since the bulk of their work is providing quasi-independent justification for a solution management already favours, for internal use only and at expensive rates.
Take the extreme case from the article: Yanukovych's attempts to portray himself as a moderniser looking for greater ties with the West ended with him being overthrown after mass public protests at his decision to suspend planned agreements with the EU under economic pressure from Russia (with the West largely approving of his overthrow and Russia treating him as largely irrelevant to their own subsequent intervention in Ukraine). If McKinsey contributed significantly to his reform strategy at all, it's very hard to say they actually helped him in the long run.
The larger issue that I find with management consulting approach though is that they use the same set of tools to create solutions for ALL problems. They will throw in some charts, finance numbers, pas research etc. to sell a 'story'. They usually don't work on implementation but to present the first part of the solution. That's not how every problem should be solved IMHO. McKinsey et al. can make things easy for bureaucrats or government people to grasp, but to be honest their suggestions seems pretty ridiculous at times. Just look at some of the articles they have written about software industry and how out of touch it seems. Most of their solutions on social issues and such fields are rather ridiculous too. So I would hire an ex-consultant as an employee, no problem. But I wonder if I would ever want to outsource work to a Management Consulting company.