The role and relevance of consultants in a market that rapidly moves into the cloud is changing. Gone are the days when the technical consultant just needed to do just that: tech. We have entered a phase where consultants need to tap into their business process knowledge in order to truly add value to projects and especially customers. Let's dig in.
Ok, let’s dream big for a second and assume all customers adopt a 100% pure cloud solution: subscribe, plug & play…. What’s the most important consultant at a partners to make their customers successful?
Correct. It is the business process consultant, or maybe even the business consultant.
Whatever the title… it’s clear that people with skills to help customers optimize their business processes are quickly becoming more relevant and important players on the chessboard. Because in cloud, it is no longer about just technically delivering a solution. While that obviously is an important precondition (and so our friendly tech-consultant remains a key figure) the importance of a customer actually consuming the software and consuming it with maximum impact is key to customer happiness, loyalty and thus renewals.
The business process consultant will normally drive the cloud-mindset further both in customers and partners. Changing business processes need to happen gradually to avoid disruption (yes, there are exceptions). Small incremental steps towards a vision is the path to take. This in return requires customers to adopt software in incremental steps as well: land small, build out from there. This requires a more agile approach and both partners, SAP and customers to be in a continuous innovation cycle that ideally never ends and takes the success of all 3 involved to new heights on an ongoing basis.
Reality check: this dream world does not (yet) exist. But it is clear that we’re moving towards this scenario rapidly. And so it is important that SAP and Partners work together on growing this new group of consultants that help making our customers successful and drive the cloud mindset in our operating systems. SAP is running many programs to build capacity in the market. Curious? Please contact your Partner Manager or Partner Delivery Manager for more information. Or share your thoughts in the comments and get a conversation going! but the best thing is to tune into our podcast series with partners on Delivery Excellence. The one on the changing role of the consultant can be found here - or look for SAP Out to Lunch on Apple podcast or Spotify. New episodes coming out every other week or so. Subscribe to not miss out on it!
