Group 11
ConsultingExperts is an IT consultancy and temporary staffing agency founded in 2010, specialized in IT-infrastructure and security. The company has shown continuous growth and proved to be profitable over the years. Its goal is to provide suitable IT solutions to larger companies, institutions and governmental organizations.
It is a relatively small company consisting of around 20 highly educated employees. Much of the value of the company delivers for their customers, is in their ability to provide high-quality tailor-made solutions rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach. This is complemented by letting the consultants work in a very independent manner, giving them all the space they need to handle projects as they deem fit.
The competition is quite fierce as there is an abundance of other small IT consultancy firms, and also some big ones (think of Fox-IT, KPN Consulting, Accenture, etc.)
An analysis of the environment of the company and a series of interviews with the owners and a consultant gave a clear picture of the current trends and developments that the enterprise has to take into account. One of the most important is the rise of cloud computing.
ConsultingExperts is relying on word-of-mouth marketing by satisfied customers to increase its new customer base. They are already fully booked with projects for 2016, so there are more from its current clients that they can handle. Therefore, they want to grow steadily by hiring two highly qualified employees.
The alignment of the business and IT strategy is weak at ConsultingExperts. Due to the size of the company, the weak alignment is not a critical problem, but they should not forget to keep this in mind for the coming years.
The SWOT of ConsultingExperts indicates a few crucial points that they should take into consideration. Due to a low number of employees, they heavily depend on the skills of their staff and their personal network. Also because they do not have an active acquisition team they have the risk of losing current clients while not being able to attract net clients.
Cloud computing is both a threat and an opportunity for ConsultingExperts. When cloud computing is implemented at their clients, they will not need the advanced security services of ConsultingExperts anymore, as that risk moves to the cloud provider. The cloud can also be seen as an opportunity for ConsultingExperts. As moving the IT to the cloud can be a large project, they can help their clients with this and get new project by helping their clients with this.
When ConsultingExperts adds cloud to their expertise, they can attract new clients and new projects from existing clients as the cloud is a growing area for the future. They can train their consultants to become an expert in the Cloud which will be already profitable in a year, as these costs will be covered by the extra revenue this will generate for ConsultingExperts.
The recommendations for ConsultingExperts are to retain their current consultants, develop partnerships and hire new personnel.
