The changing face of consulting firms

As technology evolves towards SOA, open source, ready made web services and global collaboration, IT consulting firms must evolve as well. Traditionally, IT consulting are after large cash rich clients where they are able to fork out millions and billions of dollars and invest in IT. Consulting firms charge a huge amount as well and earn truck loads of cash from a big client. These projects varies from small functionality implementation to large end to end transformation project. Many of these projects involve customising off the shelf software like Oracle and SAP.

However, with the changes in technology development, delivering value for clients does not come in the form of software anymore but more in the form of strategy, aligning business and IT, change management and good system architecture.

Consulting firms must continue to develop their in house technical expertise but I believe, in future, it will be a small team of highly skilled developers instead of large warehouses of developers.