Task of IT Consulting
The scope of an IT consultant is very diverse due to its positioning and the overlapping with management and engineering tasks. Due to the rapidly advancing technical change in the age of digitalization, an IT consultant must be familiar with current market developments and be prepared to take new, innovative paths.
IT consulting involves evaluating the existing IT systems of an external company from a technical and economic point of view as well as identifying optimization options and IT business solutions for them. As part of the project, the IT Business Consultant first develops an information strategy for the company. In the next step, he conducts feasibility studies for them and calculates the costs for IT Business Solutions. When implementing the project, the IT Business Consultant is responsible for IT Strategy Consulting, punctual implementation and monitoring of his concept. He acts as a technical interface to the individual manufacturers and is responsible for the process support in the implementation of new hardware or software, their installation, configuration and administration. His responsibilities include quality control through testing and documentation. For the completion of a project, the IT consultant prepares a presentation and ensures the transfer to the customer. So that its employees can work successfully - for example, with a new IT infrastructure - an in-depth training is provided by the IT consultant.
To be able to fulfill his wide range of tasks, an IT consultant needs in-depth computer know-how, technical and business understanding as well as rhetoric and presentation skills. Furthermore, he is characterized by his contact and team skills and has an independent and structured way of working.
When considering the IT management consulting is worth noting that this was not always so extensive and varied. The range of tasks of the IT consultants has continuously widened over the years. This is because software solutions have increasingly portrayed more business tasks and increasingly comprehensive enterprise processes. In the 1980s, IT consulting was limited to the technical side of a mostly limited needs analysis before an IT project was planned. In the following decade, the operating systems became more complex, the companies already had several isolated solutions to certain problem areas. IT-Consulting had to evaluate how to integrate a new software solution into the IT landscape. But here, too, it was mainly about technical consulting.
Then, software vendors began to offer their services through Application Service Providing, and the standardization rate increased. As part of the Application Service Providing, the IT consulting companies have taken over more and more tasks in addition to the pure software offering. Multi-level support was the order of the day, but even entire processes were increasingly relocated to IT consulting companies. This increased the complexity, and the IT consultants expanded their field of activity more and more in the business sector. In the value chain, IT Consulting gradually shifted from the more downstream steps to the upstream steps. This development illustrates why, in the age of digitization, IT consultants are already in demand when designing the value-added chain, ie in the strategy phase. The digital transformation has received high and highest priority from most companies. It is now widely accepted in the marketplace that IT consulting companies have the right answer to the requirements of digitization.
Digitization: The key role of IT Consulting
Digitalization and the associated digital networking have fundamentally changed the value added of companies and organizations. Digitization has an impact on the future of every company. As a result, many companies have to make major changes, affecting business processes with individual workflows and even the entire organizational structure. Often, entire business models are put to the test. Business consultants and, above all, IT consultants must support their customers in carrying out the necessary adjustments and recognizing and exploiting the opportunities and opportunities that arise as a result. As part of digitization, IT departments have a key role in business. In order to be able to act as a future-oriented company, IT managers must drive processes forward and establish innovative business models in the company.
But how do companies manage to accomplish the necessary digital transformation? This question is increasingly confronting IT consultants today. Thus, IT consultants are faced with new requirements. According to the Lünendonk 2017 study: "Business Innovation & Transformation - Where do companies stand today?", It is becoming increasingly important for consulting and IT service providers to understand the customer journey of their customers' end customers in order to use technological innovation and business models based on this understanding to develop. IT consultants are increasingly demanding an end-to-end consulting and transformation approach with expertise in digital customer experience, process automation, data analytics and design thinking.
Due to the changed customer requirements, the competitive environment has also changed for many consulting and IT service providers. Classic agencies and newly founded digital agencies occupy the field of the realization of front-ends, apps or data analytics, while the Big Four of the business and tax consulting companies have also successfully positioned themselves in IT consulting with services for digitization. Due to changing customer requirements to offer end-to-end consulting, development and implementation, consulting and IT service providers such as Accenture, Deloitte or Wipro have acquired digital and creative agencies to integrate their expertise into their portfolio. To meet the challenges and successfully succeed in the IT consulting market, consultants need to invest in IT technologies, recruit data scientists and IT specialists, and collaborate with technology companies.
Future IT Architecture: The current challenges of IT Advisers
How to make the system architecture of client companies fit to keep up with the speed of digital transformation? That's the big question IT-Consulting has to deal with in the near future. Under the heading "Future IT Architecture", the IT consultants first create the prerequisites for keeping up with the rate of change currently demanded by the consumer. Ever shorter rollout cycles overwhelm traditional IT landscapes. These monoliths are very cumbersome and maintenance intensive. One option is the use of modern Fast Integration Business Services. The art lies in the rapid integration of these "light" IT constructs and the gradual replacement of the classically programmed IT solutions.
We constantly deal with current IT trends and new technologies and evaluate them with regard to the possible and meaningful use in our clients' projects. See what opportunities the big IT trends such as cloud computing, Microsoft Azure, Software Defined Networking (SDN), the Internet of Things (IoT) or Big Data technologies have in store for you.
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