Can Consulting be Uber-ized Too?
I am myself a consultant, and for once, I am not going to discuss the Uber-ization of my clients’s industries (Financial Services as far as I am concerned). I’d rather consider this time disruption in my own business.
You have a car? You can become a taxi-driver!
First, how to define « Uberization »? More than a technology disruption, it is a new approach to propose services with non-full time workers leveraging on one of their own ressources. With Uber: you have a car, you can become taxi-driver.
You have access to data? You can a become consultant!
At first, consulting could be seen as the perfect industry to become uber-ised. 3 main assets are required to be in this business: manpower (time), tools (mainly the MS Office suite), data (including knowledge or expertize). It does not mean that you are going to be a good consultant, as it does not mean you are a good driver just because you have a car, but that is the starting point.
The entry barrier is quite low actually, and lower in any case than for Uber. Accessing data is something we all do in our day to day life, we just need to identify and select the ones that can be valuable.
You can value your own experience to become a Uber-Consultant
Of course, not all assignments can be fully uber-ized, but for sure some of them. Let’s take an example: market study is key, either because it is the first part of most of the assignment (as a consultant the first thing you want to do it to look around what is happening) or because clients are looking for ideas and best practices. Market is now becoming wider and wider. You need to keep up-to-date to any initiative, trend, new offer all around the globe. But how to provide relevant insights if you are not in the concerned country? Is the value going to come from consulting companies or from local people experiencing the service? Obvious answer: the best feedback is not a slide but an actual demo of this service you want to know more about.
What does Uber-Consulting look like?
To my fellow consultants: I still believe in our business and its potential. I don’t think Uber-Consulting is about low-cost. To the opposite: it is about bringing more insights, and therefore more value, to clients. Still, Consulting is necessary to aggregate all the different expertise, either coming from data or from previous experiences, becoming a market place matching data and needs. This is becoming a reality, with some interesting initiatives to get inspiration from, not directly in consulting, but in professional services: eYeka and Fiverr just to mention 2 of them.
I can picture the Uber-Consultant. But what would be the Uber-Client?
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!