Hire Authorities: Page 2 of 11

		Hire Authorities Meet the Consultants: Comparison of Company Specs IT, Dotted and Crossed: Contracting with Consultants

Only you can decide what is strategic for your organization. In general, it's the projects that help a company achieve its broadest goals. For example, changing an e-mail system will have a relatively minor effect on a business that uses e-mail primarily for internal communications. However, we interviewed an ISP that used consulting services to improve e-mail services for its customers, as e-mail is a strategic component of its business.

Making a Road Map

Regardless of how you define consulting, there's no doubt it's big business. Gartner Dataquest predicts that by 2003, total consulting in North America will grow to $8.2 billion--up 8 percent from 2001 and up 12 percent from this year. Not surprisingly, nearly all respondents to a January Gartner survey of consultants reported technical architecture as their primary competency. What we found surprising is that those respondents were developing competency in business strategy more than in any other area of expertise. (See graphic "Consulting and Systems Integration Vendor Competencies.")

We distributed two surveys of our own--one to consultants and another to our readers--to supplement this information. We asked the top revenue-producing consulting firms to tell us the specific technologies for which they offer services. The answers vary widely--with EAI (enterprise application integration) at 100 percent, CRM (customer relationship management)/ERP (enterprise resource planning) at 92 percent, VoIP (voice over IP) at 33 percent and directory services at 25 percent.