Currently, the digital transformation of the provisioning of IT consulting services to clients forces many companies to reinvent their business models. While the importance of digital transformation is well recognised, very little has been done until now to closely examine the concepts characterising this phenomenon in the domain of IT consulting. This paper aims at mapping out what is currently known in scientific literature about the digitalisation of IT consulting service provisioning and its characterising concepts and approaches. Analysing 20 selected articles, we identified 10 concepts characterising the digital IT consulting and 14 areas considered to be candidates for inclusion in the design of digital IT consulting services. Moreover, we found only one approach to the digitalisation of service provisioning that was empirically evaluated. We conclude that (i) the digital transformation is multifaceted and characterised through many aspects; (ii) digital IT consulting services are primarily explored from business perspective, while research of stakeholders' needs, technical requirements, and designs of relevant artefacts is scarce; (iii) while individual solutions and practices that worked in real‐world contexts are reported, very little empirical evaluation was done. Finally, we reflected on the limitations and on the theoretical and practical implications of this work.

IT consulting companies deal with the digital transformation of their clients' business and services. However, the IT consulting business itself and, in particular, the IT consulting services provided, have so far only been digitized to a limited extent. Despite the increased research interest in digital transformation, the requirements for digitalization of IT consulting services are hardly known.This paper reports results from an exploratory study that used focus groups (FGs) of IT consulting practitioners to identify their expectations and requirements for digitalized IT consulting services and digital IT consulting platforms. Our study revealed 79 requirements and expectations that our FG participants deemed important for the successful digitalization of services in their organizations. Our findings are related to the structure of digital IT consulting services, the services provisioning process, actor collaboration, user experience and guidance, the sales and marketing process, technical conditions, and digital consulting asset protection and security.The central contributions of our paper are (1) the elicitation of requirements and expectations of IT consulting practitioners for digital IT consulting services and platforms, and (2) a catalog of functional, non-functional as well as technical requirements that can be used to develop scientific artifacts that could serve as digital transformation solutions and give impulses to IT consulting practitioners striving to digitalize their business.

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Although the digitization of their clients' business processes is one of the main areas of activity for IT consulting companies, the digitization of their own services is still largely absent. Even though we witness extensive use of digital tools, such as digital presentations or video meetings, in the daily work of IT consultants, the business is still very human-centric and dependent on their face-to-face interactions. This is not inherently a problem, yet it poses major challenges to the domain for which few solutions exist to date -the ubiquitous provisioning of digital IT consulting services with the help of digital consulting platforms. To mitigate this shortcoming, in this paper we propose an architecture design for a digital IT consulting platform. Using the design science methodology and based on high-level requirements elicited in an exploratory focus group study with 16 IT consulting practitioners, we derive data requirements, functional requirements, and quality requirements. Based on these requirements, we then propose necessary architectural components. The technology choices in the instantiation of our proposed architecture are illustrated in a realistic context. Our plan for follow-up evaluation is presented as well, along with our reflection on limitations and implications. With this work we make two main contributions: (a) catalog of derived requirements for a digital IT Consulting platform, and (b) a component-level architecture proposal of how a digital IT consulting platform can be designed.

Today IT consulting services are neither digitalized nor standardized widely. They are conducted with the help of consultants and are fully based on these professionals' knowledge and experience. Thus, the results of IT consulting initiatives often differ considerably. With the increasing demands of digitalization and globalization, new and relevant challenges arise within the IT consulting sector. Asset-or platform-based approaches can be considered as a possible means to address these challenges in the current consulting research literature. We believe that these approaches require significantly more research related to formal description of IT consulting services. Formally described Digital IT Consulting Products should be the foundation of computer-based interpretation and a future digital IT consulting service system based management and provisioning. This Ph.D. research project addresses this topic first by conducting a structured literature review to understand the state-of-the-art in IT consulting service digitalization and formal service description. This is followed by focus group interviews conducted with experts from the IT consulting sector in order to understand stakeholder requirements and to be able to design a formal description language. The formal description language is validated by implementation and testing of a prototyped digital IT consulting service system and its experimental analysis.