To hire an intranet consultant, visit Prescient Digital Media to see their intranet consulting services.

Intranet consulting is a relatively new discipline. Intranet consultants are far more rare than their Internet counterparts (although some double as both), but almost always have a greater business acumen than the Internet consultant, but less advertising / marketing experience. A big-five consulting firm has some very smart people with mixed intranet and Internet experience, but can be outrageously expensive.  

“The IT consulting jungle is full of perils and possibilities -- and it's a fine line that separate the two,” writes Paul Chin in his Intranet Journal article Avoiding Dangerous Intranet Consultants. “You take the left fork and you get exactly what you're looking for; you take the right fork and you wake up with the IT equivalent of a black widow spider crawling up your back.

Paul describes the “five deadliest intranet consultant species” to avoid:

·         The Snake Oil Salesperson - Modus operandi: Snake oil salespeople push you to choose one solution over another too forcibly and enthusiastically without providing you with any legitimate justification for their suggested solution.

·         The Lonely Derelict - Modus operandi: Lonely derelicts don't seem to take their job very seriously, show little enthusiasm for what they do, act as though they don't really want to be there, and only accepts a handful of small jobs a year.

·         The Self-Proclaimed Idol - Modus operandi: Self-proclaimed idols are condescending, acting as though they know everything and you know nothing.

·         The Doomsdayer - Modus operandi: Doomsdayers love to expose all the so-called faults with your current IT environment. They're extremely negative and like picking at, and highlighting, all your technological shortcomings.

·         The Slacker - Modus operandi: Slackers appear for initial requirements gathering meetings and then disappear for days or even weeks at a time.

I have to snicker when reading these as I think many of us know people that fit into each of these categories. Fortunately, I don’t know too many “Idols” in the intranet space, but there are many of the others particularly the “snake oil salesperson.” Typically the ‘snakes’ are those with firms that list a number of ‘partnerships’ on their corporate websites (a.k.a. reselling partnerships where the firm in question is paid a commission to sell a certain off-the-shelf product such as Vignette, SharePoint or another software company). In other words, they’re not technology neutral or truly interested in finding the best solution for your requirements, they want to sell you software that pays them a commission.

As I highlighted in How to hire an intranet consultant, there are a number of things to look for when considering an intranet consultant:

RELATED READING:

How to hire an intranet consultant

10 things to ask your intranet consultant

Or to hire an intranet consultant, visit Prescient Digital Media to see their intranet consulting services.