Founding an independent IT consultancy — designing business and IT as one (1989)

What the end-to-end model left behind

At the heart of this founding decision was a choice of position: to chase the steady orders of a keiretsu, or to stand alone, without a backer, and take on a client’s management problems whole. In 1980s Japan, joining a keiretsu’s subcontracting chain was itself a form of business safety. That Future let go of the insurance in advance and bet instead on an end-to-end model — designing the business and its IT as one — gives the founding a character different from an engineer merely going independent. It can be read as a company that deliberately imposed on itself the constraint of winning work on nothing but the quality of its proposals and the results it delivered.

Whether an independent position actually pays off, however, depends on the technology and the market of the moment. The advantage Future found at the seam between the closed mainframe and the open system carries no guarantee of holding into the age of the cloud and generative AI. Even so, the founding template — never separating the business from the IT — was not let go through the later diversification or the holding-company reorganization. How far the 1989 choice, to take on a client’s management problems whole rather than lean on a keiretsu, keeps defining the very model of the independent IT consultancy is a question that still sits at the origin — and one worth holding onto in reading today’s push into full-service consulting and its early bets on AI.