ABSTRACT
The role of consultants is ever changing. As digitalization continues to progress, the consultants of tomorrow may acquire several technological advantages, while at the same time they may also face new challenges. This theoretical/speculative study draws upon some of the available literature and the authors’ own best-practice experiences in exploring some of the most pressing issues of the digitalization process of consulting of today, with an anticipation of how the role and profile of the consultants may come to develop in the near future as digitalization and the digital transformation ensues. The development of analytics tools will be of paramount importance. To this end, four phases of consulting have been identified: (1) the pre-analysis phase, (2) the problem-identification phase, (3) the analysis phase and (4) the implementation phase. The chapter concludes that digitalization will carry the greatest benefit during phase 3, the analysis phase. A risk brought on by the advancement of digitalization is that organizations may be tempted to try optimizing their performance by having in-house data scientists take on more of the consultants’ traditional tasks, which may lead to less favorable outcomes. However, going forward, consultants and data scientists will likely need to cooperate and synergize their efforts.
