I no longer believe that organizations can be changed by imposing a model developed elsewhere. So little transfers to, or even inspires, those trying to work at change in their organizations. Second, and much more important, the new physics cogently explains that there is no objective reality out there waiting to reveal its secrets. There are no recipes or formulae, no checklists, or advice that describes ‘reality’. There is only what we create through our engagement with others and with events. Nothing really transfers; everything is always new and different and unique to each of us.

Wheatley, M., Leadership and the New Science,

Berrett-Koeler, San Francisco, 1992, p. 7.

1.1 Consultancy: the opportunity

Not long ago IT consultancy was perceived as a highly exclusive profession. There were a relatively small number of large prestigious IT consulting firms who were the major providers of expert advice and service. In addition there were small firms operating in specialist niches. IT consultancy was seen as an exclusive profession that was really quite difficult to penetrate. You either had to get into one of the big firms or you had to be really quite special, probably with a computer science degree or an MBA or a PhD or maybe all three. IT consultants were seen as being remote and very often they were not perceived as delivering much value to organizations. The old quip that says ‘a consultant is someone who borrows your watch so as to tell you the time, then pockets your watch without even a thank you and sends you a big bill for having told you what time it is’ was created to politely express a profound dissatisfaction with what many consultants actually had to offer. The watch story is an allegory or metaphor for the fact that the organization often has to educate the consultant in the ins-and-outs of the particular business before he or she can be effective. Being called the consultant by the corporate team was not necessarily a term of endearment.

Today much of this has changed. There is a different attitude to consultancy and specifically to IT consultancy. To begin with the image of consultants is much more positive than it has ever been before and this is due to a number of reasons. In the first place there are many more IT consultancy organizations now, both big and small. These IT consultancy organizations came about because of the enormous need for advice and skills which was generated by several large waves of computerization over the past 20 years. Corporate requirements for IT have simply rocketed. These massive increases in demand for computers and skills resulted from first, the Big Bang in the City of London in the mid-1980s; then the arrival of the Internet and the Web starting in the early 1990s following by Dot.Com mania leading up to the end of that decade. There has also been the Y2K issue, which offered great opportunities for business firms to shake out much of their legacy systems. All of these computerization initiatives created massive opportunities for IT consultancies, which were in a position to offer independent advice and provide the necessary skills to make systems work.

1.2 Changes brought by the Internet and the Web

It is sometimes suggested that perhaps the greatest and most long-lived of these waves of demand will turn out to have been the arrival of the Internet and the Web. This created an enormous need and subsequent demand for specialist IT advice and skills. These were required and are still needed, not only by well-established organizations, but also by the thousands of new businesses that were created in order to take advantage of the promise of the great fortunes there were to be made out of the Web. In the case of well-established firms their existing IT departments’ capacity was already fairly well committed due to the work needed to supply the routine information systems requirements of their organizations when the Internet and the Web revolution exploded. Many of these IT departments just couldn't take on the extra work. So many of these larger organizations with well-established IT departments had to outsource much of their Web development work leading to more jobs for consultants.

And the thousands of new venture capital funded businesses attracted to the Web, much like a moth to a candle, also needed quality IT advice and skills. It was certainly boom time for IT consultancy.

But as mentioned above the Internet and the Web were not the only drivers of the increase in demand for the advice and skills supplied by IT consultants. The year 2000 problem was solved largely by organizations disposing of their legacy systems and acquiring large Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications such as SAP, Baan, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards to mention only a few. These are large, complex systems, which are in terms of human resources very demanding. ERP applications are not software packages that can be easily and quickly dropped into a business. To obtain real value from this type of system it needs to be tailored for each business environment. Highly skilled and even more highly paid staff is needed to implement these systems. Some if not many companies are unable to find adequate staffing resources of their own to manage all the different aspects of these challenging new application systems. Where this has occurred these organizations have had to turn to IT consultants for help. This has resulted in demand for a large number of IT consultants of all different types and grades. Much the same sort of situation exists in the data warehousing and data mining areas as well as in the field of Intranet and Extranet development and use.

… THIS HAS RESULTED IN DEMAND FOR A LARGE NUMBER OF IT CONSULTANTS …

1.3 Consultants plug a gap

So, as IT becomes more and more sophisticated, business firms and other organizations will find it harder and harder to obtain suitable staff and will therefore need to use consultants. This trend is likely to continue into the future with more and more IT consultants being needed to help business firms and other organizations cope with ever increasingly sophisticated application systems.

This huge demand for specialist IT advice and skills brought a flood of new organizations into the market place. Some of these new firms are quite big but many are in fact small operations with only one or a couple of people running the business. The range of IT professional services offered by these firms is quite broad. In the Internet and the Web market segment alone there are dozens of specialist consulting operations related to design, to payment collection, to hosting, to business models, to connecting the front office to the back office to mention only a few.

1.4 A major career option

IT consultancy is now a major career option for a wide range of IT professionals, with the last few years seeing dramatic growth in the number of individuals entering the IT consultancy profession. As described above this has been fuelled by the relatively unforeseen exponential growth in IT expenditure during this period.

But the growth in IT expenditure alone has not been the only driver of the interest in IT consultancy. Increasingly IT professionals want to break out of large corporate structures and to try business on their own account for themselves. This new attitude has been fuelled by at least two major economic and social developments:

NEW ATTITUDES

• Employers’ attitudes towards staff and staff attitude toward employers.

• Employers’ attitude towards consultants.

There has been a major shift in society's attitude towards jobs. Whereas 20 or 30 years ago large organizations frequently offered long-term career opportunities or maybe even a job for life, today that has changed. One of the best examples of this is the IBM organization. When I joined IBM in 1973 I was told that unless I committed a very grave offence I would not be fired. IBM had a non-firing and non-redundancy policy. If I didn't perform well my pay could be reduced. I was after all a salesman, and I could find myself doing more and more boring jobs – a stationery inventory controller was mentioned. But my livelihood was secure. The firm would be loyal to me. This attitude was prevalent in many large organizations that saw security of employment as one of the major factors that talented people wanted.

THIRTY YEARS LATER THIS HAS ALL BEEN THROWN OVERBOARD

Thirty years later this has all been thrown overboard. Redundancy is a way of life in virtually all organizations, including IBM. There is no longer any question of business firms or other organizations for that matter being loyal to their staff. As a general rule today, if the staff don't shape up they have to ship out. If the business turns down then the staff have to walk – get off the payroll as quickly as possible. And in recent years more than a few people have been made redundant more than once. Furthermore once you have reached the age of 50 for certain and in some cases maybe even 40 it is increasingly hard to find another full-time permanent job. This is the reality of early twenty-first century business life. Furthermore it is difficult to see how business conditions will ever be easy again and that there will again be job security which existed 20 or 30 years ago.

It is indeed not surprising that an increasing number of people want to be in business on their own and this is as true for IT professionals as it is for any other group. The idea of staying in one company for a long time, never mind in the same job for life, is as dead as the proverbial dodo. One of the main reasons is that being self-employed you have the opportunity to spread your income risk by having more than one client. So if, or rather when, you finish with, lose or fall out with one client, hopefully you will have a few others to keep you going.

In the second place many established business firms and other organizations are today more willing to use consultants than they were before. Previously the preferred approach was to have all the human resources in the form of full-time employees or members of staff. However, this old attitude led to head count increases. Today companies are really quite sensitive to the number of people that they employ as head count control is regarded by many to be a particularly important critical success factor. This has led to business firms and other organizations being more prepared to outsource a number of different aspects of their operations. One of the key ways in which firms outsource is to use consultants.¹

The recent popularization of outsourcing is a very important business development, which has created many consulting opportunities. This change in attitude has occurred because an increasing number of firms have realized that their most rational strategy to human resources is to focus intensely on their core competencies and to outsource any other competencies which are not core and which they may only require from time to time. This approach to business resourcing was well addressed by Charles Handy in his book The Age of Unreason when he described the shamrock organization, which is shown here in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 The shamrock model organization resourcing

Note the three leaves in the shamrock model are core competencies, outsourcing and flexible resources. This represents the three principal ways that organizations can acquire resources. According to the model of the shamrock organization businesses will prosper if they focus on developing their core competencies (first leaf) so that in these respects they are operating at world-class performance levels. Any business activity which is not core should be outsourced (second leaf). In some instances this proposition is believed to the extent that it is said that if you don't outsource non-core activities you are actually wasting the business's scarce resources. The question of flexible resources (third leaf) concerns the issue of having available a pool of additional people to help the organization cope during its peak seasons. Thus this part of the shamrock model also supports the notion of outsourcing.

At the same time as organizations have been adapting shamrock structure thinking there has been a realization that the old idea of organizational boundaries is not as useful as it was once thought. Not long ago it was felt that everyone outside the organization, including suppliers, essentially had an adversarial attitude. Fortunately this mind set is on the wane as it is realized that collaboration is far more mutually beneficial.

… ORGANIZATIONS HAVE BEEN ADAPTING SHAMROCK STRUCTURE …

The result of these trends in the market place and the business world in general is that IT consultancy is today, more than it has ever been before, a major career alternative for the IT professional. IT professionals, ranging from IT departmental managers, to project managers, to IT planners and strategic analysts on the one hand, to web designers and web graphics specialists on the other, can relatively easily move into IT consultancy. Of course whether or not they make a success of this is an entirely different matter.

1.5 Requirements to start

To enter the world of IT consultancy on your own, you will need to have a sought after set of professional skills and competencies. You will need to be quite expert in your own field. There are a considerable number of different areas and industry sectors in which it is possible for you to operate and some of these are described in Chapter 4. You will need to have a set of attitudes and an orientation towards work, which are discussed in Chapter 2. And of course you will need some financial resources, which are discussed in Chapter 3 and again in Chapter 10.

Other than the above there is very little in the way of barriers to entering the IT consulting world. But before you take the plunge into a new career read this book and think carefully if becoming a successful IT consultant is really what you want to do.

1.6 Summary and conclusion

Although the demand for consultants has grown faster in some years than in others, this market, especially for IT consulting, will continue to show growth potentially for some time. As a result this has become a major career opportunity for IT professionals. However, this type of work will not suit everyone and you need to consider carefully if you should give up your job and follow this type of career. The questions put to you at the end of Chapter 2 will help you decide if IT consultancy is really for you.

¹ There is another way of looking at the new attitude to outsourcing and consulting. As the business environment becomes more competitive it also becomes more complex and this produces a need for more highly competent and qualified staff who are expensive but not all of whom will be needed on a permanent basis. Therefore it makes very good business sense to buy in these skills only in small short bursts when they are actually needed.