Business is big on the word "Consultant", it's appended to Solution, Technical, Business, Enterprise and, I'm sure, other words I can't think of right now. It seems clear that business offers consultancy and yet very often we are asked to provide expertise not consultation. Is there a difference between the two? Clearly I think so or I wouldn't be writing this note :-)
The act of consulting is one of guiding the customer towards the answer the customer wants but just doesn't know how to get there -- it is often an art to pull out the requirements from the customer and allow the customer themselves to fully visualize the business problem(s) being addressed, the solution itself and the successful road to deployment of it. You must ask a lot of questions but provide very few answers -- answers drive thinking processes and consultants should not be drivers but navigators.
Providing expertise is quite different; you are the driver, you know where you are going and how you are going to get there. Expertise is a very wonderful thing to draw on when you have the problem space well understood, for then you know you have the right expert at the table. That's the problem with expertise; it's not so easy to be an expert in multiple disciplines or even sub-disciplines, whereas a good consultant ought to be able to go outside of their consultancy field. They may not know all the questions to ask but should be able to figure out there are missing questions yet to be asked by the right consultant but an expert may only think "I don't know the answer to that so I'll shut up". You probably wouldn't expect an expert automobile mechanic to be expert at large truck maintenance -- nor should you necessarily expect that an expert at email servers should be an expert at (say) Email Management software just because both contain the word "email".
What does a customer require? Well both of course. The real question is what does a customer require from Business? That answer will vary by customer, some will require pure consultancy -- they have their own experts to draw on they just need some help assuring they have all of the right ones at the table. Other customers will have their own fully-fledged internal consultancy to draw on and/or use the services of an independent firm but have almost no internal expertise to draw upon. It's probably fair to say however that most customers require some of both Consultancy and Expertise from the businesses and vendors they deal with.
The challenge for businesses as a whole and more particularly for those that are 'writing paper', creating Statements of Work and other forms of contractual arrangements is to recognize which roles are required which ones are being requested and identify any conflicts. It's a challenge because of our historical size, it's a small company necessity to have multi-talented, jack-of-all-trades 'expert consultants' who really do have to simultaneously be both a Consultant and an Expert on many different topics. Rarely is a consultant an expert at anything and just as rarely is an expert asked to perform a consultancy task (like, for instance, Project Management).
So, ask yourself the next time you are on site at a customer, are you there as a Consultant or as an Expert? And are you playing the expected part?
