Who Will Consult the Consultants?

I’ve spent most of my career doing web development for non-tech enterprise clients. Companies like these love using consultants to do their technical work because they wish they didn’t need anyone to do technical work for them. It’s not a core part of their business, but a necessary evil. Many of them are taking a long time to come to the conclusion that this whole internet thing is here to stay and that using it for their business needs to be on equal footing (at least) with all of their traditional functions.

They’ve had consultants, probably from a large firm like Accenture or Cognizant, building out their tech stack piecemeal and on-demand for many years. They may have even switched firms a time or two. The product of all that work has never been terribly popular internally, but the dissatisfaction was outweighed by a desire for the problem to just go away because it’s nerd stuff for nerds.

That product consists of one or more implementations of legacy systems. Likely some of the consultants who worked on them over the years put a lot of care in to their work. But because there hasn’t been a central figure overseeing and guiding the work, what they have is a gross parfait of work from different groups, with different goals, using different processes, layered on top of each other without ever touching the layers below because those layers were business essential, scary, and hard to understand because they were already out of date.

Now that executives are actually paying attention to what’s going on in that sad stew, the task of bringing it under their purview feels insurmountable. How do they…

• decide on what they need to do to get out of this mess with input from all of the stakeholders with a bad taste still in their mouths?
• hire and train the team they need to prevent the same problems from recurring and drive revenue?
• scope, plan, and execute the work?
• decide on a cogent AI strategy that will maximize its usefulness without creating reliability problems they cannot afford?

I plan on going into the solutions in more detail in other posts. I’ll update this one with links as I do. To start though, they need to bring someone in who has been in this situation before to come in, quickly learn their business, and provide them with the tools and people they need to build the future they need. That person should be a consultant who does specifically this for a living. Like me, for example.