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August 10, 2005

Is the Tide Turning?

Yesterday, a colleague and I stopped for a conversation which turned toward the difference between an employee and consultant within the large corporation. My belief is that:

Consultants are hired for their experience, assumed to be knowledgeable, and must prove otherwise. Employees are hired for their potential, assumed to lack knowledge, and must prove otherwise.

As an example, a couple of weeks ago I walked into a meetings where the discussion was on enterprise architecture governance and knowledge management. Clearly, we have over 6 years experience in this area but the business person continued to turn to a visiting consultant to answer the questions first. They were armed with great high level theory but had no knowledge or understanding in the actually process of implementation. They had talked about the subject but never really did anything. Just about every issue they discussed could be found in books by Firestone, McElroy, or Drucker. They provided little or no value add that could be gathered for $24.99.

This colleague said that the tide is turning on this observation and that the value of the employee is changing. With out sourcing, over seas sourcing, job cuts, and the transformation that most organizations are going through, I can’t see this actually happening. Do you?

Posted by Todd at August 10, 2005 12:58 PM

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