SYSTEMS PRACTICE IN CONSULTING

The paper covers the area of systems thinking and practice in manageme nt consultancy primarily in Tata Consultancy Service in India. As the largest consultancy organization in the country, it has the need and o pportunity to deal with very large societal systems which are by natur e complex. It needs to develop new holistic approaches to execute the assignments. The Systems Engineering and Cybernetic Centre (SECC) was started in 1982 to meet this requirement. The paper described the gene sis and the arena of activity of SECC over the years, highlighting the formulation of an interactive consulting paradigm and a multimodeling approach to complex problem solving. The philosophical bases of these are discussed along with systems practice in some typical complex ass ignments.