Let us begin our discussion of modern data consultancies with the different types of data consultancies out there. Being able to identify what type of consultancy you plan to build will significantly affect your strategy, market, hiring and development plans for your resources. We basically have three distinct types of consultancies: Augmentors, Specialists or Brokers.

Augmentors

Augmentors, as the name suggests, enhance the capabilities of their clients to solve the problems they are facing. More specifically, Augmentors within the analytics domain improve their clients’ capacity to take data driven decisions. They enhance current analytical capacities within the client, or establish it from scratch. Their expertise lies in using the latest analytical offerings from one or more vendors to build modern architectures to support the analytical needs and aspirations of their clientele. Although they might have accrued domain expertise through dealings with clients from various industries, they usually rely on the domain experts coming from the client.

Specialists

Specialists are experts in the analytics related to one or more specific industrial, commercial or scientific domains. They are versed in the particular metrics, KPIs and other measurables of their domain of expertise. They are also familiar with the analytical challenges associated with their domain(s) of expertise, and often have materialized this knowledge in the form of accelerators or frameworks that they can use to address the aforementioned challenges when dealing with new clients. Specialists might not have expertise with all the analytical offerings provided by various vendors in the market, but they do have expertise with the best of breed offerings that service their particular domain of expertise. Specialists will often have domain experts as part of their permanent staff, and they are used to augment the domain expertise of the clients they are engaged with. This is in contrast with Augmentors, which would rely completely on the domain expertise client-side.

Brokers

Finally, we have Brokers. Brokers control a pool of talented assets that are basically rented out to clients to work as part of their analytical workforce. Clients are charged based on asset type and seniority, as well as the number of time units (think man-hours, man-days, etc.) that the asset spends client-side. It is often the case that the asset pool is transitive in nature (i.e. with a relatively high level of attrition), and this risk needs to be mitigated early on in planning.

So, there you have it. The three basic types of data consultancies. Depending on which one(s) you are planning to build, your strategy, market positioning and resources will vary significantly. See you on the next post!