On the Effect of Digital Frontstores on
Transforming Business Models
Concept and Use-case from the Consulting Industry
Denis Johann, Tobias Greff and Dirk Werth
AWS-Institute for digitized products and processes, Uni Campus Nord, Saarbruecken, Germany
{denis.johann, tobias.greff, dirk.werth}@aws-institut.de
Keywords: Business Models, Business Model Transformation, Digital Consulting, eConsulting Store, Frontstore.
Abstract: Digitization has been changing society and economy enormously for the last 15 years. Surprisingly, consult-
ing, though acting as a key driver in the digitization of other branches, was not subject of any significant
changes. The consulting process is still merely supported by ICT technologies. We develop a digital frontstore
approach to easily enable digitization of consulting. This approach focuses on the interaction of consultancies
with their customers and the support of those using digital technologies, especially ecommerce systems. Such
a store requires to transparently and modularly offer consulting services, which is opposed to the current sales
model of most consultancies. Hence, we discuss in this paper inherent implications of digitized consulting
services on the business model of consulting. In order to assess our findings, we present the actual implemen-
tation of an electronic consulting store as initial design artefact. We used this artefact to evaluate our under-
standing of a digital consulting frontstore. This allows us to conclude our work with a summary of an expert
panel reviewing our conceptual findings.
1 INTRODUCTION
Digitization has changed our age. In the last 15 years,
it has become the major trend for transforming socie-
tal and business life (Kappelmann et al., 2014; Von
dem Esche and Hennig-Thurau, 2014; Leimeister et
al., 2014; Cocorocchia et al., 2016). In this respect,
digitization means the transformation of products and
services that have been originally produced and pro-
vided in the real world into computer- and Internet-
based services. However, it is not a one-fits-all solu-
tion. Each business has to conceive its own approach
of their digitization (Veit et al., 2014). This is also -
and above all - valid for ICT industry that has been
enabling or catalyzing digitization (Sabbagh et al.,
2012). Especially those “digital factories” are at risk
to be easily surpassed by more digitized competitors.
The same applies to the consulting industry that over-
laps with ICT industry (Zhou and Muller, 2003).
Many consulting companies have profited from digit-
ization for years. They initiated the projects, fostered
and propagated them, they were steering and manag-
ing them, but they are nevertheless neglecting self-
digitization. Smartphones and Excel Sheets are estab-
lished tools in the consulting domain. But digital soft-
ware solutions supporting and improving the consult-
ing processes itself are missing putting consulting
companies at high risk. They may lose market shares
to challenging competitors with novel, digital con-
sulting approaches.
As in the case of ICT enterprises the risk arises
primarily by actual success: After the first consulting
firms were founded about 100 years ago, consulting
industry has been constantly growing (McKenna,
2010). Even though the mergers and acquisitions we
have seen in the last years just demonstrates that the
market has become mature, there is still an increase
in market volume. But maturity implies at the same
time that consulting has become a commodity. Look-
ing into digitization development, especially those
commodity services are affected, transformed and re-
placed by new digital business models (Friedrich et
al., 2013). To be on top of this development it is
highly necessary for challengers and established com-
panies to reveal and realize the potentials and effects
of digitized consulting.
Therefore our work contributes to this research
field by analyzing and introducing such a potential -
the digital frontstore approach - that enables the dig-
itization of consulting service processes.
To introduce the approach we first present our un-
derstanding of digitization of consulting - especially
64
Johann D., Greff T. and Werth D.
On the Effect of Digital Frontstores on Transforming Business Models - Concept and Use-case from the Consulting Industry.
DOI: 10.5220/0006222300640072
In Proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design (BMSD 2016), pages 64-72
ISBN: 978-989-758-190-8
Copyright
c
2016 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
by considering requirements - in the context of al-
ready existing solutions for digitized services. After-
wards, we use those insights to develop an initial de-
sign artifact of the digital frontstore approach, a light-
weight transformation for digital consulting offer-
ings. Analyzing this approach, we can assess inherent
implications for the business model of consultancies
based on the well-established business model canvas.
Our work is concluded by presenting the eConsulting
Store prototype as the result of a first design and im-
plementation cycle, followed by discussion with an
expert panel with regards to possible implications of
our approach to the traditional business model of con-
sultancies.
2 DIGITIZATION OF
CONSULTING
Digitization of services has become the standard: In
all kind of domains there are efforts to transform con-
ventional services into digital ones (Cocorocchia et
al., 2016). This affects retail in the same way as it af-
fects banking and other industries. Thereby, not all
services possess the same potential for a digital trans-
formation. With hairdressing – a common example –
only the front end part of the process can be digitized:
Finding the right hairdresser, fixing an appointment,
booking the service and paying it, all this can be op-
erated through the Internet. And there are companies
and platforms using such approaches already (e.g. sa-
lonselect.com.au, mylocalsalon.com.au). But the
original service provision, the cutting, is and will re-
main a manual, physical activity that obviously can-
not be digitized. In that respect immaterial services
are easier targets for digitization since material ser-
vices will never be completely digitizable Conse-
quently, services have to satisfy special requirements
in order to be digitizable (Greff and Werth, 2015)
since they must be – at least partially – transformable
into a software solution. Thus, digitizability implies
applicability. Consequently, we define digital ser-
vices objective-based as those services that were
originally rendered analoguely, but are made more ef-
ficient and effective by using ICT. In our context, this
holds in particular for digitized consulting
Since personnel costs typically present the largest
cost item in consulting business, the standard ap-
proach for digitization is to reduce manpower or in-
crease usage of IT (Taherdoost et al., 2013). Ideally,
both effects can be combined, although in many cases
a human being is only finitely replaceable by ICT.
Still in these cases, digitization may help to transfer
processes from the company site to the client site via
a proper interface (Werth et al., 2016). Accordingly,
staffing requirements and customer contributions are
key components to evaluate digital services. This in-
sight enables us to better and more accurately classify
digital services, see Fig. 1 (Taherdoost et al., 2013).
Figure 1: Classification of Services, after (Taderhoost et al.,
2013).
This classification also shows, that different tech-
nologies are suited to support digital services depend-
ing on the quadrant. Consequently, there is no univer-
sal technology available for digitized consulting, but
a proper implementation is required for every charac-
teristic. They can be coarsely distinguished as given
below:
1. Computer Supported Consulting (CSC): Software
tools are used to support single tasks of a consult-
ant, while the tools themselves are domain neu-
tral. Only the way they are used provides an added
value to the consulting itself. Typical examples
are electronic data processing tools.
2. Computer Assisted Consulting (CAC): It incorpo-
rates tools developed specifically for consulting
economy, supporting specific tasks of this branch.
3. Computer Controlled Consulting (CCC): It ex-
tends CAC. Instead of supporting single tasks, a
CCC-system assists in rendering the consulting
service as a whole. As a key difference, note that
such a system focuses on processes rather than
supporting specific functions, as it is the case for
a CAC-system.
4. Computer Executed Consulting (CEC): CEC aims
at completely replacing the consultant. Services
originally rendered by the consultant are in this
case undertaken by a software platform. The con-
sulting itself is not anymore assisted, but as much
On the Effect of Digital Frontstores on Transforming Business Models - Concept and Use-case from the Consulting
Industry
65
as possible provided by the software. Examples
could be automatized audits, as proposed for Self-
Service Consulting.
Not all known consulting services can be supported
or replaced by any class more sophisticated than CSC,
hence current approaches typically focus on elec-
tronic data processing tools. It is thus necessary to
identify conditions, under which a service can profit
from CAC, CCC or CEC towards further digitization.
The requirements of standardization, modularization,
customization, integration, customer-services and so-
cialization are to be met for a service to be digitized
(Greff and Werth, 2015).
A well-known and established example for CAC
digitization in consulting is Quantifye, which allows
to order various consulting services. Here, the poten-
tial customer first describes his problems, after which
a consultant is assigned to the project based on skills,
location and availability. This way, Quantifye focuses
on mediation of consultants, which prevents the pos-
sibility to offer consulting on a small scale directly
via the platform itself. Additionally, only the first
steps of the consulting process, namely project de-
scription and assignment of a consultant are captured
by the consultant. Hillgate has a similar approach.
A vendor that goes further with a CCC solution is
clarity.fm, offering a dashboard to chat or talk to a
possible consultant. After a consultation, billing is au-
tomatically processed on a minutely rate, yet. clar-
ity.fm does not incorporate customer-site consulting.
As our discussions with experts revealed, customers
still want the ability to book on-site consulting, as we
present in the last section. In addition, the focus of
platforms like clarify.fm lies on start-ups rather than
offering consulting services at any scale.
McKinsey Solutions captures a totally different
part of the process and is considered to be one of the
most disruptive innovations in consulting so far
(Moreau, 2013). Unlike the platforms discussed
above, it is a Software as a Service solution that con-
centrates on providing a broad range of data analysis,
processing and presentation tools. As it supports spe-
cific consulting tasks it is an additional example for a
CAC solution. Yet McKinsey Solutions lacks the abil-
ity to initiate the consulting process.
Other potential applications of digitized consult-
ing would be remote consulting, for example webi-
nars or video calls. Here, a complete digitization
would give rise to more automatization of business
and consulting processes, thus reducing need of per-
sonnel and making the consulting service itself more
efficient. But the digitization of consulting requires
initially changes to the classical web presence of
companies, which we discuss in the next section.
3 THE DIGITAL FRONTSTORE
APPROACH
Classical online stores like Amazon or iTunes offer
either material goods or data including software and
content. If such a shop enables a customer to search
and buy a product, which is eventually shipped after-
wards, the complete purchase process is already cap-
tured. A consulting service has a much more complex
purchase process, hence requiring a more complex
store solution. Therefore we need to clearly define
first, how a consulting service is executed from a pro-
cedural perspective, see Fig. 2. Broadly speaking, it
already starts when a project is specified: A potential
customer must align his/her problem with the availa-
ble portfolio of competences. Afterwards, a consult-
ant must be associated, who has skills matching the
project’s requirements. In the next two steps, a con-
cept must be developed, evaluated and implemented.
The consulting service is completed by evaluation
and billing. Each of these steps involves sub-pro-
cesses that depend on the branch of the actual con-
sulting service, e.g. sales consulting, business con-
sulting or IT consulting. Hence, we do not discuss
these sub-processes here in detail. However, it is clear
that a solution is needed that can be involved in all
major processes above.
If we compare actual websites of consulting com-
panies, they typically lead to a contact form by which
a potential customer might only initiate a consulting
process. Other than that, several platforms act as me-
diators between interested clients and freelancer con-
sultants, as we discussed above.
Neither the mediator platforms nor the websites of
consultancies are covering the complete consulting
process. To get a holistic approach fulfilling this cri-
terion we introduce the digital frontstore (DFS) ap-
proach. A DFS is at least a CCC solution, optionally
extended by CEC services.
A DFS must allow a customer to search and book
services whereas the vendor must be able to combine
Figure 2: Generic Consulting Process, after (Block and Markowitz, 2000).
Sixth International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design
66
and customize services. After booking, services pro-
vision must be handled by the frontstore. This han-
dling extends until the service is evaluated after com-
pletion. Consequently, we conclude that a DFS must
support the following functions:
1. Electronic Alter-ego: Both customers and consult-
ants must be represented via electronic alter-egos.
This way, the communication between the two
parties is digitized and rendered by the platform.
2. Listing of Product Portfolio: A potential customer
should be able to see all available products of-
fered. In addition, consultants should have the
possibility to add services and assign them to their
portfolio.
3. Shopping: While a customer looks for a service,
s/he must first of all filter the portfolio. By the rea-
son of complexity s/he may need support of sales
consulting, which must be accessible online, for
example via a video call functionality. As soon as
a customer has decided to book a service, the DFS
offers the possibility to add services to a shopping
cart. From this shopping cart, the customer can ei-
ther check-out immediately or request a quote, es-
pecially if s/he books several services.
4. Payment: The payment process of the DFS is
more complex than for classical online stores. It is
typically not the person booking the service, who
later has to pay, but rather the financial depart-
ment of a company. Therefore, the customer must
be associated with a company, and billing is fin-
ished in contact with the company directly. In ad-
dition, for services offered at a minutely rate, pay-
ment can only be initiated after service provision-
ing.
5. Support of Fulfillment: Consultants typically ren-
der their service in contact with numerous people
on customer-side. Henceforth arises the necessity
to associate employees of the same company with
a booked digital service. In addition, times must
be scheduled, eventually with a large team of em-
ployees, so the DFS must allow scheduling as well
as supporting the fulfillment of a task - especially
for those consulting services that are performed in
a digitizable way, e.g. calls or webinars. A DFS
can even incorporate the whole fulfillment pro-
cess by offering remote call technology.
The implementation of the listed functions has direct
effects on the classical consulting processes. Primar-
ily changes affect sales, scheduling and fulfillment
processes (Werth et al., 2016). However within the
scope of this paper, we neglect those operational im-
pact of the DFS. Rather we concentrate on the ques-
tion how it affects the business model of a consul-
tancy.
4 EFFECTS ON THE BUSINESS
MODEL
Introducing a DFS as described above at first sight
only seems to add another channel for sales and cus-
tomer interaction. Instead of the sales representative,
now the customer itself uses the store to select and
purchase the consulting services. However, this actu-
ally neglects the effects of this new approach on the
business model of a consulting company. In this con-
text, a business model is “the business logic of an un-
derlying company by a combination of interdepend-
ent offering, market, internal as well as economical
business model components in a static and dynamic
way beyond the company’s borders” (Burkhart et al.,
2011). By selecting this definition we focus on the
value creation of a business model. Digitization in
particular implies effects on the value creation
(Methlie, 2000; Weill and Woerner, 2013; Johnson et
al., 2008; Moreau, 2013). The identification of the ef-
fects in case of the DFS shows the real added values,
justifying the DFS approach in particular and digiti-
zation in the consulting domain in general.
Effect 1: The Long Tail A common and often refer-
enced effect of an e-shop solution is the long tail
(Oestreicher-Singer and Sundararajan, 2012; Elberse
2008). Amazon as a well-known example highly
profited from this effect (Elberse, 2008). It mainly
means the improved possibilities to offer products
and services that are sold rarely. The positive effect
on the value creation results from the mass of such
products, that individually are not producing high
sales volume, but the pure mass of them provokes sig-
nificant revenues. In our context, this means that con-
sultancies may offer a large variety of modular ser-
vices, reflecting their actual skill portfolio, as an ex-
tended offering. It enlarges the limited offerings
which sales consultants usually present in on site cus-
tomer appointments. This is in line with the second
effect:
Effect 2: Explicit Offering Consultancies usually of-
fer a wide range of problem solving competencies.
Similar individual consultants rather present them-
selves as capable of solving any problem in their area
of expertise. The scoping and detailing of the consult-
ing activities is discussed and negotiated within bilat-
eral meetings with customers. However, this proce-
dure is rather less compatible with the functioning of
an online store. The catalogue structure of such a
On the Effect of Digital Frontstores on Transforming Business Models - Concept and Use-case from the Consulting
Industry
67
store requires the definition of the products (and ser-
vices) to be included in the catalogues. In this respect,
it becomes mandatory for consultancies to switch
from a “we solve everything” into an explicit offering
approach. They need to specify precisely what con-
sulting services they offer, how they are fulfilled and
how much effort this requires.
Effect 3: Price Transparency This effect also results
from the catalogue nature of an online store.
All services are offered at a fixed price and can be
easily compared by potential customers in contrast to
the current model of consultancies to only provide re-
quest forms and not publically revealing prices. Thus,
this comparability already changed the pricing sys-
tems of several industrial branches and gave rise to
comparison platforms (Weinhardt et al., 2009; Klein
and Bhagat, 2010) and may even more affect consul-
tancies since their pricing model heavily relies on
competitors’ prices (Iveroth et al., 2013).
Effect 4: Pre- and Post-consultancy Automation
Online stores change the sales processes and concepts
of consultancies. They benefit from the fact that the
sales cycle is reduced tremendously, since the time to
set up an offer is negligible. The customer itself
browses through the service portfolio and selects ap-
propriate consultancies. But the automation (from the
point of view of the consulting company) is not lim-
ited to the sales process. Also other auxiliary tasks
can be executed electronically without human inter-
vention. Examples are the determination of appoint-
ments, or the invoicing. In this situation, the online
store can incorporate the complete pre- and post-con-
sulting process, not only saving time but also increase
comfort for customers and consultants via its in-
creased flexibility, a one-fits-all interface and ex-
tended reachability. Consultants and specific consults
can be searched online at any time, independent of
specific business hours.
Effect 5: Micro Consultancy The introduction of an
electronic channel for purchasing consultancy ser-
vices can change the way how pre- and post-consult-
ing is processed. But can it also change the consulting
services itself? It has already been revealed that re-
mote consulting can be offered at significantly lower
prices than on-site consulting (Oracle) High wages in
consulting are typically a result of the large amount
of time spent on and the employees’ willingness for
travelling. But the consequences of removing travel
costs and automating pre-and post-processing efforts
are going farther: The overhang of a consulting ser-
vice can be reduced enormously. When a consultant
does not need to travel to the customer and if the sales
and invoicing costs are marginal, there is no need to
just sell long time periods to the same customer. Even
providing hour-wise consultancies now becomes eco-
nomically possible. Moreover, the role model of con-
sultants changes from spatial reachability towards
temporal reachability.
Effect 6: Standardized Services In addition to the
effects already mentioned, it would be possible to just
push the existing consulting offerings to the eshop.
However, this would not result in the desired objec-
tives. E.g. there is an inherent risk if offering fixed
price services without being clear in the operations.
Therefore, in order to catalogue the offered services,
there is a minimal requirement of standardization re-
garding the types of services offered, the description
of the actual service and how fulfillment is done
(Gottschalk et al., 2002).
Effect 7: Modular Consulting Incorporating those
effects leads to new options in the design of consult-
ing services. Having a larger portfolio of specific and
standardized consulting services, companies can use
those to combine them and bundle them into new of-
ferings. In the same way, existing services can be re-
viewed and transformed in a way that they (at least
partially) are composed by other, smaller compo-
nents. Finally, this results in a modular design of con-
sulting services. And this effect is not limited to their
own services: Consulting companies can easily aug-
ment their service portfolios by offering or bundling
additional products or services provided by third par-
ties along with the consulting services, for example
guides or software packages.
In order to provide a more structured view on the
influence of the DFS on consultancies’ business
model, we use the business model canvas
(Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2013). This scheme de-
composes business models in individual areas of con-
cerns. Even if those areas are not fully independent
(Krumeich et al., 2013) it enables a depicted analysis
of the factors which are affected by the DFS. The re-
sulting canvas is shown in Fig. 3. It contains the ef-
fects mentioned above and the consequences derived
from the conditions of a DFS. For example software
and hardware as resourcesE2. It is remarkable that all
sectors of the canvas undergo an adaptation due to the
DFS. This reflects the significant impact of the ap-
proach on the business model of a consulting com-
pany.
5 THE ECONSULTING STORE
USE CASE
The concept of the digital frontstore approach devel-
oped above was implemented as a prototype called
Sixth International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design
68
Figure 3: Effects of the frontstore approach on the consulting business model classified by business model canvas.
(“+”/”-“: increase/decrease of the respective item, “0”: item unaffected).
eConsulting Store (ECS) together with the consulting
company Scheer GmbH. Implementing all require-
ments of the DFS would require a large complexity,
making it more expedient in the short term to evolu-
tionary digitize single stages of the consulting pro-
cess. The resulting modular solutions may be merged
later into a complete DFS. This must be kept in mind
during the initial design cycle. Hence, we focus here
on designing a quickly applicable solution providing
an entry point to digital consulting.
The prototype was implemented and customized
for the company specific IT Consulting Services. The
respective business unit provides consulting services
for a specific software family. The offered consulting
services are characterized by their close relation to
this specific software and its structured rollout, cus-
tomization and usage. We could henceforth assume,
that a digitization of the consulting service is princi-
pally possible, since no spatial or functional binding
of that consulting services exists. As the offered con-
sulting services aim at IT-based solutions, we could
also assume an optimal willingness of potential cus-
tomers to work with new technologies, which is the
reason why we chose this business field for a proto-
typic implementation.
After verifying suitability we identified needs in
this field in form of a use case. We found that custom-
ers in particular demand internet-based booking, pro-
cessing and billing of two different consulting ser-
vices. The first one being workshops, classified as
one-to-many services. The second one are modular
one-to-one consulting services. In both situations, the
client must be able to buy and process the service re-
motely. As an example for such a one-to-many con-
sulting workshop we consider the “BPA workshop”-
offering of the consulting company. Here, all of the
customer’s current BPA- and BPM-activities are de-
termined within four days and possible opportunities
of optimization are evaluated. As an instance for one-
to-one consulting services we reference to complex
live business model development and modelling as-
sistance with business process tools.
As a proof of concept, we implemented the ECS
in the domain of those IT Consulting Services based
on the open source webstore Magento. Our choice
was governed by accessibility of the source code, var-
iability of available plugins, customizability and gen-
eral extensibility by individually developed modules.
A first result was a customer oriented architecture of
the eConsulting Store that mainly consists of two
components (see Fig. 4). The frontend essentially
handles purchases while the backend bundles the or-
ganizational process surrounding consulting services.
A user management needs to span both components,
since user registration and verification is required,
On the Effect of Digital Frontstores on Transforming Business Models - Concept and Use-case from the Consulting
Industry
69
Figure 4: eConsultingStore architecture.
Responsive Design is implemented to assure
presentation of the store independent of the user’s de-
vice. In addition to client-oriented components, we
have an administrative Store Management, as an in-
terface to the provider to update offers and adapt the
store in detail.
We provide the details of the prototype by the typ-
ical use-cases mentioned above, namely a customer
searching, ordering and scheduling a consulting ser-
vice - be it a workshop or a one-to-one consulting ser-
vice - as well as fulfillment and after-sales services.
At first, a potential customer sees the home page
of the web store, explaining the concept of the store.
From here, s/he can navigate via the menu bar to a
browse-functionality, where the customer can either
browse through all available services or search for a
specific service by keywords. From the overview, the
client can request detailed information about specific
services by simply clicking on the product of interest.
From the detail-view, the customer can now add a ser-
vice, including the volume of services needed, to his
shopping cart. If customers are unsure about which
products suit their individual needs, they may request
an online sales consulting via a live chat function. Be-
sides standard functionality of a shopping cart like re-
moving items and checking out, we set up a function
to request a discount, if for example several instances
of the same product are purchased.
If a customer decides to buy a service directly, the
buying process is invoked, during which s/he may
choose the preferred method of payment. Besides
classical payment methods like credit card payment,
we allow the customer to be associated with the fi-
nancial department of a company. Often it is not the
actual customer booking the service, who later pays
the bill, but rather the respective employer.
If now the cart is checked out, a database object is
generated on server-side. All earlier bookings can be
accessed by shop administrators through a dashboard.
Nonetheless, the billing process is started automati-
cally after the purchase is finished.
A customer may access the booked and payed ser-
vices via a GUI. Here, s/he can schedule services, for
example in the case of a call. Additionally, s/he can
associate other users of the same company with a ser-
vice, for example by inviting them to a webinar.
If we now look at the ECS, we find that it matches
most criteria of a digital frontstore that is able to per-
form digital consulting services. Orientation, selec-
tion, conception, and evaluation are fully imple-
mented. Only the implementation is not fully availa-
ble, since the service itself is in most cases still per-
formed outside the scope of the platform. Although
hybridization is part of the platform the choice for on-
site or remote consulting should lie on the side of cus-
tomer. Therefore, this is going to be part of our future
work.
6 EXPERT REVIEW
During the initial stage of the ECS, we collected opin-
ions on changes and effects of a DFS on consulting
processes during roadshows, talks, conferences and
Sixth International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design
70
conceptual stakeholder meetings. As a majority, these
opinions reflect biased positions of the involved
roles, containing statements by experts as well as di-
rectly affected people. The opinions are sorted by five
aspects, representing compact catchwords for a spe-
cific change caused by digital consulting. We found
that the experts in general agreed with our expecta-
tions as discussed in section 4. In addition, our ex-
perts brought forward the following aspects:
1. Spatial Independency: “The customer must al-
ways be able to choose between remote or on-side
consulting.” “A success of remote-consulting de-
pends on comprehensible win-win situations.”
Examples here are significant discounts based on
savings in travel costs. “A sustainable model
could incorporate hybrid types in the context of a
consulting project. A first get-together on client-
side followed by remote-consulting.”
2. Small Scaling: This means, that the ECS can offer
smaller consulting units in the context of duration
and extent. “This allows to even reach small mar-
kets.” But not all of these markets are profitable.
“Addressing a broader customer base, for exam-
ple by internationalization, is therefore considered
a necessity.” According to consultants’ opinions,
a smallest subunit is still inevitable. Two or three
topics a day are considered to be the maximum.
“Changing topics too quickly is considered to en-
danger the consultant’s focus.” Disadvantages are
expected by losing a negotiating basis and enable
comparability with competitors.
3. Reachability: This is a surplus value especially for
customers. New digital and existing bookable
consulting services are permanently viewable and
reachable. Consulting becomes a multi-channel
offer. “If every channel here comprises an added
value is hard to estimate.” ”Synergies for sure add
value, but also the risk to neglect essential chan-
nels.” ”Digital consulting does not assure the con-
tact to a specific consultant, but it needs to be
guaranteed that a consultant with equivalent skills
is available remotely or locally.” The fact the re-
cipient of a consulting service is different from the
buyer is considered to inhibit the reachability and
usage of digital channels.
4. Analyzability: “Digital consulting promises a
large data analysis potential by CRM, structured
collection of feedbacks and even predictive ana-
lytics for customer needs.” In particular, this al-
lows automatized refinement and presentation of
success stories. In it highly controversial but often
assumed, that “analyzability by digital consulting
comprises security for the company, since con-
tacts and projects are less cross-linked and un-
dergo smaller fluctuations.” The largest concern
in the context of analyzability is “inhibition due to
doubts about data security.”
5. Reusability: “Tools from digital consulting sup-
port consulting processes today – and will do so
in the future – in different hybrid forms wherever
and whenever redundancies are evitable.” Webi-
nars are an example of a product that can be con-
sumed several times or the construction of a
knowledge management system, assuring long-
term preservation and usage of knowledge. “Es-
pecially training of new employees or exchange
of knowledge within a company offer large poten-
tials.” A problem of reusability is of course the
need for a copy protection.
6. Scalability: With this we think of reaching arbi-
trarily many customers with appropriate effort. A
concise example is that of a “remote consulting by
one consultant, rendering his service to hundreds,
if not thousands, of customers.” ”This would be a
fair model for trade show consulting, but personal
consulting is hard to imagine due to a large variety
of individual aspects.” Rather than that, the idea is
to make the business model of digital consulting
scalable. Digital consulting should offer the opti-
mal mediation of consultants. “Mediation as a ser-
vice can be arbitrarily scaled.” “Computer-as-
sisted networks, incorporation of freelancers and
generation of a broad employee base by breaking-
up traditional business structures are essential
driving forces of this idea.” A concern here is me-
diating credibility. In addition, digital mass con-
sulting comes with a comparability that is consid-
ered to be critical.
7 CONCLUSION
In this work, we introduced a digital fronststore ap-
proach for consulting services. Using a business
model canvas, we identified impacts on the business
model of consultancies and found that a DFS mainly
affects all components of a consultancy’s business
model. We provide as a first design principle the
eConsulting store, allowing us to discuss the DFS ap-
proach with an expert panel.
Since the ECS is the result of a first design cycle,
future work is going to include implementation of fur-
ther functions of the DFS, as discussed in section 3.
In addition, future theories and prototypes should take
into account the results of our expert panel.
It will be interesting to match our expectations on
On the Effect of Digital Frontstores on Transforming Business Models - Concept and Use-case from the Consulting
Industry
71
how a DFS may affect the business model of consul-
tancies with its actual impact on the business model
of consultancies, as soon as a full DFS solution is
available.
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