Collaboratation Replaces Consulting

Today organizations hire consultants for a few good reasons, namely temporary skilled labour, skills, knowledge and experience that don't have in-house, and seldom but wisely as a skilled and knowledgeable outside opinion on strategy and tactics.

Recently, most organizations are hiring consultants as outsourcers to do the work on a temporary basis.   Some still wise will hire consultants as an independent advisor on strategy and tactics, but few think this is of value.

What is dropping off more and more, it may be the "Uber" of consulting is the need for skills, knowledge and experience.  Firms are able to buy them directly from the web or can google solutions and case studies they can implement(or

they think they can implement).

But the best reason to purchase consultants and also receive a high return on that investment is to hire them to collaborate.  A good consultant can collaborate with an organizations staff or  a group of consultants to create uniqueness.

If you want "off the shelf" solutions for your business (standard accounting reports, ITSM, legal, even HR work) you can easily purchases services from outsourcers (who may call themselves consultants) or in some cases web services.  

But if you are looking at building an organization that has competitive advantages, who outperforms their competitors , you need a collaborative solution.  There are lots of examples, recently I worked with a Data analytics consultant (one of those Big Data guys) and together we collaborated to offer a major corporation the opportunity to leverage their significant data, along with public sources and apply some unique business models to create new service offering to make money from a previously unused asset.  This type of collaboration is the wave of the future.

So you can remain part of the pack and buy off the shelf services or you can hire collaborative consultants who create unique solutions and create competitive advantage to support new revenue for your organization.

Brian Crew is a consultant with BricConsulting.  BricConsulting offers clients unique solutions, creative problem solving, collaboration and holistic approaches to grow your business.