Did you know that 70% of all major business transformations fail?

It’s a bold statistic, but an Oxford University study says the reasoning is simple. Most projects are ‘over budget, over time and under benefit, over and over again.’

Investing in new business technology, while a necessary part of doing business, is no easy (or cheap) transformation. It requires strategy, data-driven decision-making, and most importantly, cultural adoption. 

And not having a clear vision of your ‘big picture’ before embarking on a digital transformation journey can lead to some serious issues.

This is where having a business technology consultant becomes invaluable in terms of ensuring digital transformation success.

Table of Contents

1. What is Business Consulting?
2. 3 Benefits of Having a Business Consultant
3. Tips for Hiring the Right Business Consulting 
4. Getting Started With a Business Consultant 

What is Business Consulting?

Business technology consultants offer a variety of services that contribute to the overall success of a company, from developing and implementing data governance strategies to creating a future-proof enterprise program to ensure company-wide success.

You may be wondering, what types of services do business technology consultants offer? ‘Business consulting’ can be quite a broad term when defining the types of services a firm may offer. It’s time to take the ambiguity out of the term and streamline the meaning. Here are the three key services Kenway Consulting provides its clients’ for success: 

1. Technology Solution Delivery

Selecting the right technology for your organization is just the first step— once a solution has made it through the key stakeholder’s approval process, many companies lack a clear roadmap for what’s next. 

To navigate this transition period, Kenway Consulting offers Technology Solution Delivery services to provide organizations with an end-to-end solution for the entire digital transformation. From IT strategy and architecture to implementation, our team designs and delivers a customized approach to ensure transformation success. 

Technology Solution Delivery includes services such as:

• • • • IT Strategy to align IT objectives with business strategies
      • Architecture & Design to equip your IT leaders with recommendations and a clear roadmap for your enterprise IT architecture and strategy. Not to mention, the solution architecture and design to implement it are also imperative for success
      • Custom Development to provide your organization with functional solutions that meet your unique security, scalability, and optimized performance needs
      • Enterprise Applications & Solutions to configure and deliver enterprise package solutions, such as Salesforce, NetSuite, and Collibra

2. Enterprise Program Leadership

Digital transformation can only be successful if it's fully implemented into all aspects of the infrastructure and culture of your organization. But the top two barriers to digital transformation are employee pushback and lack of expertise to lead digitization initiatives. The reasons these two issues occur typically stem from the following oversights:

• • • • Lack of internal committees, processes, tools, templates, and training materials for the new technology
      • IT investments aren’t aligned with business strategies upfront 
      • Little investment or optimization in PMO capabilities
      • No clear alignment or communication on the delivery of the technology across organizational departments 
      • Lack of organization-wide communication to ensure the technology is embraced by long-term employees who are used to legacy systems and processes

After being in the business strategy consulting world for nearly two decades, we’ve found that providing our clients with effective skills, processes, and governance services is key to driving organization-wide transformational change. When creating a successful strategy for digital transformation, services that should be sought after include:

• • • • IT Governance to ensure investments align with business strategies 
      • Project Management Office Enablement to establish and optimize PMO capabilities
      • Program Management & Delivery to align the delivery approach across departments and multi-project workstreams
      • Change Management to help your organization embrace the new technology, processes, and procedures

3. Information Insight 

Optimally leveraging your data is a key component of any digital transformation. This is where our Information Insight services come into play. Kenway’s Information Insight capabilities help business leaders to leverage data to reduce costs, identify new opportunities and make data-driven decisions moving forward. We offer three business consulting services to make this possible:

• • • • Data Governance to ensure your organization has a framework that maintains the quality and consistency of your organization's data 
      • Data Management to actually facilitate the integration of data across your enterprise 
      • Business Intelligence & Analytics to help you have a holistic view of your organizational data and allow for real-time, business-impacting decision making

3 Benefits of Having a Technology Business Consultant 

Spending on the necessary technologies and services for successful digital transformation is expected to reach $22.3 trillion by 2023. No doubt, it's a large, profound investment—one that's best not to step into blindly. Hiring a business technology consultant can ensure your technology implementation efforts are streamlined, customized, and deployed in a timely manner. Here are the four key benefits of working with a business consultant:

1. Customized Solutions

The right business consulting firm won’t walk into your business with a one-size-fits-all approach. Rather, they will spend time getting to the heart of your enterprise. They will get to know your IT objectives, your workflows, and your people before suggesting any kind of architecture plans. Because of this in-depth, hands-on approach, they may find gaps in your current digital transformation journey that, if not detected sooner, may have led to failure, saving your organization a whole lot of time, money, and headache.

2. Help Drive Organizational Adoption

One McKinsey study found that nearly 70 percent of organizations say their top teams changed during their transformation journey. This is because implementing the right technology for your organization is just the first step—ensuring your teams adopt and embrace that technology is a whole other challenge in itself. The right business strategy consultant will understand this and help your organization’s leaders successfully navigate change by:

• • • • Setting up the governance frameworks that encourage desirable behavior in using IT resources
      • Enabling operational effectiveness through methodology, culture, structure, value delivery, and tools
      • Implementing cross-program communication strategies to enable effective collaboration across each organizational department
      • Orchestrating an internal PR initiative that will ensure technology roll-outs are embraced and successfully adopted across departments and team members

3. Making Your Data Work For You

Lastly, a business consultant won’t just help you deploy and embrace the technology and then walk away. They will also train your organization’s leaders to leverage your data in ways that drive them to make revenue-impacting decisions. They do this by:

• • • • Setting up processes, policies, and procedures to govern your data
      • Ensuring your data is clean, organized, auditable, and secure across the organization
      • Deploying reporting, dashboards, and visualizations to help your leaders better understand data insights

Putting these solutions in place allows you to future-proof your organization as your leaders will be able to use data to reduce costs, identify new opportunities, forecast the best and worst-case scenarios, and make high-level data-driven decisions for the enterprise.

The benefits that come with hiring a business consultant to pay for themselves. From crafting customized tech and governed solutions aligned with your business strategies and IT objectives to help you future proof your enterprise with Business Intelligence (BI) & analysis tools, hiring a professional will equip you with the strategies necessary for digital transformation success.

Tips for Hiring a Business Consultant 

When it comes to business technology consultants, there are tons of fish in the sea. How do you select the best possible partner to ensure success for your organization? Here are some of our top tips. 

1. Be Prepared For Anything 

Hiring a consultant means allowing a fresh pair of eyes to see each aspect of your organization from its leadership and its processes to its technology and data organization. It’s important to be prepared to take in some constructive feedback in all areas of your enterprise. 

It’s also important to understand that your original plan may have to change in order to successfully achieve your desired outcomes. Sometimes this entails organizational restructuring, change management, new technology deployment, and delayed projects. Go into your business consulting relationship understanding that ‘change’ may not look exactly how your leadership team envisioned. Our best advice? Prepare for the unexpected.

2. Ensure the Consultant is a Cultural Fit 

When hiring a business consulting firm, you should consider the practice to be an extension of your team. This means they need to align with your organization culturally both from a solution level and from a values level. 

Here at Kenway, we allow our guiding principles to guide our interactions with our consultants, clients, recruits, and those with whom we engage. Bucketed into six categories, our principles focus on the following themes:

1. 1. 1. 1. 1. Treat each individual with respect

            2. Integrity

            3. Means over outcomes

            4. Communication

            5. Entrepreneurial spirit & tenacity

            6. Value & quality

Getting Started With a Business Consultant 

At Kenway, our objective as business consultants is to guide and help your organization on its journey to digital transformation. Kenway has the experts needed to deploy end-to-end implementation from strategy to execution and ensure your business thrives. But above all, integrity, honesty, and communication among other guiding principles guide our team members to deliver the best solutions possible for your organization. 

Contact us today to see how we can help you on your digital transformation journey.