| Well lets say you're a guy who runs the 10-year-old analytics platform for your company; your team's job is to deliver a bunch of charts and data to the executive team on the performance of the company on a weekly basis. That's not an easy job, because you've got a shitton of unstructured data, new data sources coming online all the time, and a patchwork of analysis tools. This work would be a hell of a lot easier and more accurate and maybe even cheaper in the long run if you had an analytics layer that was more modern - but you don't have time to make the case to the CIO, because you're too busy just running the reports and doing the job that you're paid to do. However, maybe a guy like me is having a convo with his client the CIO and she says "Y'know, Eisenstein thinks we need a new analytics plat, but he's busy on five other projects – can I pay you $5k to take a look at it and make me some recommendations?" So I can sit with you, get your hot take, maybe bring in one of my guys who is shit-hot on dozens of analytics platforms, show you and your boss the trade-offs, costs, etc. If I'm lucky maybe you'll even hire one of my guys for a couple of months to install it and train you and your team up on it. Way cheaper than interviewing and trying to do an apples-to-apples comparison between a dozen different analytics companies who're all gonna lie to your face about how their product is the best, probably politically better that you don't miss a full quarter of you doing your job, and your boss also gets to look good when I ship a sexy deck that shows how we're going to integrate all her peers' pet systems and provide much more timely, accurate, and readable results. (I made this all up out of whole cloth, but the bottom line is sometimes incentives are aligned as such that a middle man can help you get there faster, cheaper, and better than DIY. On the other hand, consultants can also make things WAY worse as this thread illustrates) |