Even the experts in the industry struggle to define what a digital business consultant does. The results of several studies are unanimous: digital consulting has not yet coalesced into a distinct persona. It’s a combination of strategy, technology implementation, process optimization, and change management. This ambiguity is what throws companies, who are looking to hire one set of skills and get another.
A digital business consultant is a bridge between a company’s digital vision and its current state. Sounds simple, but the chasm is fivefold and interrelated: strategy (what we want to build and why), technology (how we build and integrate systems), data (how we measure and make decisions), customer experience (how customers interact with digital interfaces), and organizational capability (whether the team has the chops to deliver on the vision).
The problem is that addressing one domain without addressing the others results in expensive failures. A beautiful customer experience strategy will not work if the technology to support it is not up to snuff. A great data platform is useless if the organization doesn’t have the analytics acumen to leverage it.
Digital business consulting services always focuses on four key areas that define whether a digital project is profitable or a costly experience:
Strategy & Roadmapping: What “digital” actually means to your specific business model and how to create a roadmap to execute it. This is not generic “digital transformation speak”—it’s about making hard decisions such as whether to rebuild an existing order management system or leverage new platforms, and whether your business model requires product-led growth or enterprise sales motions. Great consultants provide absolute clarity on these decisions before any work begins.
Customer Experience Optimization: How customers discover, assess, purchase, use, and expand their use of your products through digital channels. This involves website and mobile experience, self-service portals, and how online activities are integrated with offline touchpoints. The goal is to eliminate revenue-killing friction and build experiences that accelerate customers through the lifecycle.
Technology & Data Infrastructure: Evaluating whether your existing technology infrastructure is capable of supporting your ambitions and architecting a scalable infrastructure. This involves platform choice, integration planning, API design, data warehousing, analytics implementation, and technical debt management. The consultant articulates business requirements into specific technical requirements that can be engineered by the development team.
People & Change Management: Building sustainable organizational capabilities to ensure the digital operations remain after the consultants leave. It involves learning, documenting processes, building governance, and changing the culture to support the digital mindset. The typical risk is that the technology is good, but people fall back into old habits unless the new ways of working are fully adopted.
A successful digital business consulting engagement integrates these four elements, not as four separate lanes but as one cohesive unit. The technology decisions should be informed by the customer service experience. The data strategy should support the decision-making requirements. The change management should facilitate the implementation of the strategy.
Digital business consultants are NOT IT consultants. IT consultants deal with technical support, ensuring the infrastructure is running, resolving problems, and ensuring everything is running smoothly. Their role is to repair what’s broken. Digital business consultants, on the other hand, question what should exist in the first place and whether technology investments are actually aligned with business strategies. One maintains the status quo; the other challenges the business model itself.
They are NOT digital marketers. Digital marketers pursue channels for customer acquisition—paid media, search engine optimization, content, social media, and emails. They drive traffic and conversions within a given paradigm. Digital business consultants may completely transform that paradigm, determining whether you should be a marketplace or a direct seller, subscription or transaction-based, product-led or sales-led. Marketing happens within the determined model; digital business consultants may change the model itself.
They are NOT project managers. Project managers manage execution—timelines, resources, dependencies, and deliverables—to keep projects on schedule and within budget. Digital business consultants are above the details of execution, questioning what should be built, why it matters for business results, and how it fits into the broader strategy. One manages execution; the other manages outcomes.
The global digital transformation budget is close to $4 trillion a year by 2027, but research shows that only 30% of projects actually meet the expected business outcomes. The remaining 70% become expensive learning experiences about what not to do.
The problem is not with the technology; it is reliable and works well when done right. The chasm is in strategy, adoption, and accountability. Organizations embark on a “digital transformation” journey without a success definition, without aligning stakeholders, without a blunt assessment of readiness, and without long-term dedication when the going gets rough.
Good consultants change these paradigms by forcing success definitions right from the start. They define success metrics before any technology decisions are made. They identify organizational hurdles to adoption and mitigate them early on. They create governance structures to ensure projects do not meander away from business objectives. Most importantly, they ensure accountability throughout the execution phase, as opposed to making plans that never happen.
The consultant’s job is to ensure the project does not fall into the 70% failure category by focusing on the non-technology aspects of success, which are stakeholder alignment, change management, realistic planning, and sound measurement.
Weeks 1-2: Assessment Phase: We conduct a thorough review of your current situation – technology, processes, customer experience, and organizational capability. This leads to a gap analysis, which highlights what’s holding you back from achieving your business goals, and an opportunity sizing, which provides an estimate of the potential benefit of closing each gap.
Weeks 3-5: Strategic Roadmap Development: We develop a prioritized plan of implementation with distinct phases, resource requirements, success factors, and feasible timelines. This roadmap becomes the controlling document for all future work, ensuring that there’s no scope creep and that all initiatives remain connected to business value.
Weeks 6-16: Build & Implementation: Hands-on execution support or oversight depending on engagement model. This includes technology implementation, process development, team training, and continuous testing against the success factors established earlier.
Weeks 17+: Scale & Optimization Systematic expansion of initial successes, learn from real-world outcomes, and develop capabilities to maintain the momentum even after the consultants leave.
For example, Eyal Dror Consulting breaks down engagements into staged sprints with decision points. Each stage concludes with specific results and a definitive go/no-go decision on whether to proceed or not. This eliminates the possibility of prolonged, unproductive consulting engagements and ensures that initial successes create momentum for larger initiatives.
The bottom line in digital business consulting is simply the definition of the work. Contractors fill holes with deliverables; they deliver a website, integrate a system, and write a report and walk away. Consultants, on the other hand, deliver results. They are responsible for business outcomes—revenue is up, expenses are down, customers are happy, and so on, and they stick around until those numbers change.
A contractor might deliver a digital strategy report and walk away from the project. A consultant would not only deliver the report but would also make sure that the strategy is implemented, see what is working and what isn’t, and only then consider the project a success.
You need a digital business consultant when:
You're not ready yet if:
A digital business consultant who wishes to charge by the hour or by deliverable, but not based on actual business outcomes, is communicating something very telling: they don’t actually think they can move the needles that matter. A good consultant, one who is knowledgeable about their trade, will welcome outcome-based pricing because they have already demonstrated that they can deliver value.
Before you hire a consultant, you should establish success factors in language that is meaningful to your business—revenue, expenses, customer satisfaction, efficiency, time to market. If the consultant you are considering is not willing to agree to improve those factors, you are hiring them to do some pretty busywork, not to collaborate on a business-changing project. A good consultant is not just after your business; they want to demonstrate their value by delivering results that far exceed the cost of their services.
