The digital transformation of management consulting companies: a review

Management consulting (MC), as a knowledge-based industry, is regarded as fertile ground for digital transformation (DT). However, the changes that DT has introduced to MC are rather limited, notwithstanding the many cases of successful DT in the field. This paper is a systemic review of 18 cases presented in the literature concerning the digital transformation (DT) of management consulting companies (MCCs). It builds prescriptive knowledge for researchers and practitioners concerning the different approaches used to employ DT in the management consulting (MC) field. It uses a context-intervention-mechanism-outcome (CIMO) framework analysis with a pool of articles involving cases of DT in management consulting. The main findings of the paper, the mechanisms, are based on correlations between the context, the solution adopted, and the business outcomes identified. Our analysis of the cases, based on the CIMO framework, reveals three mechanisms that explain how DT transforms MC: it supports the platformization of traditional MC; it creates an opportunity for MC through crowdsourcing, in which the consultant acts as a crowd manager; and it changes the consultant-client matching process. Our study presents different layers of DT in the management consulting industry based on the complexity of the solutions identified. The findings are relevant for both MC practitioners concerned with business strategy and MC researchers.