IT Konsulter : Den Framträdande Strategiska Konsulten

The changed role of IT continuously influences organisational development, the individual and his role in the organization, different kinds of structures, management processes and strategies. One of the big concerns for IT firms is the need for IT consultants with enough experience to effectively and rapidly understand the business procedures of the firm in or-der to become a resource. In the classic IT-consultant role in the early days of IT, quite dif-ferent features were expected from them in their work procedures. The structure of how and which tasks they were expected to handle has undergone an indisputable transforma-tion. Today’s IT consultants are expected to know how to think in business strategic man-ners as well as the IT strategic manners. The need to formulate this role explicitly has thus emerged. So far it has been a case of implicit non-formulated way of handling this role. We present the implications of these regards, namely the Emerging Strategic Consultant (ESC). The purpose of the thesis is to gain knowledge about obstacles and difficulties in the proc-ess of introducing the IT-consultants to their expected role as a Strategic consultant. We also intend to give recommendations for improvements based on the study when we find apparent correlations. In order to fulfil this purpose and to present a reliable and valid report a qualitative analysis method was used. We wanted to get a deeper understanding of the chosen subject matter, therefore, we conducted interviews and questionnaires in the studied company, Systeam. After having analyzed and compared the empirical findings with the theoretical framework we can point out that there are some problems concerning the new strategic role of the consultants and the potential difficulties relating to these. On the whole we can state that management at Systeam have made a really effective job when hiring the right consultants to fit into their company strategy, however with a great deal of intricacy. The empirical study revealed that finding these consultants is not an easy task and takes some effort from many people. However, along with the positive aspects we have found some problems re-garding the replacing and introduction of the consultants into their strategic role. Among the main problems can be named lack of adequate documentation in projects, different personal expectations and non-existence of any documented explicit strategy about how a consultant should work in order to achieve strategic alignment of Business and IT. Draw-ing from this we have gathered some recommendations for the company to consider, which will be presented in the study