Towards a Formal Description Language for Digital IT Consulting Products in Decentralized IT Consulting Firms

Today IT consulting services are neither digitalized nor standardized widely. They are conducted with the help of consultants and are fully based on these professionals’ knowledge and experience. Thus, the results of IT consulting initiatives often differ considerably. With the increasing demands of digitalization and globalization, new and relevant challenges arise within the IT consulting sector. Asset- or platform-based approaches can be considered as a possible means to address these challenges in the current consulting research literature. We believe that these approaches require significantly more research related to formal description of IT consulting services. Formally described Digital IT Consulting Products should be the foundation of computer-based interpretation and a future digital IT consulting service system based management and provisioning. This Ph.D. research project addresses this topic first by conducting a structured literature review to understand the state-of-the-art in IT consulting service digitalization and formal service description. This is followed by focus group interviews conducted with experts from the IT consulting sector in order to understand stakeholder requirements and to be able to design a formal description language. The formal description language is validated by implementation and testing of a prototyped digital IT consulting service system and its experimental analysis.