In an interview with CNN on February 27, 2002, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani provided a glimpse into the services his newly-formed consulting firm is offering its corporate clients. Mr. Giuliani is chairman and CEO of Giuliani Partners, a strategic alliance with Ernst & Young (E&Y). Among other products and services, his firm plans to make available a computer-driven program that may help prevent future Enrons.

As an overview of the firm's products and services, Mr. Giuliani said he and his partners are doing a lot of preliminary work designed to help improve management's effectiveness in the area of security. "Essentially, it's crisis management and protection of businesses and brands," he said. Simply stated, the firm advises clients on what steps they need to take now to protect their future business operations.

"I know people will think… this is just about my name," he said. "But actually it's about substance." To apply that substance to his consulting business, the former mayor plans to leverage some of the same techniques he used to tame a city that people considered "unmanageable and ungovernable." A key example is the computer program the former mayor used to manage 20 agencies.

Described by Mr. Giuliani as "a way of analyzing a corporation to make it more accountable, understandable and profitable," this program can help managers and others identify and resolve problems before they become crises.

"If [the computer program] had been operating within Enron," said Mr. Giuliani, "there never would have been an Enron. The upper management of the company would have had complete and absolute knowledge of the transactions that were going on. They [the transactions] would have been more transparent to the investing public and the people who were doing the auditing."

-Rosemary Schlank