RE: Can Consulting be Uber-ized Too?
The thing that makes transport uberizable is the fact that the product range is so narrowly defined - you've got like, 4 different types of car available and suitable drivers can be narrowed down by proximity.
When you're talking about consultancy, you're talking about soft skills added to experience, expertise in various areas, all things that are incredibly subjective along a sliding scale. This isn't something you can just tap a couple of buttons in an app to get, and quickly scales out to the original problem for the client - one of recruiting.
Uber also benefits from rapid feedback from the client - did the driver get you from A to B? Good. Problem solved. Consulting not so much, you're asking about hard-to-quantify results over an indeterminate amount of time, which is difficult to track in the interim. A consultant could easily argue that they performed well, you just gave an inaccurate brief - a driver can't argue that they gave a good service when you end up in the wrong place.
The question then becomes which parts of that you can abstract out - and then you end up in the place of third-party recruiters which most people in tech can tell you are just a huge pain.
I do agree. But I think there are some parts of the consultant's job that can be clearly defined and with a performance that can be assessed. Competition benchmark for instance, but also PMO like minutes of meeting, action plan follow up etc. So I guess some piece of the consulting job could be Uber-ized, but for sure some won't. And as a consultant, I do hope that I'll keep (at least a part of) my job!