There’s a moment that’s becoming common in consultancy life, and it usually arrives in the form of an RFP.
A long-standing client is putting a transformation programme out to tender. The scope spans system implementation, data migration, integration, change management, and probably a chunk of analytics work too. Everyone in the room knows you’re well placed for two or three of those components. Everyone also knows that bidding for the whole thing means committing to delivery in areas where your team has either thin coverage, no coverage, or coverage that depends on one person who’s already overcommitted.
The instinct is to either narrow the bid to what you can comfortably deliver – and watch a competitor scoop the entire programme – or to bid for everything and worry about the gaps later. Neither feels good. Both happen all the time.
The interesting development of the last few years is that there’s now a third option, and the consultancies growing fastest in digital transformation are the ones that have built their business model around it.
What clients are actually buying has changed
The starting point is that the buying side has shifted, and not enough consultancies have noticed.
A decade ago, clients commissioning transformation work generally wanted a single firm to handle the lot. The selling proposition was integration: one throat to choke, one project plan, one accountability. That model still exists in pockets, but it’s no longer the default. Recent industry research suggests[1] 54% of enterprises now actively prefer multi-vendor digital strategy engagements, and the figure rises for the larger and more complex programmes.
Several things changed. Clients got more sophisticated buyers. They realised that no single firm was actually best-in-class across every component of a transformation, and that pretending otherwise tended to produce mediocre delivery in the parts that didn’t fit the lead firm’s strengths. They also got tired of paying premium rates for specialist work being done by generalists who happened to wear the lead firm’s lanyard.
The buying conversation now tends to revolve around two questions. First: who will own delivery and accountability? Second: who’s actually going to do the work in each area, and how confident are you in their depth? Consultancies that can give credible answers to both – not just the first – are winning more work. Consultancies that can only answer the first are increasingly being filtered out at shortlist stage.
The “build everything internally” trap
The traditional response to this would be to hire your way out of it. If clients want depth, build depth. Bring in the specialists, expand the team, grow the firm.
It’s a reasonable instinct that’s getting harder to act on, for reasons that aren’t going away. The IT skills shortage is structural now, not cyclical. Roughly 67% of digital transformation initiatives are delayed by IT skill shortages[2], and nearly half of enterprises report internal capability gaps in cloud engineering, data science, cybersecurity, or enterprise architecture.[3] Consultancies are competing for the same scarce specialists as their clients, and often losing.
Even when the hiring works, the economics are uncomfortable. Specialist demand across a project portfolio is rarely consistent – you need deep data expertise for an intense delivery phase and very little of it the month after. Building permanent capability around intermittent demand creates either expensive bench time or burned-out specialists who leave. Both end the same way.
Then there’s the more uncomfortable question, which is whether internal hires actually become specialists in the meaningful sense. A senior data engineer plucked from a previous firm and given six months of mixed-portfolio work tends to become a general-purpose senior. The deep specialism that justified the hire dilutes quickly. And the specialist work the firm now needs to do for clients is being done by someone who is, increasingly, not really a specialist.
None of this is an argument against hiring. It’s an argument against treating hiring as the only growth lever.
The consultancy as orchestrator
The model that’s working is closer to orchestration than to manufacturing.
Instead of trying to own every capability in-house, the consultancy positions itself as the firm that owns the client relationship, the strategic understanding, the architectural decisions, and the accountability for delivery – and brings in trusted specialists for the components where genuine depth matters. The specialists don’t replace the consultancy; they amplify it. The client gets a single point of accountability and best-in-class execution across the components that drive the most risk.
Done well, this looks invisible to the client. Done badly, it looks like a subcontracting chain that nobody really controls. The difference comes down to how the partnerships are structured and how integrated the working relationships actually are.
The consultancies that make it work tend to share a few characteristics. They identify their specialist partners deliberately rather than reactively – well before any specific project demands them. They invest in the relationship: shared methodologies, joint planning, mutual understanding of how each side delivers. They treat partner capability as part of their own credentials in client conversations, not as a fallback when an internal team is overstretched. And they’re honest with clients about who’s doing what, because the alternative – pretending the work is all internal – tends to come unstuck the moment something goes wrong.
Why data is the natural place to start
Of all the components of a typical transformation programme, data work is the one where the gap between competent and excellent has the most consequences.
Gartner’s widely cited research puts the data migration failure rate at around 83%[4] – projects that either fail outright or significantly exceed budgets and timelines. The single biggest cause isn’t the technology. It’s underestimated complexity in the data itself, which is typically discovered three months into delivery rather than three months before it.
For a consultancy delivering a transformation programme, this is the component most likely to derail the whole thing. Which makes it the component where partnering with genuine specialists pays off the most clearly. A data migration that goes well is invisible. A data migration that goes badly is the only thing the client remembers about the entire programme, regardless of how well the rest of the work was executed.
Specialist data partners exist precisely because this work needs depth that a general transformation team can’t credibly provide. Cleansing, deduplication, mapping, multi-system reconciliation, the structured handling of unstructured document estates, the validation layers that make migrated data trustworthy in the new environment – none of this is something you pick up between projects. It’s its own discipline, with its own tooling and its own accumulated lessons.
Where Dajon comes in
Dajon Data Management works with IT consultancies as a specialist data partner.
The arrangement is straightforward. The consultancy holds the client relationship, the architecture, and the accountability for the overall programme. Dajon provides the depth on the data side – legacy data preparation, migration, integration, document digitisation, data governance – with the kind of specialism that comes from doing nothing else for years. The work is delivered alongside the consultancy’s team, not instead of it. From the client’s point of view, they get a transformation partner that can credibly handle every component of the programme, including the parts that most often go wrong.
For consultancies, the value isn’t just delivery confidence on individual projects. It’s the ability to bid for work that would otherwise have been outside scope – the larger programmes, the more data-intensive transformations, the regulated sector engagements where defensibility matters as much as execution.
Growth without the overhead
The shift this represents is worth being explicit about.
For most of the history of professional services, growth has meant hiring. More people, more capability, more revenue, more cost base. The consultancies operating most effectively in digital transformation today have unbundled that equation. They’re growing revenue and capability faster than they’re growing headcount, by being deliberate about which parts of the work they own and which parts they bring in through partners they trust.
The traditional measure of a consultancy’s strength was the depth of its bench. The new measure is increasingly the depth of its ecosystem. Clients are buying both, but they’re paying attention to the second in a way they didn’t five years ago.
If your consultancy is still narrowing bids to fit what you can comfortably staff internally – or worse, bidding for work and crossing your fingers on the components you can’t really deliver – it might be worth asking whether the operating model itself needs updating.
The consultancies winning in this market aren’t the ones with the biggest teams. They’re the ones with the smartest combinations.
Dajon Data Management partners with IT consultancies as a specialist data partner on digital transformation programmes. Get in touch to explore how we can support your delivery and broaden the work you can credibly bid for.
References
- Digital Transformation Strategy Consulting Market Size Business Research Insights[↩]
- Digital Transformation Consulting Services Market 2026-2035 Business Research Insights[↩]
- IT Consulting Services Market Share & Trends Market Reports World[↩]
- Top Data Migration Challenges & How to Overcome Them Gartner via Kanerika[↩]