What Do Consulting Firms Require In Changing Business Scenario?If consulting is considered as the business of giving advice, then a lot of people, probably in billions, qualify as consultants, because it is so easy to give advice. To some of us, the art of giving advice, even free advice, is a natural trait. However, if we consider consulting as giving professional advice to client organizations as a paid service and delivered in a formal, institutionalized manner, then the boundaries of who can be legitimately considered as consultants start to emerge.
Consultants come in all shapes and sizes. They come with various shades of grey too. Grey haired consultants were preferred around twenty years back because the grey colour symbolized experience and maturity and the clients expected such consultants to deliver practical stuff. A new entrant in the consulting fraternity for several years now is a young, MBA educated person endowed with the skills of analysis, ability to apply conceptual frameworks and proficient in IT based tools and methodologies. The grey matter in his or her brain is not as conspicuous as his smartness and confidence level is.
The consulting fraternity is a heterogeneous lot. There are consultants who form part of the workforce of large consulting firms and there are also freelance consultants who do their own marketing, work individually or in small teams and who grow their business through word of mouth publicity in niche markets. There are also retired officers from the Government or the corporate sector who showcase themselves as consultants. It is also not uncommon to see middlemen brand themselves as consultants. Most of these profiles are those of people with decades of experience. Consultants often function as experts in specific domains or sectors such as banking, retail or manufacturing. They also often work as functional consultants say as marketing or finance or HR consultants. They may be engaged in giving strategic advice or in designing and implementing IT based solutions. Thus, there can be a wide range of specializations both functionally or domain-wise to which consultant may belong. Again, and domain knowledge or functional expertise is critical and experience matters a lot for these services.
Another important change in the business of consulting is that the clients are getting smarter. They have started mastering the tricks of the trade. They also hire top league MBA professionals and domain experts, who are well aware of models and conceptual frameworks, and who are fairly clear about what and how technology can deliver to them. Most of them possess the requisite analytical skills and the associated software tools for analysing data. So why should the clients hire a consultant? The answer lies in consultants' ability to provide a holistic perspective through their skill of synthesis.
Clients also increasingly seek a process driven approach wherein the consultant hears out all the perceptions about the complexity of the problem from within the client organization. The consultant helps in deciphering the complexity of a problem and providing elegant solutions that work. There is therefore no denying that consultants do add value which is regarded as important by the client (which is the reason why consulting still exists and has been growing). However this is a domain in which consultants of grey hair category have a clear edge over young consultants due to their in-depth experience of interacting with client personnel in different types of organizations.
Another significant change in the business scenario of consulting firms is that the consultants are increasingly becoming technology savvy. They keep abreast with technological changes and their implications for the business of client organizations. Learning about newly emerging technologies and their business applications in their preferred sectors of providing services is a continual process for such smart consultants. These smart consultants enable the client organization to decide about the right kind of technology for their (clients') business. Here too, the facts and the internal business situation is as informed by (or as elicited from) the client organization. But it is the consultants' ability to grasp this reality quickly and offer technology-led solutions which provide a cutting edge to the client that matters. The young generation have a distinct advantage over their experienced counterparts in this regard.
A question often asked is whether consulting firms only seek people with some prior work experience in technology companies or do they seek fresh MBAs as well. Very often a fresher is preferred for a consulting profile by a company precisely because he/she is a fresher. Of course, relevant work experience in a technical field having close linkage with IT consulting knowledge and skills helps in good measure to stand up and be noticed for IT consulting related positions.
It would be pragmatic to conclude by saying that a judicious mix of young and experienced minds is required by a consulting firm to grow in the changing business scenario. Both types of talent contribute to the success of the firm by providing the requisite domain knowledge, maturity and experience on the one hand and the savviness with technology, analytical skills and a fresh perspective on the other hand.
The author is Dean Academics and Professor at IMT Ghaziabad. He has been earlier a senior consultant with Tata Consultancy Services and a freelance consultant for several years.
Guest Author
Surinder Batra is Dean Academics and Professor at IMT Ghaziabad. He has been earlier a senior consultant with Tata Consultancy Services and a freelance consultant for several years.
