IT (brand) architecture is not the answer

By Fiona Czerniawska

Technology companies* have always had a problem with consulting.

Typically, technology companies have treated their consulting businesses in one of two ways. For some – most, perhaps – consultants have essentially been sales people, tasked with opening the door to senior budget holders and pulling in behind them downstream systems integration and outsourcing services. But other firms embedded consulting in their back-office processes, giving an innovative or high-value polish to what might otherwise have been a commodity service. Neither was particularly satisfactory from a client point of view, so from time to time, firms have tried to break the mould. Usually through acquisition, they’d make dramatic public announcements about renewed investment in consulting – only to see the latter gradually collapse into one of the two traditional roles outlined above.

Resolving this problem has now become urgent. Digitisation is forcing the convergence between business and technology, so huge transformation projects are being won and lost over the ability to combine the two successfully. At the same time, the market for large-scale, traditional IT outsourcing deals is contracting – no one wants an inflexible ten year contract when technology and expectations are changing so quickly.

It’s tempting to argue that the issue is one of brand – and it’s certainly true that plenty of ground has been lost because technology companies have created low-key, defensive consulting. But the real problem is the business model. In neither of the traditional approaches was consulting work charged to clients as just that: sometimes it was free, a clear loss-leader for other type of business; on other occasions, it was buried in the hardware and software costs. This meant that the consulting practices didn’t have control over their own destiny; their ability to recruit the people they needed and invest in innovative, new services their clients were asking for. But it also meant that the consulting work, literally and figuratively, had no value. And it had no value because the vast majority of people at the top of the technology companies aren’t consultants: they see consulting as the means to an end, not an end in itself – and they don’t understand what makes consulting work and consultants tick (hint: it’s not just adding ‘business services’ to your letterhead).

Executives in technology companies have been known to pour scorn on the idea of putting consultants in charge, but they need to start accepting the idea that nothing’s really going to change in their business unless they do so.

*Just to be clear: I’m not referring here to the legion of companies which make hardware and/or software and which offer support around these, but to those whose heritage is in hardware, software and related services but which have subsequently tried to move into more general IT and even management consulting.