How IT Business Consulting Works: Tasks, Approaches, Results

Introduction: The Problem of IT Consulting Standards

Published: March 16, 2021. Reading time: 7 min. The CIS IT market is relatively young.
For many of its areas, including IT consulting, clear standards have still not been established.
Audit, implementation support, and disguised IT product sales are all called consulting. As a result, the value of IT consulting is blurred in the eyes of business: at kt.team, we sometimes encounter clients who do not understand how consulting will actually help them.
Let's look at why businesses need IT consulting, how it works, and how it does not work.

From IT Audit to IT Consulting

These two concepts are often confused. As a result, a business may not always understand which service it needs right now.

Colleagues from the finance sector will help us sort out the concepts.

There, market standards have long been established both in legal regulation and in client understanding. For example, a company is about to undergo a tax audit.

To prepare for it, the company invites an auditor.

Its task is to check whether the documents are in order, whether reporting complies with standards, and whether there are grounds for fines or, worse, for administrative or even criminal proceedings. It also proposes changes that will quickly eliminate all noncompliance.

The auditor's duties and authority end there.

Consulting is one level above.

It no longer works on fixing consequences, but on building the right processes.

How should work be organized so errors do not occur? How can business goals be achieved?

How to redesign the system for changing conditions

The same is true in IT: IT audit looks for existing and potential errors, while IT consulting works toward strategic and tactical goals within digital transformation. With one caveat: IT consulting looks at achieving business goals through the lens of information technology.

IT Consulting Levels

There are three levels of IT consulting: consulting audit, applied consulting, and strategic consulting. They differ by the level of tasks the client brings to consulting, from tactical and minor to strategic. The lowest level is process consulting. The IT consultant looks at processes, identifies their weak points, and proposes specific changes.
It answers the question: "How should existing processes be adjusted to achieve a good result?"
This may involve refining processes or systems, or introducing new functionality.
At the intermediate level, within architectural consulting, the key question becomes: "How should a company’s IT architecture be built or rebuilt so that it is most effective within the existing business model and company goals?"
This is no longer work with isolated processes, but with the company's entire operating system. The IT consultant identifies who owns each business process in the company, what problems exist, how the IT architecture reflects the company's organizational structure, and then refines the existing architecture.
Strategic consulting is the highest level, the level of changing strategy and driving business digital transformation.
At this level, IT consulting works not with specific technologies, but with strategic decisions and business model redesign.
The higher the consulting level, the less it focuses on specifics, such as individual systems that can be implemented in the company's IT infrastructure.
But at the same time, each decision or proposal has a stronger impact on the client's results.
It is worth noting that even at the strategic level, it makes no sense to come to IT consulting with a request like: "We do not know how to move forward, but we want to become Yandex, so write a development strategy for us."
For IT consulting to be effective, the business must have a vision and an overall development strategy. The consultant only helps ground them at the level of information technology and digitalization, formulate steps to implement the strategy, identify potential digital transformation risks, and discuss adjusting the strategy based on the experience gained.

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The Line Between Sales and Consulting

Almost always, IT consulting is provided by companies that are also IT integrators.
This affects how the consultation is conducted and what its outcome is.
Having mastered certain technologies, an IT integrator often tries to solve clients’ business problems through the lens of those technologies. For example, 6 or 7 years ago we also tried to address client needs through Magento, a product we knew well at the time.
If a consultant has only a small number of technologies in their toolkit, their solutions are limited. Instead of enabling effective business digital transformation, they risk trapping the client in a technological dead end.
It is far more effective when an IT consultant has experience working with a broad range of technologies.
In this case, it can offer different approaches relevant to the client’s business goals. Another possibility is chasing trendy technologies.
Blockchain, computer vision, and machine learning are in the spotlight right now, surrounded by an aura of being cool.
Clients and developers embrace them enthusiastically, but there are not many real successful cases.
When proposing these technologies from a consulting perspective, an IT integrator does not always consider whether they make business sense for the client.
Consulting not only answers what to do, but also explains why it should be done and what the result will be.
If a consultant can justify their proposals and recommendations with data and practicality, their work was effective.

Must-Have for a Consultant

IT consulting thinks and acts on two levels: the level of business goals and the level of applied solutions.
From this, we can infer the set of skills a consultant should have. The first is business expertise.
Any consulting is based on understanding a company's strategy, tactics, business goals, and business processes. In this sense, IT consulting differs from traditional business consulting only in its point of view: it filters goals and tasks through the lens of information technology. It looks at how to improve business processes using IT.
It proposes technology solutions at the level of specific systems or IT architecture that help implement the company’s strategy. It helps refine the IT strategy.
The second key skill of an IT consultant is hands-on expertise, which allows them to propose truly effective and practical digitalization scenarios.
Working in the field strips away the romantic aura around technologies and teaches you to assess trends pragmatically.
An IT consultant knows the pros and cons, as well as the implementation specifics, of each technology from practical experience, not marketing claims.
That is why they can offer truly relevant and modern solutions to your challenges. To be clear, broad hands-on expertise is not the same as deep implementation experience with one or two technologies.
The value of consulting lies in the ability to view problems and processes in a company from different angles, choose the solutions on the market that are optimal for the client, and explain why those particular solutions are being recommended.

When IT Consulting Is Useful

It may seem that in IT consulting the "ball" is always on the contractor's side: they analyze business processes, make suggestions, and so on.

But the result of IT consulting also depends on the client.

You can get concrete, workable, and effective proposals in the following situations: your business strategy is already defined, and you have a vision of how the business will develop next.

Working on the overall strategy is the responsibility of C-level executives and owners: they bring their own vision of the business’s future to the strategy, and they are also accountable for its implementation.

From a management perspective, shifting this responsibility to consulting is wrong. You have a list of business tasks at the level of "improve a specific business process"

or "improve a specific metric"

In response to these challenges, consulting should offer concrete step-by-step solutions, not abstract and hard-to-implement advice like "Become Uber." Incidentally, this is one of the markers you can use to assess consulting quality. It should be clear that consulting is not the same as development. A consultant should not be given technology-level tasks such as building a B2B portal or integrating a specific system.

Its level of questions is: "We have problems in this part of the process: what is wrong, and what can be done from an IT perspective to solve the problem and improve this set of metrics?"

Key Takeaways

Do not mix IT consulting with IT audit. IT audit looks for existing and potential errors. IT consulting works toward strategic and tactical goals using IT solutions. It is also important to understand the line between IT consulting and technology sales. Consulting not only answers what to do, but also explains why it should be done and what the result will be.

IT consulting has three levels:

Process consulting answers the question: "How should existing processes be adjusted to achieve the target result?" Architectural consulting answers the question: "How should the company's IT architecture be built or redesigned so that it is most effective within the current business model?" Strategic consulting answers the question: "How should the company's IT strategy be developed and implemented?"

An IT consultant should:

have business expertise, since IT consulting is a special case of business consulting have sufficient hands-on expertise working with different technologies and platforms For IT consulting to be effective, the client should clearly define business goals and identify problem areas. The consultant should propose solutions, so you should not come to them asking for a specific technology.

Consulting will not be useful for you:

if the company has no clear business model or strategy if the consultant cannot explain exactly how a particular business goal can be achieved from a technology standpoint if the consultant lacks sufficient expertise with different technologies When choosing an IT consulting provider, the main thing to keep in mind is that your company does not need a technology, no matter how attractive, trendy, or popular it may be, but a solution to a specific task or problem.