I have seen many changes in my forty years as a professional management consultant, particularly in the business change and management improvement practices. My specialty is applying information technology for the benefit of the business. In the 1960s and 1970s, we developed information systems from the ground up to satisfy user requirements. It was clear that users could not envisage how IT could really benefit the business. So much of our value was in helping users define and understand the main results the business had to produce and then in designing the full man-machine solution to produce better results. We did not implement the system, we implemented the methods and procedures to improve results using the system.
Then in the 1980s, things began to change. Application packages quickly replaced custom development. This lowered the cost of a quality system, but it also created a gap between the system and the business.
Since he no longer developed the system, the professional, who understood the business, had to dig deep to understand the functionality of the package to apply the advanced features that enabled the business to improve. The professional who...