Local consultancy firm Business Systems Group (BSG) has appointed Jurie Schoeman as managing partner, as the company looks to scale up its operations.
Prior to his appointment, Schoeman was CEO of the home-grown BSG, which competes with multinationals such as Deloitte, Accenture and KPMG in the South African and African consultancy space.
The appointment comes as BSG chairman Mteto Nyati reorganises the firm to effectively compete in the market.
Nyati, who is also chairman of the Eskom board, bought a 40% controlling stake in BSG for an undisclosed amount in November 2022.
As he bolsters the business, last year BSG took advantage of the large-scale job retrenchments announced by Nyati’s former employer Microsoft, to acquire its local digital advisory services team of 11 professionals.
In his new role, Schoeman will be responsible for executing BSG’s strategic growth plans in collaboration with BSG’s partners and leadership team.
According to the company, he brings experience and expertise from 24 years in consulting, with more than 17 years at BSG, including as CEO from 2018 to 2023, during which time Schoeman prioritised creating personal connection in BSG under the theme of “Being BSG”, while achieving 100% topline growth.
“The change in the role has a lot to do with the wisdom and leadership Mteto has brought to BSG,” Schoeman tells ITWeb in an interview.
“The whole plan around that is: how do we grow as a business? So, we are re-organising our roles and responsibilities. As the CEO, it was more of a hierarchical structure and the managing partner has got autonomy and accountability to grow parts of the business. It’s now about being accountable to a group of partners to bring everything together and also to make sure autonomy exists.”
He reveals there are two other partners within the business – one for digital advisory solutions and another for strategy and solutions – and, as the business grows, there will be many partners.
“When Mteto came into BSG, the first strategy was to become a challenger in the market, so now we want to move from being a challenger to becoming a leader. In the first six or so months that Mteto has been in BSG, the strategy was to create growth beyond financial services.
“That’s an exciting and significant shift for us compared to what we did before. We also want to have strong partnerships with the hyperscalers. So far, we are working with Microsoft and AWS [Amazon Web Services], and in time to come, Google and others will follow. That supports us in being able to help our customers make the best decision across those platforms,” he adds.
Schoeman points out that one of the ways in which BSG has been a challenger in the market has been by leading through purpose, which is arguably more important than ever before, with the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to fundamentally change how business is conducted, and the moral, ethical and societal impact of this technology.
“At BSG, we see being purposeful in understanding the likely longer-term consequences of the decisions we make now and ensuring these are going to help to create a positive and sustained impact in society.
“Generative AI has the potential to change all aspects of our lives, including how we do business, and we see great potential to harness this to assist in closing the technical skills gap in Africa and in helping the businesses we work with to be much closer to their customers and their holistic, long-term needs.
“We can see within the industries that we work with that the technology has huge potential. We are going to help them to translate that potential into performance. As with any technology, the quality and access to data is critical to be able to use it from a generative AI perspective. We need to help them [the industries] to take those first [generative AI] steps because it involves different situations and environments,” he concludes.
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