Recruiting an IT Consultant

IT consultants can be divided into five specialty categories: systems integration; Web strategy and return on investment (ROI); software products and services; data management and security; and management and operations. However, firm capabilities often defy strict categorization. The services offered often bleed into other specialties, so it’s important to question your candidates closely about their strongest skills and experience.

In addition, approach your consultant search as though you’re interviewing potential employees, according to Miller. “If you’re checking out consultancies, ask for references—at least three of them—and tell [the candidates] you want them to be recent,” he says. “It could be they did something great for a client three years ago and haven’t done much since. You need to find out: ‘What have you done recently for someone that you’re just plain excited about?’”

Here’s a closer look at each of the five categories of IT consultants.

Businesses today—especially larger corporations—crave solutions that enable their various organizational groups to share data. “You could have a situation where the product development group wants to know something about sales so they can try to direct their operation from a macro standpoint,” Herzog says. “And sales wants to know something about product development—how long it takes to get a product to market, how much will it cost to make it, and how can I sell it? And where can I position it in the marketplace? Each group has its own operational data, and now they’re trying to use each other’s. That’s where systems integration comes into play.”

It’s an area of IT that’s “still in its infancy,” Miller says. To date, the technologies that have been built to help businesses integrate systems haven’t been entirely refined, he explains. For example, it’s still difficult to integrate your e-mail contacts with a database that contains their recent sales activity. “It gets better every year as new technologies come out for data access between systems,” he says.

However, an innovative solutions provider can help businesses pinpoint areas in which automation can add efficiency to a process. “For example, in a manufacturing process, what you’ll find is that the people in the office need to know where in the process you are for a specific part for a customer,” Miller says. “They want to get an exact date for when they’re going to receive it, but they may never think about the fact that automated ticklers can be created when the part reaches each stage along the way. So instead of having to go pull that information, they can often have that information pushed to them—it’ll be there in their inbox.”