Evidence of Learning 

Name: Arjun Prabhune 

 

Date: 1/08/2021

 

Citation: 

Kaplan, Soren. “The Business Consulting Industry Is Booming, and It's About to Be Disrupted.” Inc.com, Inc., 11 Sept. 2017, www.inc.com/soren-kaplan/the-business-consulting-industry-is-booming-and-it.html#:~:text=Management%20consulting%20is%20a%20%24250%20billion%20industry.%20It%27s,highly%20profitable.%20And%20it%27s%20about%20to%20be%20disrupted. 

 

Introduction: 

 

Over the Christmas holiday, I had a development in my vision as to which job I would like to work in when I am older. I still wanted to remain true to my technology path as it is a field that is destined to continue its rapid growth among the coming years. However, I wanted to use these skills in a way that is more business minded rather than working solely for another person’s company for the rest of my career. I also have a strength in creating presentations as well as speaking to an audience as it feels very natural to me. My dad and I had a chat and we talked about what I wanted to do when I grew older. I told him about my beliefs of how I wanted to use my technological skills in an entrepreneurial manner, and he introduced me to a career field known as Information Technology Consulting. In this field, consultants provide business owners with solutions as to how they can use technology in order to boost the reputation/earnings of their business. IT Consultants also create the software behind these solutions and then present them to the business owner. 

 

This career field marks a lot of my checklist. I can enter a field which specializes in technology, thereby ensuring that it has a high growth potential. This field also has entrepreneurial requirements in which I can apply the natural speaking skills that I have. Lastly, in this career field, I can create my own consulting firm and find teammates who will take our business to the next level. I believe that I will get a lot of satisfaction from this career field and it is something that truly would satisfy me. From this, I have found an article which deals with how the consulting business will change as a result of big data and technology and I have provided my analysis on it.

 

Analysis:

 

In today’s workforce, there are over 700,000 consulting firms operating with the goal of helping out its clients. Any successful company has its own consulting firm behind it as they are the ones who provide a lot of the solutions that big corporations show off. Consulting firms have been linked with the success of big companies. The major flaws of the consulting industry all draw back to a commonality, lack of technological fluency between firms. This results in solutions that appear outdated the second they come into fruition (as these firms rely on human labor to come up with results), humans have to spend a brunt of their time working upon solutions, which can leave firms feeling overworked, and solutions are not as accurate as they can be. With the current situation of the consulting industry, there is a clear solution that can be implemented, data science, machine learning and data analytics. These technologies prioritize coming up with accurate solutions and projections which could be very beneficial to consulting firms around the world. With the emergence of these technologies in recent years, ML models have become a lot more accurate and accessible and can easily be implemented in conjunction with a consultant’s presentations. Rather than having to create data and convincing numbers from scratch, simple models can be implemented in order to find lines of best fit, break even points, profit vs losses, and many more quality estimates. With this, we can see how beneficial AI algorithms can be to the presentation and data creation portion of a consultant’s work. 

Furthermore, algorithms can also be employed in the research phase of a consultant’s work. Simply creating a basic algorithm to filter out particular words can be incredibly helpful for a research project as the consultant can find prior studies, essays, and papers much easier compared to scouring online databases without any filtration system. 

Many firms such as Domo, Radius, and Qlik have already employed big data, cloud computing, and data analytics into their daily operations and have found themselves becoming much more efficient companies. With these methods being employed in many companies, these firms provide a glimpse into the data driven future of the consulting industry. More accurate projections, easier research methods, and a reduction of overall time should be more than enough to convince smaller consulting firms to switch over to a future of technological fluency. It is common to see many industries adapting to the advent of technology, and the consulting industry is no different as it will only help out daily operations.

And with the advent of technology, we will also see those that don’t adapt to this system soon fade away as a result of continuing outdated techniques. Companies such as Gartner and Forrester will either continue their outdated methods of hiring full teams of researchers, or they can switch over to a much more efficient method of research through ML algorithms and see the productivity in their company start to boom. It is only a matter of time before these companies either adapt or fall victim to lack of action and crash.

In addition to this, with many businesses themselves adapting to big data, and analysis, consulting firms without any sort of technological fluency will find themselves at the bottom of the pecking order as companies would not want to have outdated methodologies working to further their business, a business which has adapted to the future. Even if consulting firms are hesitant to make the switch by themselves, since the companies they seek to manage are going to be adapting themselves, we see a forceful shift that may take place as firms will need to adapt in order to gain any sort of business.

 

Conclusion:

With the increased usage of data, consulting firms will have to adapt in order to stay afloat. However, the field that I aspire to step foot into, IT Consulting already has adapted to these changes which is a positive. Being fluent in technology allows consulting forms to gain more clients as they can help an establishment that has a firm base in technology improve their metrics or they can help out smaller companies that require some assistance with their digital portfolios. Thereby, consulting firms will also gain more business if they adapt to the future of big data and analysis.