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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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Sixth International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design