The use of digital tech consulting is rapidly increasing in the world of digital-first experience and widespread automation. Yet, the value and role of consulting are often underestimated. A digital business consultant is often perceived as someone only enterprise-level companies would need and could afford.
In this article, we go through the key benefits of digital consulting for business, regardless of size or domain, and explain how specialists in digital strategy services and IT consulting help companies not only leverage digital technology but reap the most of their IT investment.
What can digital consulting do for your business?
Digital consulting market has been growing steadily for the last ten years, according to Statista. A few years ago, it has reached $48 billion worth, and in 2021, its global market value is expected to surpass the mark of $53 billion. World-renowned Accenture, Oracle and IBM are among the leading digital consulting agencies today.
The main purpose of digital advisory services is to help companies and organizations achieve their goals in innovation and digital transformation in the most efficient way and stay relevant in the market using information technology and digital channels.
The range of IT consulting services spans from building a long-term digital innovation strategy to immediate transformations like integrations with third-party services, cloud migration, business process automation, consulting on big data and custom software development. Therefore, businesses seek assistance from digital consultants to reach different short and long-term goals. Here are some of them:
Build and implement your innovation roadmap with digital strategy consulting
Today, companies of varying sizes either implement or consider digital transformation. To avoid ad hoc initiatives, executives choose to start with a digital strategy to ensure a smooth transformation journey, mitigate risks and justify the investment into innovation.
However, building an efficient digital strategy for a company is not an ordinary job. It requires technology, industry, market and business expertise and thorough analytics capabilities. Digital consulting firms specialize in the development of digital strategies and tactics, among other services.
First of all, consultants have analytics and business expertise to figure out how a company can achieve its short and long-term innovation goals efficiently and on budget. Therefore, a digital consultation includes, among other things, market research, analysis of industry best practices, trends and the current state of technology.
Secondly, IT consulting companies have strong technical experience and knowledge and can give expert advice on what platforms, digital channels and digital tools to use to achieve set business objectives. They will help you explore different types of web portals, select scalable solutions and data technologies that fit your requirements and delivery timelines.
Finally, in many cases, a digital consulting company can not only put together an actionable plan but also bring it to life — design and develop digital systems, prepare the infrastructure on the client’s side, integrate technology into business processes and set it up for future progress.
Are you looking for an experienced digital consulting partner to help you future-proof your business? Contact Digiteum specialists and tell us about the challenges you are dealing with, your expectations, and your goals.
Introduce intelligence
Data brings new opportunities for business. However, many companies often struggle with their data and extract only a small fraction of value from it, if any. Often, big data is heterogeneous and too massive to deal with. It requires adequate data strategy and infrastructure in place.
Digital consulting is focused on helping companies overcome these issues and bring the benefits of cloud business intelligence to business.
Expert IT consultants provide a company’s executives and other decision-makers with a data strategy that relates to their business goals. They help define what data has potential, understand how to work with it and whom to put in charge.
Moreover, a skilled IT service provider can also build all the necessary digital tools to transform raw data into insights — data visualization and analytic tools, advanced analytics based on machine learning, predictive models, etc. — and pull these insights into versatile dashboards. Thus, IT consultants help companies leverage their data, integrate data solutions, get access to valuable insights and improve overall decision-making.
Blend technology into your business process with digital transformation consulting
Apart from data solutions, IT consultants offer other services to drive efficiency to a company’s business process. It goes far beyond building an app for a webshop, hiring a web portal development company to develop a customer portal, or integrating a CRM system into customer service operations.
Digital transformation consulting is focused on choosing the right combination of technologies, processes, and practices that would help businesses achieve their goals for optimization, automation, sustainability, etc. After all, what is a digital consultant if not a bridge between business and innovation?
Having strong technology expertise at hand, consultants can identify the most relevant technologies that could transform traditional business processes. These transformations can have various impacts on business — automate and optimize workflow, improve efficiency, reduce cost, enhance security and safety, even reinvent the whole business process for good.
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There’s a long list of technologies that can play a role in such transformations, including IoT technology to better connect people, devices and the whole ecosystems, robotics, cutting-edge AI and chatbot solutions to automate processes and free people from mundane tasks.
Address customer needs and follow design trends
Today, every business understands the importance of design and the role of user experience in sales, customer loyalty and business growth, especially in the B2C sector. In fact, good quality design has become a competitive advantage for many companies since it directly impacts conversion, customer engagement and retention in many industries.
However, keeping up with the design trends and monitoring ever-changing customer behavior is not an easy job for non-tech companies, for example, in banking or retail.
This is when digital product strategy analysis comes into play. Not only do consultants have great expertise in user experience, customer behavioral patterns and understand what intuitive design is. Professional IT advisors can perform a custom analysis for a particular company, study customer journeys, find UX fails and identify opportunities for improvement. They combine design best practices, trends, technology and create a tailored UX design strategy to build a better digital service or product.
Digital business consulting helps stay relevant in the market
Design is not the only area that always changes. Progressing technologies, the influence of social media, fast-changing competition landscape lure companies into a race to stay relevant. Digital consulting services can help win this race, too.
Consultants know how to scale up and explore new digital channels, get the best of industry-specific digital products and platforms, create integration strategy and use competition shifts for the benefit of their clients.
Therefore, with a skilled digital business consultancy by one’s side, a company gets better chances to enhance customer reach using emerging technologies and channels, scale up to new platforms and create a seamless experience for their customers across web, mobile, IoT, wearables, etc.
Optimize cost and reduce risks
Any digital transformation journey, be it expanding online presence, automation, adopting new technologies or building new digital products or services, requires investment and entails risks.
Companies choose different strategies to minimize these risks and optimize costs. Some choose to manage their IT and analytics needs in-house to maintain better control. Others expand their resources using tech team augmentation services.
Many companies and organizations, primarily the ones that have been in the digital race for a while, invest in digital business consulting services to optimize their efforts and reduce expenses. Giants like UPS, Renault and 7 Eleven outsource their digital transformation strategies to Oracle, Microsoft and IBM, even though they have their own IT teams. Not to mention smaller companies and startups who often choose to outsource their projects to a mobile or web app development agency and fully rely on the experience of technology consulting firms to achieve their goals.
Looking for an offshore web development partner to optimize project costs and meet tight deadlines? Let’s talk!
Importance of finding a trusted partner
It is not easy to find a partner that would not only offer consulting and strategy services but could also become a reliable go-to tech provider. Some clients are looking for expertise in their domain, others evaluate providers’ overall experience and capacity. In many cases, the deciding factors for choosing a digital consultant are proximity, lack of communication boundaries and cultural friction.
In over a decade-long experience in digital, we had a chance to work as an IT consulting and custom software development company with different SMB and enterprise clients. Among the brands that we have worked with as digital strategists and analytics are Kantar, Printique, Oxford Languages, and many more.
One of our IT consulting projects involved code and performance analysis of the client’s system and the development of a working strategy for system scale-up. We completed in-depth system architecture and code review, identified a range of issues and security weaknesses and came up with a list of practical recommendations for platform optimization and improvement. Our BA and development team conducted market and technology research and review the limitations and capacity of the market the company planned to enter. We selected technologies, third-party platforms and services for backend development that would enable the platform to successfully work in the new environment.
If you are looking for an experienced IT consulting and software development company that could develop and implement an effective digital strategy for your business, contact our team. We provide end-to-end IT consulting and custom software development services, including business analytics, product strategy and digital transformation.
Read: Business analysis in software development — key techniques for different use cases
Final thought
The benefits of digital consulting have been proven by many success stories. Statistics and expert opinions agree that demand for technology consulting will only grow. As a result, it will speed up innovation in business and directly impact the pace of digital transformation in different industries.
At Digiteum, we help companies build and implement efficient digital transformation strategies. Contact us to learn more about our experience and services or request a digital consultation for your project.
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