Get Over It Already

                         You're Not Consultants Anymore

Today I listened in on an analyst firm webinar concerning their predictions for the IT services industry. In the Q&A that followed, a caller wanted to know why systems integrators still have not productized their offerings as we move well into 2008.

While one of the analysts offered a capable answer, the reality of it is a little more insidious.

Yes, consultants like to believe in the unique problem sets that their clients possess and that only a consultant can craft an equally unique solution for them.  The concept of commoditizing (or productizing) one's solution is repugnant to a consultant because once commoditized, the unique value of a consultant is lost.  In fact, the consultant is replaced with an installer.

People love to call themselves consultants even when all they do is show up at the same outsourcing data center and do the same task every single day.  Likewise, you are not a consultant if you routinely install the same software package using the same methodology that is sold through a menu of pricing options from which a customer selects.  No, you're not a consultant. You are an order fulfillment specialist.

The Economist produced a book titled Business Consulting recently.  One major theme that this book explored was that management and strategy consulting is no longer what most major service firms sell today.  No, they sell preconfigured solutions.

Any systems integrator that balks at productizing its offerings is doing so because it is hanging on to the romantic notion that it still is a highly malleable and adaptable consultancy when it is not. Anyone who works in a delivery center, center of excellence, or other industrialized factory of preconfigured thinking is not, I repeat not, a consultant.

For those firms with deep roots in the old consulting world, it's time to drop the name consulting from your corporate banner.  You do not provide independent advice and counsel to clients anymore.  You do not put your client's interest first as you put your economic interests ahead of their's.  You have chosen to provide services around commodity technologies and not provide unique solutions in their place.  You have chosen to grow your company and revenues at the expense of maintaining the intimacy and professionalism of consulting.  You no longer deserve nor warrant the use of the name consulting or consultant and you should refrain from it going forward.

The market, workforce and many firms have evolved in recent years. It's time to to rename companies, professions and job titles and get clear about what it is that integrators and consultants deliver.

Comments

[Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan]

This is a very good differentiation between consultants (customised intellectual capital to improve the client’s condition, extra brainpower to think in a new way and create something new) and subcontractors (extra pair of hands to perform pre-determined manual labour the client has neither time nor inclination to perform in house.)

I would also add to this train of thought that any firm that sells its services on a piecemeal basis for hourly pricing (or any time-based) basis, tracks its people’s “performance” through timesheets and pays them hourly wages is not a consulting firm. It’s, an installation plant, installing pre-created, off-the-shelf, shrink-wrapped, “our unique approach” solutions.

The other mark of a true consulting firm is that, instead of silos of specialists, you find a cohesive team of – using Andrew Sobel’s term - broad generalists or as I’ve just read somewhere, versatilists. They have their specialities, but also have significant peripheral knowledge, so they can do their specialities in context of the big picture. Specialists can’t do that. A specialist keeps working on the brand new business plan in spite of the CEO’s announcement that the company is shutting down. Most specialists can’t think beyond their specialities.

Or in Robert Anson Heinlein’s* words, “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

* American author. One of the Big Three with Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Winner of the first Grand Master Award given by the Science Fiction Writers of America for lifetime achievement.

Cheers
Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan

[Luis-tic616]

As a former consultant at a big one, I cannot agree more on this post - I work now by my own and I deliver knowledge to my clients whilst before, at the big consulting company, we delivered hours in pre-packaged projects

[Luis-tic616]

As a former consultant at a big one, I cannot agree more on this post - I work now by my own and I deliver knowledge to my clients whilst before, at the big consulting company, we delivered hours in pre-packaged projects