[paulriddle]

These companies provide political value. I think of them as black boxes that don't really do anything to its input but give political weight to the arbitrary claim associated with the input. Want to cover your fuckup on a project? Hire Accenture for a few months to do something meaningless, like produce a report with all the problems in the project. Change nothing. Then say that clearly the project is more difficult than you've anticipated, you even retained a consultant that said this and that. More resources are required.

You can do training sessions for people you want to advance or hold back. In both cases sessions would be meaningless and void of any real value, except that they assign attribute Foo to the group of people. Then you can say that only people with Foo can do Bar, moving those people forward in their career. Alternatively you can overcome some bureaucratic obstacle by claiming that you do Foo regularly, which is a requirement from some authority for some reason.

I don't really know how this kind of politics works, but this is how I tend to think about it.