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In today’s post I would like to explain one of the most important characteristics of our technology and Internet consulting model, that have brought us many competitive advantages over our competitors but that also has been questioned by many people. The characteristic I am talking about is an advisory model that only gets to that point: being advisory. Therefore, even if the consulting processes we make at Innovintergy – before named 360º Consulting- are about technology, we only act as advisors and strategists but we don’t sell the technological solution our clients must implement, according to the strategy that has been defined.
Many people have questioned our model, because they state we are loosing important business opportunities if we can sell our clients a technological solution that represent for us a bigger income. Additionally, they have stated that this will ease our selling process, because clients prefer to pay more money for a functional product than for an intangible such as knowledge and strategy. It is logical that many people think in this way because in the traditional technology consulting model as IBM, SAP, other big companies and also some small ones, it has been established in this way: advisory + technological solution.
However, we have decided not to do it in this way for a principal reason: we don’t want to have conflicts of interest when we have to advice our clients. When a company hires a consultant on technology subjects they want to be assessed in the best and clearest way. We think that when we are linked to a technological solution, it is more difficult to be impartial and advise in a better way to our clients because we sill be interested in selling them a more expensive solution. For example, we have seen cases where companies bought an expensive module that the company didn’t needed and that they hire because they where advised to do it. Undoubtedly there are many consultants that area very ethical in this point, even in the traditional model, but definitely having conflicts of interests might make more difficult the transparency of the process.
A question that might come in this point is how to correctly execute the strategy if we don’t sell the technological solution. The answer we have found in our consulting model is having a comprehensive network of partners from which we know how they work and we can recommend. Therefore, we can suggest to our clients, various options of companies we know they are excellent, but they will have to present their proposal and compete fair and square with the other proponents and we will never receive commission from these businesses.
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