External Capabilities & Insights Specialist

You will be a part of the External Capabilities and Insights (eC&I) team, which is the firm's external capability portfolio that manages $250mn+ of external capabilities for client service enablement. The team acts as a CoE for Client Service Teams (CST's) and practices to strategically source, host, deploy and manage a growing portfolio of 400+ cutting edge external sources & services for expertise, knowledge and data.

Three pillars form the teams value proposition:

• Client service and innovation enablement: Deliver insights & expertise with the best external knowledge, data, experts & services

• De-risk firm: Safeguard our firm by governing and managing third party risks

• Prudent resource and spend management: Drive high use, minimize costs, steward investments with gold standard processes

The eC&I team enable consultant's to deliver distinctive client impact through 4 service lines - Expert Network Services, Surveys, Data & Knowledge and Business Research & Analytics Outsourcing. The team touches >95% of firm's consultant's and is strongly integrated with practices and has an exceptional global talent pool. eC&I has a well codified recipe and a plug and play chassis to make external capabilities deployment seamless.

You will be the driving force for how consultants, capabilities & insights colleagues, assets, practices discover, engage, and deploy external sources and services for client service. You will be a category manager focusing on specific practice(s) to understand practice strategy, client needs, use cases, knowledge strategy and build external capabilities ecosystem to support the same.

You will collaborate with multiple stakeholders (e.g., partners, experts, directors, managers, asset leaders) to monitor the overall source portfolio and identify opportunities to upgrade, complement, or substitute client service offerings. You will lead cells to innovation outcomes stewarding massive investments on some of the most complex and largest investments the firm makes and bring incubation and investment expertise to new impact spaces/build new assets.

You will collaborate with and advise client capabilities teams/consultants ensuring that your cells have access to the right sources within their industry, function, or geography; represent their specific needs while evaluating, negotiating, and deploying relationships that complement client service activities. You will also work alongside senior account executives, product owners, and external support teams to shape commercial terms and simplify account dynamics to ensure mutually beneficial relationships and sustainable outcomes.

You will be leading a critical cross-section of firm activity, interacting with Client Service Teams, third-party providers, firm Legal, Risk and Finance functions. You will codify and transfer best practices alongside other eC&I colleagues as we further strengthen our firm's ability to use and converge external knowledge with internal and client knowledge.

You will solve creatively through market challenges to balance competitive requirements around intellectual property, price disparity, and channel conflict across multiple stakeholders. You will also partner with Legal and Risk colleagues on high-risk, sensitive use cases, contributing expertise and driving solutions to protect experimentation and build out high-risk/high-reward client capabilities such as data assets and direct-to-client offerings.

You will also have the opportunity to demonstrate your skills across resource strategy, relationship building, and project management, working in a fast-paced, client-driven knowledge environment.

You will also potentially be responsible for harmonizing relationship management, especially with key "shared" vendors, and making efficiency gains (e.g., contract discussions) as well as managing the increasing complexity of 3rd party resource management and improving risk mitigation, especially in key areas of usage compliance and security of supply.

You will also manage relationships with enterprise-wide resource providers and financial commitment/recovery planning and execution and coordinate awareness of the cell's information vendor landscape (e.g., new entrants, new offerings, competition, M&A) and keeping cell stakeholders informed of developments. You will deploy best practice in core vendor management processes including invoice payments, recoveries mechanisms, and usage monitoring.

• Undergraduate degree is required; advanced degree, e.g., MBA or a related discipline is highly desirable

• Professional experience as a consultant, C&I colleague or a senior professional in an information/resource management setting

• Proven history of business development and entrepreneurial projects exhibiting strong project management skills, ability to multi-task, manage through ambiguity and work with/represent senior stakeholders

• Strong problem solving, structuring, communications and client service capabilities

• Ability to navigate functional requirements of a large global corporation (finance, accounting, procurement), ability to drive negotiations and manage budget and performance metrics

• Ability to think dynamically and adapt to changing situations; an entrepreneurial, action and growth-oriented mindset

• Ability to interact with and influence leadership as a peer and operate as an integral member of the team collaborating in a complex organization with various firm cells

• Experience in a knowledge-related function with an understanding of the information industry, client use cases for data, and related contracting risks is a plus