When you need an IT organizational consultant you have no shortage of options. You can choose:
- One of the giant consultancies.
- A general-purpose management consulting company.
- Any of a thousand or more boutique IT consultants.
- Us.
We differ in our goals, our guiding principles, and our approach. Also, we won't promise measurable improvement until after we understand the situation.
One other factor differentiates us even more: Our proprietary IT Organizational Performance Model, which turns organizational performance assessment and improvement into something of a science.
Goals
Unlike our giant competitors, we have no "school bus" to pull behind us. The giant consultancies generally make most of their profits in systems integration projects and outsourcing contracts. They can't, that is, guarantee impartiality in their findings.IT Catalysts makes its money consulting. It's what we do. If we think you should engage a systems integrator, or should outsource part or all of your IT function, we'll tell you, and you can have confidence it isn't because we'll make an additional profit if you accept our recommendation.
Guiding Principles
Most of our competitors recommend the "standard model": CIOs should operate IT as a business, delivering working software to their internal customers.
We don't. We see internal IT as an integral part of the enterprise, that collaborates closely with its business peers to drive success.
There's a lot more we'd like you to know all about our guiding principles - they're one of the most important criteria you should use when choosing a consulting partner. For more, click here.
Approach
Our job is to ask the right questions, drawing on the knowledge that already exists in your organizations to create a path forward.
And that's what's important - for us to help you plan a path forward, and to get started on it. For more about our approach, click here.
We don't promise measurable improvement
Wait - don't stop reading!
We don't promise measurable improvement because that's a shell game. A con. Yes, it is that bad.
Delivering measurable improvement is easy. Any consultant can do it, so long as the consultant gets to choose the measure. Whether that measure is what matters for your business is an entirely different matter.
And if, in the course of improving the measure we chose, we cause other metrics to deteriorate? Life is filled with trade-offs.
If you choose the measure, we won't promise to improve it until after we see how you're doing. If we did, you'd rightfully feel that we're arrogant and you're insulted, because assuming we can improve something before we understand how it's being done is insulting.
And arrogant.