IT consultants: The good, the bad and the downright incompetent, part 1

I have spent a large portion of my career either as an IT consultant or hiring IT consultants, and for the purposes of this particular blog, I would like to rant about one type in particular. I don’t really have anything to say at this point about the technical IT consultant, i.e. the people who rent you their expertise in a particular programming language or with a specific hardware device. These folks are generally extremely knowledgeable about their chosen topic and amply reward your financial investment with the appropriate production or guidance.

No, I am more interested in the so-called ‘business’ or ‘strategic’ IT consultants. Let me give you an example of one particular instance when I was working for a major high-tech organization. We had hundreds of telephone salespeople ensconced in giant cube farms whose only purpose in life was to take orders over the phone and try and upsell the customer. At the same time, we had hundreds of technical support people and their only purpose in life was to provide the appropriate expertise when the customer’s purchases failed to work or failed to live up to the expectations generated by the enthusiastic sales staff. Now, like all efficient companies, we were constantly searching for ways to save money and ‘when in doubt, hire a consultant’ became a rallying cry for some of our executives.

So we did, and we hired one of the biggest consulting companies around (who shall remain nameless). They did the usual brilliant job of selling, sending us one of their few competent ‘partners’ who arrived in his shiny BMW with some young ‘bag-carrying consultants’. The pitch was professional and they guaranteed to deliver us a solution to our problems within 60 days. They fooled us, and the next Monday morning, all the young ‘bag-carrying consultants’, and LOTS of even younger ‘not-yet-ready-to-carry-a-bag consultants’ arrived all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. They took up a number of private offices, since consultants can never work in cubicles, mounted their freshly-won MBAs on the wall and for the next 60 days, proceeded to ask the most banal questions of anyone they could fool into their offices.