How your IT experts become consultants (and charge you more)

I’m an industry pundit (IP). I might even be a Recognized Industry Pundit (RIP). Ever wonder what it takes to achieve this exalted state of rentable wisdom?

Once upon a time I was a lowly IT manager. I say “lowly” because the IT function I was responsible for was one of those absolutely essential but utterly thankless IT responsibilities where the “invisibility index” is the key success metric.

Our story begins with IT asking for a big wad of cash (BWC). The details don’t matter, because no matter how big or small the BWC was, and how urgent the rationale, the executive leadership team just wasn’t going to fork over the requested amount.

Which is why the CIO brought in a team of high-profile consultants to assess the situation. Which they did, and cheerfully endorsed the BWC request in their final report.

They also included some brilliant off-the-shelf suggestions regarding how we could run IT better.

Every consultant’s origin tale

One of the suggestions the consultants offered truly was brilliant — namely, that the company should charter a cross-functional industry technology committee, to keep track of evolving IT trends and how they might affect the company’s business strategies and tactics.

I say it was brilliant because a bunch of us had already chartered such a committee a few years prior (I was a member) — a fact I mentioned to the consulting team during a preview of their findings.

Not that this mattered. Their recommendations survived my critique unscathed, leading to a profound change in how the company managed evolving industry technologies: We changed the existing committee’s name, agreed that henceforth we would use fewer expletives in our discussions, and waited (in vain) for praise from the executive leadership team for our foresight in having anticipated the consultants’ guidance.

“Well shucks,” I said to a fellow member of the Industry Technology Planning Committee, “if all it takes to be an expert is to listen to what clients tell you and claim their ideas as your own newly minted wisdom, why do I beat my brains out trying to convince company management that, when I go shopping at the Clue Store, I don’t leave with an empty basket?”

And so, I left a career in Doing Something Useful to take up one of Giving Advice for a living. That’s where I encountered the three inviolable rules of Expertise Credentialing:

1. Nobody is allowed to be an expert within the hallowed halls of their place of employment.
2. If I didn’t know how a client should deal with a sticky situation, I should ask their internal experts. I might as well, as somebody ought to listen to them, and it wasn’t going to be my client.
3. If I was recommending something new to my client I needed to precede my suggestion with these words: “In my experience …” whether or not I had actual experience with the situation in question.

Why is Expertise Credentialing Rule #1 inviolable?

There are two reasons internal “experts” aren’t allowed to be experts.

The first is that for internal staff and management, claiming expertise leads to a reaction of “Who do you think you are?”

It isn’t an unreasonable question: If you’re internal staff or management your job is to make something work and keep it working. That’s as opposed to outside experts whose claimed experience is — thanks to the outside consultant’s marketeers and resume polishers — precisely the subject your company needs expertise in.

If you have expertise, in contrast, it must have come from reading what outside experts have to say on a subject. That makes them the experts, not you.

And if that isn’t where your purported expertise comes from, that must mean your claimed expertise starts with “In my experience …” — only, in your case, your audience consists of peers who know what your actual experience consists of.

Sorry.

The moral of this little story is that if you want a career where you’re paid for your expert advice, your first step is to find a consultancy that sells the expertise you have. Among the advantages over starting up your own lemonade stand is that an existing consultancy knows how to sell your expertise.

Sorry … pardon me … that’s your third step. Your first step is to figure out how to explain, to yourself, and anyone else who might care, how what you’re good at lines up with what a consultancy might want to sell.

That leaves your second step, which, in my experience, is to get in the habit of saying “In my experience” whenever the situation allows it.