Consulting For SMBs - Crucial To Sustain Competition

Information Technology (IT) is more strategic today than ever. Enterprises rely on IT not only to
conduct day-to-day business, but also to fuel growth. IT has transitioned from a support function
into a true driver of business.

Like all large enterprises, SMBs too have to respond to competition, comply with regulations and
do more with lesser budgets. They need to manage risk, costs, improve service, and align IT investments with business needs. These everyday business challenges force SMBs to look at external consulting organisations for expert assistance in many areas.

The need for consulting services

Considering the lack of resource pool at anvil for the SMBs, tighter budgets, lesser margin for error (a crucial error may put them out of business) and hiring costlier resources for specific needs, the need is higher to engage a third party for consulting services.

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“SMBs, with their constraints, tend to use their shallow knowledge available within to make decisions and investments in IT Service Management. This, at times, may prove to be very costly at a later stage when they really want to scale up. This is also one area where IT Service Management consultancy services play a key role. Creating this awareness is also very crucial in a country like India where we have more and more SMBs coming up,” said Benil George, senior consultant – ITSM.

Generally these services are expensive, but not all of them deliver the same quality. Hence, it is important to ponder and evaluate before hiring one. Whether one engages a major consulting firm or an individual consultant, it is very important to make sure that they are given a clear understanding of what they’re expected to deliver and the criteria for acceptance.

Consultants think ‘out-of-the-box’

In the words of Rajendra P. Dhavale, consulting director, CA, “Fundamentally, IT is a collection of infrastructure assets, information, people and processes that need to work together. You gain the most value in business when you manage all these three pillars of business together. All this requires consulting of various types – as it is clear that technology alone will not be able to solve the problem. It has to be aligned to the best practices such as ITIL (for Service Management), BS7799 (for Information Security) and all concerned people also need to be properly educated in the right context.”

According to experts, consulting organisations are able to think ‘out-of-the-box’ which is difficult for SMBs when they seek in house expertise. These organisations have more ‘ready-to-use’ service and products, which are more configurable than ‘reinventing-the-wheel’. Consulting organisations are more focused on the job at hand than ’extended-multi-tasked-kind-of suitable’ workforce within.

SMBs have always found time short, either to react or to race ahead. However, consultants talk about time in the range of ‘3 to 18 months’ for the solutions. No investment is ever small and every decision has financial impact, as ‘charges by hour’ is way of life in consulting. It is a proven fact that no in house expertise or people, who wear multiple hats with limited ability, do justice to the task at hand. Consultants would be ready to show ’ how to do it’ but would rarely get their hands dirty.

Partners in business

“It would be appropriate for SMBs to look at consulting as an option during the tough times as today’s consulting options are modular, time bound, results oriented, tailored to your needs and last but not least, affordable. SMBs are more likely to gain than loose and it would turn out to be a more apt combination of the “lime and honey” than “lime and milk” which would produce a “fit and slim” outcome in such engagements,” said Sandeep Gondhalekar, lead consultant, Quint Wellington Redwood.

Organisations that have engaged consulting agree to the fact that consulting organisations offer today’s solution based on “quick wins” and “long term” which SMBs can chose from their current needs and not future needs. Today’s solutions are designed on business drivers than strategy alone, which addresses immediate pains effectively and provisions for alignment with the big picture later. Consultants today have remodeled themselves as “partners in business” leaving behind the “I show, you do” approach.

Consulting is becoming more tailored to customer’s needs and more of a service which can offer transactional pricing than a project, which is at fixed cost and fixed deliverables. Thus consulting is certainly a viable option for SMBs that are determined to sustain competition and eventually grow.