A Digitalization Phase Model for IT Consulting Services

In recent years, many companies recognized the importance of digitalization in IT consulting. Partly fueled by the Covid-19 crisis, the demand for digitalized IT consulting services became obvious as IT consulting firms were increasingly asked by their clients to digitally provide their service portfolio. While this created new business opportunities, it also revealed the lack of appropriate means to describe and deliver standardized, modular IT consulting services that can nevertheless be customized and delivered through digital channels. To date, there is no accepted and standardized approach that enables an IT consulting firm to drive the digitalization of its own service portfolio in a structured way. This paper proposes a new incremental approach, the DITCOS Digitalization Phase Model, that enables IT consulting firms to (i) digitally codify their services over three defined phases using the DITCOS-DN description notation, (ii) dynamically transform the resulting service model into an executable BPMN 2.0 workflow based on user tasks, and (iii) automate the delivery of parts of the service models by dynamically transforming them into BPMN 2.0 workflows based on user and system tasks. Using the action design research methodology, we designed, implemented, and evaluated our approach with the help of IT consulting practitioners on a digital IT consulting platform prototype.