Digital IT Consulting Service Provisioning - A practice-driven platform architecture proposal

• Published in: 2021 IEEE 25th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Workshop (EDOCW) pp. 251 - 260
• Main Authors: Bode, Meikel, Deneva, Maya, van Sinderen, Marten J.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.10.2021
• Subjects: architecture model; Companies; Computational modeling; Computer architecture; Conferences; Design methodology; design science; digital consulting platform; digital transformation; IT consulting services; IT service provisioning; Reflection; requirements engineering
• ISSN: 2325-6605
• DOI: 10.1109/EDOCW52865.2021.00056

Although the digitization of their clients' business processes is one of the main areas of activity for IT consulting companies, the digitization of their own services is still largely absent. Even though we witness extensive use of digital tools, such as digital presentations or video meetings, in the daily work of IT consultants, the business is still very human-centric and dependent on their face-to-face interactions. This is not inherently a problem, yet it poses major challenges to the domain for which few solutions exist to date - the ubiquitous provisioning of digital IT consulting services with the help of digital consulting platforms. To mitigate this shortcoming, in this paper we propose an architecture design for a digital IT consulting platform. Using the design science methodology and based on high-level requirements elicited in an exploratory focus group study with 16 IT consulting practitioners, we derive data requirements, functional requirements, and quality requirements. Based on these requirements, we then propose necessary architectural components. The technology choices in the instantiation of our proposed architecture are illustrated in a realistic context. Our plan for follow-up evaluation is presented as well, along with our reflection on limitations and implications. With this work we make two main contributions: (a) catalog of derived requirements for a digital IT Consulting platform, and (b) a component-level architecture proposal of how a digital IT consulting platform can be designed.