Pity the poor consultant. Behind the facade of power suits and BMWs are people with a lot of problems—most of which are other people’s problems. Consultants well understand one of the fundamental laws of labor: You can have a job with little stress, or you can have a job that pays well.

Many consultants get no fringe benefits. Nobody pays them while they’re on vacation. They don’t have medical insurance, and they have to pay both halves of Social Insecurity themselves. They can’t even enjoy a round of golf because they keep thinking of how much money they could be making instead.

Enter Online Consulting

And now, as if that weren’t bad enough, along comes the International Data Corporation (IDC) with the news that online consultants are going to put the traditional consultants out of business. This information is in the IDC’s new report, “Will Online Consulting Lead to a Stealth Attack on the Consulting Industry?” (IDC #B21184). According to Marianne Hedin, Ph.D., manager of IDC’s consulting services research program, “Online consulting possesses the same characteristics as a disruptive technology and consequently has the potential of initiating a stealth attack on consulting services firms and their current business models.” If you want a copy of this report, contact Sally Donovan at 800-343-4952 ext. 4219 or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

What is a disruptive technology? The man who coined the term, Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen, says that disruptive technologies are “simple, convenient-to-use innovations that initially are used only by the unsophisticated customers at the low end of markets.” Disruptive technologies don’t obey the rules by which traditional businesses operate. Maybe the profit margins aren’t high enough. Maybe they appeal to a too-small percentage of the marketplace. But over time, these technologies gain a larger and larger market share, until the big guys are hurting. At this point, the big guys realize they should have invested in these technologies in the beginning.

I recommend that you take a look at an interesting Web site, www.disruptivetechnologies.com, for more information. Among other things, you’ll find several examples of industries that ignored disruptive technologies, and you’ll learn how doing so was their undoing. You might also want to check out the Harvard Business School library site at www.library.hbs.edu/hc/distech/relatedweb.htm for more disruptive technology links.

What’s an online consultant, anyway? Well, it’s a consultant who works via the Internet. The first time I heard of this, I could just imagine myself getting a spam email from a couple of guys in a garage somewhere asking me to let them manage my network or, worse, two 14 year olds sitting in a public school library offering to design my Web site. Since you never know what’s behind a Web site, my impressions may not be far off the mark, or I may be all wet.

The reality is that people are really serious about doing consulting over the Internet. For example, for a measly $75 (credit card payments only, please), NetWEB Online Consulting (www.netwebhost.com/ oconsult.htm) will help you with Internet marketing planning, Web site promotion, online shopping, hardware and software requirements, and Web site hosting and management issues. Does $75 sound like too much? Then consider trying the free services of 4frontconsulting. com, at webboard.4frontconsulting.com:8080/~4front-consulting. Its consultants participate in discussion forums. You can participate as well, at no charge. Of course, no company makes a living by giving away its product for free, so4frontconsulting.com is hoping you’ll like its people and want to engage its for-pay services.

It’s About People

So this brings me back to IDC’s contention. If IDC is right, online consultants are (or will be) picking up business that the traditional consulting firms won’t handle. Perhaps they’ll begin with those small businesses that I talked about last month—the ones that can’t afford to pay $80+ per hour. (See “Open Source Business Applications, Anyone?” Midrange Computing, March 2000.) As these consultants gain expertise, they’ll begin to pick up more and more of the niche markets and better-paying stuff. Then one morning, the traditional consultants will get out of bed to find that they’re only servicing the biggest customers, and they’ll be scrambling to find work.

But I don’t buy it, even though I’m sure that much consulting work could be done online. The technology’s there. The impediment I see is not one of technology, but of people. Users want a lot of assurance, and I don’t blame them. They want hand-holding. They want things they can see, like suits and briefcases and shiny shoes. And I’m skeptical that consultants can understand a client’s business without sitting down face to face with people and working together in the same location.

So my feeling is that traditional consulting firms, even those with only one employee, don’t have a lot to fear from online consultants...at least not for a long while. Of course, I may be wrong. If you get a spam email from me one of these days, asking you to let me do your programming, please don’t be too hasty to delete it. I may need money to heat my garage.