2. Consulting and Presales in Digital Projects

Organizations that embark on the digital transformation journey identify the main digitization opportunities and business values. Business teams within the organization come up with the key requirements for their future digital platform. Digital consultants and strategists (from within the organization or from external agencies) then analyze the requirements through a consulting exercise. Digital consulting is the key exercise that is designed to determine the digital program vision, create a digital strategy for the program, evaluate candidate digital products and technologies, and define a capability roadmap for the entire digital program. The digital consulting engagement lays the groundwork for future phases of the digital program. A presales engagement is mainly an exercise to understand the suitability of products and technologies through demos, PoCs, and workshops and define the solution and win themes of the engagement. Digital consultants, product vendors, technology partners, and system integrators (SI) are involved in the presales stage of the engagement. Various solution approaches, along with their pros and cons, are discussed the during presales engagement. The activities of digital consulting and presales overlap in some stages. An effective combination of consulting and presales is needed to define a robust digital strategy and implementation plan.