I’ve just had a great skype chat with Guillaume Lerouge from xWiki. It reminded me of a debate on the role of consulting we had some months ago on the 2.0 scene. Here is a refresher. Some people, including Euan Semple and Dennis Howlett, think social computing calls for a different form of consulting. A form of consulting that differs from mainstream consulting, whose heralds are the consulting moguls. And the same people believe that it is the reason why consulting moguls won’t get it to a point that a new bread of consulting firms would emerge.

Enteprise 2.0 (enterprise social computing) is changing the consulting industry (?)

That is true, we see new consulting firms emerging, and Headshift probably is one - if not - the leading company. But at the same time, we need to be cautious. For two reasons:

1 - mainstream consulting is in fact mostly outsourcing

Consultants are often young and inexperienced. The majority of the workforce of giant consultancies is made of people coming straight from Engineering or Business schools. These are Digital Natives They finally don’t know much, but management or legal technics, so that what they really do all day long is to apply processes, methods and work on limited scopes. There is no real difference with the job of a line worker in a big manufacturing company.
Consulting moguls have processed their work, mostly intellectual, in the very same way that manufactures have done for material work. This is bureaucracy in the proper sense of the term (Weber). This is successful to a certain point. This point is creativity, i.e. insight generation. This issue is the one we keep on witnessing in many organizations. Managers don’t understand the nature and implications of intellectual work. They seem to think it is sequential, dividable into tasks one can measure … and invoice. In fact they make money (good for their company), but they create no value (bad for their client and employees). This is one reason why knowledge economy does not happen properly.
What does that imply for the consulting industry? They provide manpower, not intelligence. Their trade is not consulting. Consulting an organization is about providing insights to help management improve the activity they are responsible for and the company they work for. This implies having the big picture, having the ability to grasp socio-technical environments, knowing how to make happen the insights in context.
This is the principal reason why I don’t quite agree with Euan and Dennis. What they call for is not a new form of consulting, it is real consulting. And yes, consulting moguls can make it. They only have to get back to their real trade, by changing the way they work. This would immediately change the service they offer, and charge for. The real question is are they willing to get back to the roots. Are they ready to confront their identity? I don’t think so, but it is not proper to this sector and this is the real reason for non-adoption of enterprise 2.0.

2 - Enterprise 2.0 consulting still have a long way to go before being a model

Integrated E2.0 consultancies do not exist today. We need to be clear about that.
The E2.0 consulting market is made of a variety of different consulting.
a - IT consulting
They work on IT solutions. They sell and implement the product. They principally focus on the delivering a product : blogs, wikis, social networks, personalized pages, social bookmarking appliances or rss generators. They don’t work on the social side of the social computing. The result is often that the client has a product that does not deliver. This is especially the case when the client has detailed specifications built like a bunch of features. A common situation.
b - Communication agency
They work on communication plans. Most of them have no techies, or techies that develop static websites or flash. They have no ability to understand tools like blogging platform or wikis or social networks. They pretend so, but reality is different. When they don’t make the mistake of building messages and not conversations, they end up recommending weird product implementations. They charge you a lot for that, because it takes time to implement craziness, so that you end up with a product that does not deliver. Another common situation.
c - Social media / computing consulting firms (Headshift-likes)
They work on tools with an attention to the social interaction tools are meant to favor and support. They usually know pretty well tools, at least a handful of them, and how to make adoption / participation a success. Today these companies are the one that are the nearest to what should be E2.0 consulting firms. The difficulty they have is to transform pilots into enterprise-wide applications. And the reason for that is simple: they have no skills in change management.
d - Change management consulting
They work at senior management level and processes. They have the ability to educate decision makers and make change happen for real. Some of them, like the great Dominique Turcq from Boostzone and Ross Dawson are specialized in network centric management or collective intelligence. The difficulty they have is that they have no social computing oriented techies. They therefore can’t make the change they recommended happen.

So what is / should be Enterprise 2.0 consulting?

A mix of c and d: E2.0C = SCC+CMC.

It is consulting firm, I mean a firm that creates not replicates insights, with a good command of:
- computing i.e how to implement, interface, tweak (social) tools.
- social i.e the interactions that make social tools work and become a successful and useful tools.
- change management i.e the ability to reform the organisational processes, routines, behaviours
The reason is simple, and it is not a novelty. A new tool introduces a new way of doing things. It therefore shapes the socio-technical environment it integrates. But at the same time, it is shaped by this environment : its project manager crafted the functionality, rules and processes crafted by management impact the way it is to be used, users make the decision to use it or not and to a certain extend.
Social computing consultancies can help to a certain level but they need to be backed by change management consultancies. Their is a need for organizational flexibility and openness in order to get the best fruits social computing bears.
We need to build structures that can work at the same time on the systems, on the social dynamics and on the identity of the organization. On the paper it’s simple as a basic equation. In reality it is much more complex.

What prevents us from building E2.0C ?

Mostly culture clashes.

a - on the supply side (consulting)

Real social computing consulting often emerges from people who have the philosophy of web 2.0. They are here for the power of participation and the beauty of playing with tools (geeks?). They have no real appetite for or understanding of organizations. Some might even hate the capitalism system. They don’t want to pay attention to profit making; which is to my knowledge the natural and congenital endeavor of the corporation. S2C also have this obligation of providing work to techies so that they focus on building tools.
Change management consultancies are made of people coming from management and corporations. They understand more profit making that the beauty of crafting a tool. They sell and implement methods, not tools. They have this obligation of providing work to non-techies.
This cultural difference impacts the understanding of value. The formers see the value in product crafting and will make sure that it is the most significant part of the bill; the laters see the value in changing processes and will make sure that it is the most significant part of the bill. So you have problem there too. And this probably where the major issue is (because human nature makes most of us accept cohabitation as long as you make good money out of it).

b - on the demand side (client organizations)

If one starts working at the same time on systems, social dynamics and identity then managers have a problem at two levels.

They have a cognitive problem. They have been educated to be specialists so that they can’t see the big picture. They have been educated to be technicians so that they can’t see the “why” of the organization (the real thing that makes things a whole, an entity).

They have an identity problem. Management still have this old-fashioned idea of themselves. They see themselves as commanders. They insist in believing that Chandler’s definition of the manager is the one that fits them. This might be good for their ego but it’s completely out of reality. The organization has evolved, the management too. We definitely moved away from the Army as a model.