InformationWeek

April 26, 1999

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Smaller Is Better

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HP's Christensen and other executives stress that it's imperative to meet the people you're counting on to deliver an application on time. "A lot of consulting firms bring window dressing vs. tacticians," he says. "You not only need to meet the partners, but also the people doing the real work."

First Union's Procinsky concurs. "At least half of any project is the development of the human organization that will do the project," he says. That means clarifying the real roles people will play, "not the ones that are on the organizational chart."

Culture is another important issue with small Web consulting firms, which don't have the same attitude or management skills as the Big Five consulting firms. "You need to understand the types of firms that these boutiques are," says Meta Group's Lepeak.

Lepeak says he's seen cases in which there was a culture clash between the people in a traditional IT shop and the twenty-something analysts at the consulting firm. "You're probably going to spend more time managing them than you expected," he says.

If you choose the right Web consulting firm and manage the relationship properly, however, it may be able to turn an informational Web site into something that becomes a strategic part of your business. Cleaver-Brooks, a division of Aqua-Chem Inc., a boiler-systems manufacturer in Milwaukee, hired Fetch Interactive Inc. in 1997 to move some design documents onto an intranet. Fetch was taken over by what's now USWeb/

CKS, which helped Cleaver-Brooks develop a long-term plan to link its sales and design teams through the Internet by connecting two separate Web applications called Boilerspec and OrderNet.

"Ultimately, we'd like to marry the information from one end to the other," says John Warczak, Cleaver-Brooks' VP of materials and systems. That's quite a ways from the initial job of putting boiler specifications into a format that could be posted on the Web. When the company started the project, it wasn't considering putting business applications on the Internet. But Cleaver-Brooks soon realized the benefit of doing so.

Today, 10,000 engineers are using Boilerspec to help them design boiler systems. Eventually, Boilerspec will be linked with other parts of the company's value chain. One step will be to connect it with OrderNet, which is used by 1,500 sales representatives who are involved in the design process and use OrderNet to determine pricing and send transactions into the company's mainframe.

That will take some time and require some challenging changes. But change is a big part of doing business on the Web, and enlightened IT managers realize that consultants are advisors and that the real responsibility for success lies within their own organizations.

ADP's Miller recalls one incident in which a consulting firm doing work on a mainframe system said it could expand the scope of its work to add Web extensions to a legacy application. The result wasn't successful, but Miller came away with an important lesson: his department can't blame failures on the outsiders. "A lot of it has to do with shortcomings of ourselves," he says. "We can't work the old way--or it's going to be an expensive lesson."