Face it - we consultants really want to develop deep relationships with our clients - and keep them coming back for more of our services.  One key way to do that is to develop industry best practices - demonstrating real depth in the industry of our clients.  Thus, we can become trusted business advisors rather than solely technology advisors. But sometimes, we are limited because of the one-to-one nature of consulting.  Hence the challenge:  what can consultants do to market at least some of their services as “one-to-many?”

Here is where the concept of “Service as Software” can come into play.  The term, coined by Computer Reseller News a few years ago refers to the embedding of best practices - our intellectual capital - in software.  The idea is that consultants can deliver their “Service as Software” in a repeatable fashion providing enhanced value-added customizations to their clients. Thus, industry best practices are reflected as customizations and extensions, seamlessly integrated into the customer’s enterprise business management suite.

This new value proposition for consultants and solution providers can create myriad opportunities for business development. This changes the previous linear business model, and frees the consultant with technical skills to focus more on higher-value, higher-margin services like changing and improving the customer’s business processes; mapping those processes to a business management application; and configuring and customizing the application accordingly.

Now we know that consultants and solutions providers aren’t about to enter the software development and distribution business. And they are certainly not going to become job shops of coders.  Rather, value is derived from customer or industry-specific additions of features or functionality to a core enterprise business solution. The greatest impact springs from industry-specific concentration or specialization, leading to the ability to provide solutions to a more greatly distributed range of customers.

The embodiment of services in repeatable distributed value-add functionality can only be successful under certain conditions. Here are some key criteria:

• Customizations are persistent and have long life cycles, so the investment in time to create them pays off - and customers receive better developed and tested solutions from their providers that have a long life-span.
• Customizations are reusable: the value-added application or function created for one customer is likely to be of use to another. Providers can attract new clients in similar industries and leverage their prior development efforts over a broad range of clients.

Now - to ensure that consultants are not engulfed in coding nightmares, there are some very clear caveats for this plan to work:

1. The core enterprise application has to be easily extensible, with exposed interfaces. And you need to pick one - not create a model that needs recoding for other underlying products.
2. The application should have widespread acceptance to best leverage the solution provider’s investment in adding functionality to it.
3. The toolkit provided for extending the application to meet the needs of vertical industries should be stocked with tools, documentation, and access to support when needed.
4. A test-bed must be available for trial runs, trouble shooting, and integration checking.
5. Access to the remote application - the one to be developed for - is required.  A consultant should not have to invest in a hardware and software infrastructure to succeed in the move from a service to software.
6. If you are using a SaaS application architecture, which is the easiest kind of application for this model to work in, it has to provide a layer of abstraction between the core application and the customizations you create for the customer. This ensures that those customizations will automatically carry forward to the next version of the application without intervention on your part.
7. A centralized, readily accessible library with documentation for each script should be available through which to experiment and sell the applications created to customers.
8. For maximum value, the added functionality should be able to be built within the core application as opposed to outside of it. Solutions built outside the application require the extra work and cost of maintaining integrations into that core.

Benefits of “Service as Software”

Both customers and the solution providers that support them benefit from Software as a Service and the ability for solution providers to embed their services in software customizations.

Customers win in this model:

• Customers want to work with solutions providers they can trust, who understand their business, speak the language of their industries, and who will sell them business solutions, not just products.
• Customers want to standardize their business processes based on industry best practices.
• Customers want rapid time to market.
• Customers want low cost implementations.
• Customers want references from other companies in their specific industry.

Conclusion

We as consultants can leverage our vertical best practices into replicable solutions, providing a higher level of service through increased industry focus. We can leverage this intellectual property through easily-created applications and customizations that can be used by a far broader community of clients - thus providing “service as software (SaS)”.

With this new business model and with the vast span of the software-as-a-service infrastructure today, we can more easily target other clients in a very similar business niche who need the same business solutions. Our new-found scope can be far-reaching—we can service customers far beyond our locale with business solutions - with Web-enabled support for a world-wide franchise of value.