The man behind the curtain: Exploring the role of IS strategic consultant

Abstract

Most organizations encounter business-IT alignment problems because they fail to properly understand how well an enterprise software package aligns with or fits their needs. Strategic consultants make a profit by reducing such external manifestations of the differences between the organization's needs and the system's capabilities. Therefore it appears relevant to understand how consultants behave. Our theoretical model shows how a consultancy can assess the way to extract and to generalize knowledge from its clients. The share of a consulting firm's global knowledge is compensated with new local knowledge obtained from the client. Hence we underline a way to assess the quality of that contribution and the mutual knowledge exchange. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.