I disagree. I worked for a couple of big-six consulting firms, and my experience at the last one was that they could be pretty clueless and lazy about determining what the customer really needed.

I spent a goodly amount of time preparing a questionnaire about the client's business needs and purposes for doing ad-hoc database queries. None of the questions were leading or simply offered up a feature. They required some thought and would yield useful information.

The project manager was baffled by it. NO! he said, clearly flummoxed by this divergence from what apparently was his (and perhaps the firm's) lazy, half-assed approach: Look up all the available products for the customer's task, put all of the features they claim to offer in a big list with checkboxes next to them, and hand it to the client. This is exactly what I was told to do, in the rebuke I got for doing it right.

I referred to this as the grocery-list approach. Of COURSE the client is going to create an imaginary need for most of the features and check them off. Who wouldn't?

Another great example is "customizable UI." How many thousands of man-years of work have been wasted on this boondoggle?