Five situations where an independent technology advisor adds more value than cost — and three where they do not.
Independent technology advisory is a cost most organisations incur reluctantly. It is also one of the highest-leverage costs an organisation can incur, when used at the right time and in the right way. The challenge is knowing when "the right time" actually is. Bring in an advisor too early and the advice is theoretical. Bring in the problem too late and the cost of intervention has compounded.
This article describes five situations where an independent technology advisor is almost always worth the cost, and three where it usually is not.
Any technology decision above a meaningful threshold — platform replacement, major outsourcing, large-scale cloud migration — benefits from an independent view before commitment. The advisor's job is not to make the decision; it is to stress-test the analysis the executive team has already done and to surface the assumptions the decision depends on. Most of the value of advisory at this stage is in the questions that are asked, not in the answers that are given.
The earlier the intervention, the cheaper it is. The honest truth is that most programme recoveries we are asked to lead could have been avoided if an independent pair of eyes had been engaged six or twelve months earlier. The cost of an early diagnostic is a small fraction of the cost of recovery.
Vendor relationships deteriorate slowly and then suddenly. The point at which an independent view can be most useful is when the deterioration has been noticed but has not yet become a crisis. At that point the conversation with the vendor can be reset around facts rather than around feelings. Later, the conversation becomes adversarial and the cost of resolution rises sharply.
Boards are increasingly expected to exercise independent judgment on technology decisions. They do not always have the technical expertise to do so. An independent advisor who can speak to the board in business terms, defend the methodology and accept accountability for the conclusion is one of the most valuable things the board chair can commission.
Some organisations have the internal capability to manage every technology decision without external help. Many do not. Where the internal team is thin — by design, through recent turnover, or because the capability never existed in the first place — an independent advisor can both deliver the immediate outcome and build the internal capability to deliver it next time.
The honest question to ask is not whether you can afford independent advice, but whether you can afford to make the decision without it.
An advisor engaged to validate an already-decided position is an advisor being asked to provide theatre. It happens often, usually because the executive sponsor wants the cover of an independent endorsement for a decision they have already made. The honest advisor will decline the engagement and recommend a different conversation.
Independent advisory only adds value when the conclusion is allowed to be uncomfortable. Organisations that commission advisory and then ignore or dilute conclusions when the conclusion is inconvenient have spent money they didn't need to spend. A good advisor will discover this in the first conversation and decline the engagement.
Sometimes the right answer is to bring in a delivery partner, not an advisor. The distinction matters. Advisors help you decide what to do. Delivery partners help you do it. Conflating the two is one of the most common causes of advisory engagements that produce little of value.
The best advisory engagements are short, specific and outcome-driven. They have a clear scope, a defined deliverable, a known duration and an executive sponsor who has the authority to act on the conclusion. They are not open-ended. They are not "strategy refreshes" with no decision attached. They are not large teams undertaking first-principles research that the client could have done internally with a week of effort.
A useful test: if the conclusion of the advisory engagement could be a sentence — "do this, not that, for these reasons" — the engagement has been designed well. If the conclusion is a deck, the engagement probably has not been designed well.
We are biased, of course. Independent technology advisory is our business. But we believe the role of independent advice is genuinely undervalued in the Australian market. Most engagements we are asked to lead were preventable with earlier intervention. If you are weighing whether to engage an advisor on a current decision, the most useful question to ask yourself is what the cost of making the decision without that advice would be. If the answer is uncomfortable, the conversation is worth having.