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Why IT Consulting Can Be a Vicious Triangle - and 5 Steps to Escape the Pain

Dennis Drogseth

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is looking to extend the reach of its consulting practice, and we'll be soliciting your inputs on your priorities. (The URL for participating in our 5-minute survey is at the end of this blog.) But before you do, I'd like to share some of what we've learned from our work in the past.

Lesson 1: Try to avoid the vicious triangle of IT consulting by learning how to stand in the middle

Just about everyone's heard of the Bermuda Triangle. But the IT Consulting Triangle, though arguably far less elusive, is not nearly as well known. This triangle has three clear corners, each of which can generate its own mini hurricanes.

Let's call the first one process consulting or best practices. This can be very valuable, as it can lead to support from best practices ranging from the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) to Six Sigma to the IT Balanced Scorecard to fill in the blank.

The second corner of the triangle, which often comes with a premium price, is organizational consulting. This, too, can be of value, especially as IT often needs to reshape itself in the face of shifting business priorities.

And the third corner is systems integration in all its variations — where actual software and other solutions for managing and optimizing IT are selected, configured and deployed. There's no question that this is often essential.

So what's wrong with this picture?

The problem comes when investments are made across all these areas without a common awareness of interdependencies. Organization, process and technology are indeed not separate discussions in IT, but closely interrelated. This is ever more the case given the dynamic options associated with cloud and the pressures for agile and digital transformation. Investing in advice in each of these areas can be essential. But doing so without common oversight of how they interrelate can lead to a lot of expensive wheel-spinning and sometimes destructive decisions that contradict each other.

Lesson 2: Embrace the need for documenting what's true and what's not

My favorite example here, and one I frequently cite, is a case where EMA required 20 stakeholder interviews in support of a strategic, cross-domain technology initiative. At first the CIO tried to dismiss this. "I've sent out an email," he said. But we insisted and did the interviews. Afterwards that same CIO not only accepted the value of what he'd learned, but wanted us to do 20 more.

The lesson here is that what's really going on within anything more than a mom-pop IT organization in terms of priorities, issues, favored toolsets, and processes (or lack of them) is often full of surprises. And it's rarely consistent across stakeholders and roles. Building a strategy to support all of operations, or all of ITSM, or all of IT (how often do development, security and operations see eye to eye?) requires understanding the human dimensions of what's going on, as well as the technology deficits that are keeping you from going forward.

Lesson 3: Find your true maturity level(s)

I put this in the plural because your IT maturity level can vary across organizations within IT, sometimes in surprising ways. For instance, I once interviewed a development team that pushed a configuration management system with associated automation into development using SCRUM, because development, not operations, was too siloed. Finding out which IT teams relevant to your initiative are ready to fly and which aren't is one of the key ingredients to success. And of course, doing this, depends in large part on honoring Lesson 2.

Lesson 4: Only invest in generic technology winners if your IT organization is also generic

Adopting the right technologies, especially when it comes to managing and optimizing IT business services, is rarely a simple, linear scorecard decision. Generic "winners" are only right for generic IT organizations. But then, happily, I've never encountered a generic IT organization or a generic IT professional for that matter.

Try to find what fits your environment, your skill sets, and your unique needs — which isn't always necessarily what just scored the highest on "Dancing with the Stars."

Lesson 5: Invest in a staged approach to a strategic initiative, both in selecting your technologies, and in integrating them into your environment

EMA, and I'm sure we're not alone, has a ladder with clearly defined steps for going forward with major strategic initiatives — one that can apply to everything from operational and even digital transformation, to analytics, to DevOps, to ITSM-centric initiatives in service modeling and dependency mapping. But whatever staged approach you take, be sure to include dialog, process, technology, communication (a lot of communication!) and listening (a lot of that as well) as you go forward and evolve. Strategic change is not likely to make everyone happy. But needless alienation can not only cause individual pain, it can bring down the effectiveness of the entire organization — leaving digital transformation up to Penn & Teller and not up to you.

I'd like to practice what I just preached and learn from you!

To participate in our 5-minute survey just click here.

Image removed.

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Why IT Consulting Can Be a Vicious Triangle - and 5 Steps to Escape the Pain

Dennis Drogseth

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is looking to extend the reach of its consulting practice, and we'll be soliciting your inputs on your priorities. (The URL for participating in our 5-minute survey is at the end of this blog.) But before you do, I'd like to share some of what we've learned from our work in the past.

Lesson 1: Try to avoid the vicious triangle of IT consulting by learning how to stand in the middle

Just about everyone's heard of the Bermuda Triangle. But the IT Consulting Triangle, though arguably far less elusive, is not nearly as well known. This triangle has three clear corners, each of which can generate its own mini hurricanes.

Let's call the first one process consulting or best practices. This can be very valuable, as it can lead to support from best practices ranging from the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) to Six Sigma to the IT Balanced Scorecard to fill in the blank.

The second corner of the triangle, which often comes with a premium price, is organizational consulting. This, too, can be of value, especially as IT often needs to reshape itself in the face of shifting business priorities.

And the third corner is systems integration in all its variations — where actual software and other solutions for managing and optimizing IT are selected, configured and deployed. There's no question that this is often essential.

So what's wrong with this picture?

The problem comes when investments are made across all these areas without a common awareness of interdependencies. Organization, process and technology are indeed not separate discussions in IT, but closely interrelated. This is ever more the case given the dynamic options associated with cloud and the pressures for agile and digital transformation. Investing in advice in each of these areas can be essential. But doing so without common oversight of how they interrelate can lead to a lot of expensive wheel-spinning and sometimes destructive decisions that contradict each other.

Lesson 2: Embrace the need for documenting what's true and what's not

My favorite example here, and one I frequently cite, is a case where EMA required 20 stakeholder interviews in support of a strategic, cross-domain technology initiative. At first the CIO tried to dismiss this. "I've sent out an email," he said. But we insisted and did the interviews. Afterwards that same CIO not only accepted the value of what he'd learned, but wanted us to do 20 more.

The lesson here is that what's really going on within anything more than a mom-pop IT organization in terms of priorities, issues, favored toolsets, and processes (or lack of them) is often full of surprises. And it's rarely consistent across stakeholders and roles. Building a strategy to support all of operations, or all of ITSM, or all of IT (how often do development, security and operations see eye to eye?) requires understanding the human dimensions of what's going on, as well as the technology deficits that are keeping you from going forward.

Lesson 3: Find your true maturity level(s)

I put this in the plural because your IT maturity level can vary across organizations within IT, sometimes in surprising ways. For instance, I once interviewed a development team that pushed a configuration management system with associated automation into development using SCRUM, because development, not operations, was too siloed. Finding out which IT teams relevant to your initiative are ready to fly and which aren't is one of the key ingredients to success. And of course, doing this, depends in large part on honoring Lesson 2.

Lesson 4: Only invest in generic technology winners if your IT organization is also generic

Adopting the right technologies, especially when it comes to managing and optimizing IT business services, is rarely a simple, linear scorecard decision. Generic "winners" are only right for generic IT organizations. But then, happily, I've never encountered a generic IT organization or a generic IT professional for that matter.

Try to find what fits your environment, your skill sets, and your unique needs — which isn't always necessarily what just scored the highest on "Dancing with the Stars."

Lesson 5: Invest in a staged approach to a strategic initiative, both in selecting your technologies, and in integrating them into your environment

EMA, and I'm sure we're not alone, has a ladder with clearly defined steps for going forward with major strategic initiatives — one that can apply to everything from operational and even digital transformation, to analytics, to DevOps, to ITSM-centric initiatives in service modeling and dependency mapping. But whatever staged approach you take, be sure to include dialog, process, technology, communication (a lot of communication!) and listening (a lot of that as well) as you go forward and evolve. Strategic change is not likely to make everyone happy. But needless alienation can not only cause individual pain, it can bring down the effectiveness of the entire organization — leaving digital transformation up to Penn & Teller and not up to you.

I'd like to practice what I just preached and learn from you!

To participate in our 5-minute survey just click here.

Image removed.

Hot Topics

The Latest

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...

Despite the frustrations, every engineer we spoke with ultimately affirmed the value and power of OpenTelemetry. The "sucks" moments are often the flip side of its greatest strengths ... Part 2 of this blog covers the powerful advantages and breakthroughs — the "OTel Rocks" moments ...

OpenTelemetry (OTel) arrived with a grand promise: a unified, vendor-neutral standard for observability data (traces, metrics, logs) that would free engineers from vendor lock-in and provide deeper insights into complex systems ... No powerful technology comes without its challenges, and OpenTelemetry is no exception. The engineers we spoke with were frank about the friction points they've encountered ...

Enterprises are turning to AI-powered software platforms to make IT management more intelligent and ensure their systems and technology meet business needs for efficiency, lowers costs and innovation, according to new research from Information Services Group ...

The power of Kubernetes lies in its ability to orchestrate containerized applications with unparalleled efficiency. Yet, this power comes at a cost: the dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral nature of its architecture creates a monitoring challenge akin to tracking a constantly shifting, interconnected network of fleeting entities ... Due to the dynamic and complex nature of Kubernetes, monitoring poses a substantial challenge for DevOps and platform engineers. Here are the primary obstacles ...

The perception of IT has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. What was once viewed primarily as a cost center has transformed into a pivotal force driving business innovation and market leadership ... As someone who has witnessed and helped drive this evolution, it's become clear to me that the most successful organizations share a common thread: they've mastered the art of leveraging IT advancements to achieve measurable business outcomes ...

More than half (51%) of companies are already leveraging AI agents, according to the PagerDuty Agentic AI Survey. Agentic AI adoption is poised to accelerate faster than generative AI (GenAI) while reshaping automation and decision-making across industries ...

Image
Pagerduty

 

Real privacy protection thanks to technology and processes is often portrayed as too hard and too costly to implement. So the most common strategy is to do as little as possible just to conform to formal requirements of current and incoming regulations. This is a missed opportunity ...

The expanding use of AI is driving enterprise interest in data operations (DataOps) to orchestrate data integration and processing and improve data quality and validity, according to a new report from Information Services Group (ISG) ...