Current Challenges With Consultants

The current state of affairs for BPM consulting is less than ideal, and that isn't just due to companies misusing consultants, or bypassing them altogether. Some of the blame has to fall squarely on the software vendors, as well as on the BPM consulting firms themselves.

Vendors are in business to sell software. A prime way for any vendor to maximize revenue is to compete on price, or to offer a low total cost of ownership (TCO) vis-à-vis its competitors. A second way is for vendors to build out a sales channel by creating an ecosystem of consulting partners. These partners generate significant consulting revenue for themselves (typically around the same amount of money as the cost of the software purchase) by recommending the vendor's products to prospects and then assisting in the implementation.

During the sales process, vendors often downplay the need for implementation services, which in turn lowers the TCO for their solution. At the same time, these vendors will pitch prospective consulting partners on the idea that their product can generate lots of consulting dollars. Which is the truth? It really varies by vendor. If a vendor has a sizable list of consulting partners, it's a good bet that there is money to be made implementing the solution and thus vendor comments about not needing significant implementation services should be taken with a grain of salt. Unfortunately, too many companies take the service comments during the sales cycle at face value and don't budget adequately for implementation. This either results in an implementation that fails to deliver on all goals or one that is seriously over budget. In either case, the result is a black eye for BPM consulting.

You know a market is hot when every company mentions it on its Web site home page or includes it in its company tag line. All of a sudden everyone is a BPM expert. To be sure, there really are experts out there, people who have been working with BPM (or its predecessor components) at a high level, across numerous products, for many years. They have a broad view of what's available, what works and what doesn't, and where the vendors and the industry are headed. On the other hand, there are people who have been heads-down, narrowly focused on implementing a single product for many years, who now slap a BPM label on what they do. While it's accurate to say they implement BPM, it's certainly not accurate to say they're BPM experts. How much knowledge do they have of the other 60-plus products they haven't been implementing? Their BPM knowledge is also limited to the features in the particular product with which they have the most experience. For example, if "their product" doesn't offer a balanced scorecard capability, it's highly likely the consultants will have limited knowledge in that area, too.

Another group of consultants trying to claim some BPM credibility are the business intelligence (BI)/data warehousing firms. Though they're clearly experts in BI and data warehousing, do they know how to determine an organization's KPIs or improve (or even just automate) its budgeting process? Both the implementation and BI/data warehousing firms usually do their core jobs very well. However, when some tout their BPM expertise at conferences and in white papers, they may be doing a disservice to prospective customers as well as themselves.

A quick glance at this year's BPM Consulting Guide (see page 22) makes it clear that most firms provide every service a company could possibly need. Is that really possible? For example, can a firm with fewer than 10 people really be strong in both strategic management process work and hands-on implementations? Probably not. Each service demands very different skill sets, and the smaller firms cannot afford to specialize to that degree in their hiring. So what you get is a firm that's probably very strong in one area, but mediocre at best in the other.

What about firms that partner with and implement a particular vendor product, yet also claim they do vendor selection work? When a consulting group generates 95 percent of its revenue from implementing product X and a company asks that group to help it pick a product, can the outcome possibly be anything other than product X? Not only are these groups obviously biased, but where is their expertise? What do they really know of other products?

How can organizations succeed in their quest for the holy grail of one-stop shopping, with one consulting firm that can do it all? A logical answer would seem to be for the consulting companies to do what the software vendors do: partner. Unfortunately, unlike the vendors that have long partner lists with consultants (as well as, quite often, other technology companies), consulting companies have few, if any, nonvendor partners. One can speculate on the reasons for this, but the fact remains: It's hard to find a consulting company that focuses on its core strengths and partners with other consultants for the rest of the job.