The Perils of Consulting: Share of Savings?
February 20, 2010
With more and more search and content processing vendors getting into the consulting and engineering services business, consulting is a grass-is-greener opportunity. Making money from selling knowledge is a bit more difficult than selling a product. What’s knowledge? Well, the content management experts turned knowledge management experts are not going to be able to help too much. Now it seems even consultants less in touch with the complexities of today’s information technology operations are teaching an important lesson. Talking is easy; collecting is tougher. After all, determining the value of a services is difficult. The azure chip crowd and the self appointed experts don’t know what they don’t know as “BT Settles Multi-Million Spat with Cost-Cutting Consultants.” The idea is that the client did not value the services rendered by the experts. Once again the problem of defining knowledge-value pokes its nose into the fantasies of big companies looking for relief from past management decisions and the cash register ringing expertise that the consultants deliver. The write up said”:
BT has settled an £88m dispute with a consultancy it asked to find cost savings at its troubled Global Services division…Magenta [the consulting firm] asked for £80m in damages and £8.1m for unpaid invoices.
My view is that the attorneys one. Will search and content processing vendors selling consulting services find themselves in a similar pickle? The geese are overflying and watching?
Stephen E Arnold, February 20, 2010
No one paid me to write about Overflight and overflying. I will report this non payment to the FAA, which I anticipate is quite busy today.
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