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Sylvain Bernolle

Eating our own dog food on digital transformation

So many articles are being written by digital advisers urging their customers to take the digital turn before their business is doomed to disruption by another Uber of some sort.

But when asked in a recent survey conducted by RusselReynolds associates for the Harvard Business Review on “The industries that are being disrupted the most by digital”, only half of the Professional services firms felt strongly impacted by the Digital Transformation, way behind the Media, telecom or finance leaders who anticipated a more massive disruption in the industries.

So as the saying goes “shoemaker's son always goes barefoot”? Being in the Professional Services for over 15 years, this striking paradox made me think: is our consulting industry immune to the Digital disruption like 50% tend to believe it today or are we just like many others in pure denial phase against upcoming change?

Main causes of disruption are mainly to be found when barriers to entries on a market tend to dramatically be reduced, allowing new players to challenge incumbents positions. How does that apply to our consulting business?

Disruptive forces in Consulting

The truth is that barriers to entry have never been so low for starting a consulting business.

  • Direct access to a global pool of talents is made possible by freelancers platforms such as Upwork [resulting from the merge of elance and odesk in 2014] gathering over 10,000 freelancers and already processing USD 1Bn+ of work annually or soon on Linkedin profinder that just launched end of last year in California.
  • Knowledge is becoming more and more a free commodity, shared in opensource mode, communities, free trainings, even now courses from top Universities are available online with the growing successs of the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC).
  • The frenetic pace of innovation and upgrades introduced by technology vendors, is generating the need for continuous training of professionals and opening up from more nimble players who have the agility to adapt realtime to the the new demands.
  • Brick and mortar Offices are replaced by virtual teams working from home or some coffee place, a new flexibility that has a large plebiscite amongst so-called millennials employees.

All those disruptive developments are precluding consulting firms from keeping a business-as-usual attitude and eat their own dog food on digital transformation.

New business models for Consulting firms?

Can Consulting firms get inspired by the new business models and tools that they recommend to their customers who are at the forefront of Digital transformation?

Embracing the Innovation schizophrenia

…also known as bimodal approach, a term coined by Gartner: consulting firms need to have the ability to explore new avenues of digital business while still keeping the lights on on the legacy business with their clients.

In order to be able to manage this duality, consulting firms need to open up for a diversity of skills to help redefine the customer experience they provide: business savvy consultants for technology firms (or vice versa), designers, even artists that will stimulate creativity.

At the same time, managing the lifecycle of consultants skills is paramount to ensure that they can cope with the frenetic pace of innovations and are able to be constantly “upgraded” to the relevant skills.

Most of the time, it is about developing new alliances with the startup ecosystems in order to stay abreast on innovation and also connect their customers with original solution providers who are born digital.

Digital Consulting platforms?

As we know, consulting business is mainly based on advisers' ability to gain trust and it is hard to imagine that this element can be replaced by an automated process or even delivered by purely remote consultants. Proximity with a trusted advisor will remain a key selection criteria for customers. However, this proximity combined with the access to a wider pool of knowledge and services through a shared digital platform with the customer will be a key differentiation point in the experience delivered.

Key features of this digital consulting platform could include:

  • access to the consulting organization knowledge management and latest research on a particular subject matter
  • ability to connect with peers customers of the consulting organization, (even without the intervention of the firm) to guarantee neutral feedbacks
  • on-demand access to a larger pool of consultants of the consulting organization and its trusted partners on a self-service mode
  • access to benchmarks and data resources
  • best practices tools to manage projects accessible as a service
  • ∞…

The extension of the current consulting services through digital are still to be invented as most of the new digital services today.

What an exciting time to apply our creativity to our own cooking!

And you, as a customer or consultant, how do you see the future of consulting in a digital world?