IT Consulting Businesses have to Change Their Models
The age of digitalization has brought about broad and many changes across all industries and societies as a whole. Quite interestingly, one of the industries that have been at the forefront of the digital age is one that still has not fully grasped the extent and implications of the Digital Age.
Ebrahim Laher is a well known IT consultant, strategic advisor, and digital entrepreneur with years of expertise at EOH as CEO.
According to Ebrahim Laher, Business Consulting or IT consulting has now for many years played the role of trusted advisor and architect to the largest (and all others) corporations globally helping them map out a vision for growth and profitability. This has traditionally been achieved through strategy formulation, business process design, and change management and system implementations (to name some of the key activities).
The global market for IT consulting is estimated at around $ 50 billion annually. This is a significant proportion of the Economy and part of the expenditure of corporations globally. Even more significantly IT consulting makes up about 20% of all consulting work.
Being well experienced in both IT consulting and Strategic advisory Ebrahim Laher has formulated many strategies to strengthen many businesses with digital evolution in the making. Ebrahim Laher talks about the C-suite executives of ICT Consulting businesses in the Middle East and Africa (where most of Ebrahim Laher’s work is done).
Of note, Ebrahim Laher was surprised by how many of them still hold on to the traditional models of consulting and revenue lines such as time and material sales of consultants, overinflated system implementation projects and strategic consulting to Government and larger Private Corporations.
Ebrahim Laher has direct thoughts on the Cloud, the Digital Economy, Mobile Computing, and most importantly digitally-empowered business people and their customers. Ebrahim Laher iterates that this traditional business model employed by IT consulting businesses is just not sustainable into the future.
In fact the very existence of these businesses is in question. Unless there is significant re-work of what the digital economy demands from IT consulting firms. Ebrahim Laher strongly believes that firms such as Accenture have for many years been reinventing what constitutes their business and their lines of revenue. Some of these make no sense in the traditional consulting fields.
However you take a closer look and then you understand the transformation that is taking place and also the extent of what needs to be done.
Ebrahim Laher’s advice on traditional models of business being followed or used was to bring about a dramatic shift or change in the way we look at it by incorporating and embedding the digital world within the existing businesses and then to visualize and see the outcomes such as gain of profits or revenue in leaps and bounds.
The smart ones are already deep on their journeys and the rest of us need to catch up soon, or run the risk of being left behind.
Ebrahim Laher with rich expertise in IT consulting, regularly writes or pens down on his thoughts on this topic.
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