Introducing new organizational assets

The IT department incorporated many of the new organizational assets suggested by the existing literature: it brought in new capabilities (Hafezieh and Pollock 2018), increased digital leadership (Muehlburger et al. 2019), introduced the role of CDO (Horlacher et al. 2016; Tumbas et al. 2018), formulated hybrid project structures, and put a great deal of effort into improving collaboration with the business units (Mueller and Renken 2018). Also, the existing digital transformation assets, such as the EA (Ajer and Olsen 2018), were transformed to support the more holistic IT management.

Many of these asset introductions relied on and were promoted by the extensive number of consultants working in the IT department. These consultants brought in new capabilities, encouraged the IT department’s digital leadership, acted as the CDO, as well as designed and supported the IT department with hybrid project structures and customer collaboration. While the transformation of the other organizational assets improved the operations in the IT department in many ways—

and this way the finding confirms their benefits—the use of consultants as long-term transformation support was not as simplistic.

While seeking to improve its ability to support organizational-level digital transformation, the IT department became consultant reliant. The rationale for reliance on consultants was similar to the one in use and identified by previous literature, such as the fact that internal employees are often difficult to hire in the public sector due to the bureaucratic structures, and long-term employees are not the best fit in an operational environment with rapid project turnarounds and

assumed competence of the consultants (Rosenblum and McGillis 1979), all of which make consultants seem like a good solution to a lack of internal resources.

Unlike internal employees, consultants were also presumed to provide a quick and flexible solution to resource shortages (cf. Kalleberg et al. 2003).

The initially positive attitude toward consultants acted as a good foundation for the relationship between the IT department and the different consulting agencies.

The client-consultant relationships with different consulting agencies were formed similarly to the way suggested by previous literature (cf. Coelho et al. 2016; Pozzebon and Pinsonneault 2012; Robey et al. 2002) and were based on the expectation that the consultants’ role in the IT department was to provide additional expertise in digital transformation, while the IT department would hold on to the knowledge related to operations. These relationships were based on specific written agreements, similar to Coelho et al. (2016), but the consultants were perceived more as partners than contracted extra resources. The initial client-consultant relationship in the IT department resembled that of a partnership (cf. Pozzebon and Pinsonneault 2012), where potential issues, such as consultant dependency or mistrust in consultants (Robey et al. 2002), were not detectable.

Over time, this client-consultant relationship evolved. Similar to the depiction of Pozzebon and Pinsonneault (2012), in the beginning, the consultants were brought in as experts. Because of the imbalance in the knowledge related to digital transformation between the IT department and the consultants, the consultants had the upper hand. As the IT department did not see this as a problem, inadequate effort was put into knowledge transfer from the consultants to the IT department employees. When the consultants eventually left or were changed, the IT department was left powerless. This resembles examples provided by Pozzebon and Pinsonneault (2012), although unlike in their examples, the powerlessness was exaggerated by the fast-changing personnel structure where the consultants were replacing a rapidly shrinking number of internal employees.

As the personnel structure of the IT department began to evolve, also the consultants’ roles began to transform. Previous studies acknowledge that the evolution of the client-consultant relationship is possible (Pozzebon and Pinsonneault 2012), but these studies focus on the use of consultants in projects with clear objectives and endpoints (Coelho et al. 2016). The IT department often did bring in consultants for a specific task or project but was unable to let the consultants go afterward. For example, one management-level consultant was initially brought in to help the IT department solve its challenges with EA. From this initial task, he moved to redesign the IT development process, after which he became responsible

for the virtual office and, eventually, was nominated for the CDO of the municipality. Eventually, this one consultant had a better view of the operations than the internal employees, but unlike the internal employees, he was not there to stay.

The assumption that the consultants were more capable than the internal employees also largely defined the trajectory of the client-consultant relationship.

Due to trust in the consultants’ competencies, they were granted extensive access to the knowledge, resources, and important roles in operations (cf. Pozzebon and Pinsonneault 2012). While previous studies do acknowledge changes in aspects such as the power balance, they do not acknowledge the continuous nature of digital transformation and how the objectives, needs, roles, and resources can drastically evolve throughout the period when consultants are contracted.

In the case of the IT department, this drastic change resulted in the IT department unintentionally outsourcing its tacit knowledge. Warnings have been sounded about this kind of involuntary outsourcing of tacit knowledge. For example, Perl and White (2002) cautioned that if tacit knowledge were lost to consultants, public sector organizations might end up losing their capability to think for themselves. The pace at which this happened in the IT department was surprisingly fast.

This dissertation shows that while the utilization of consultants as a tool to bring in new organizational assets can result in positive outcomes, these assets do not automatically become part of the organization if proper attention is not paid to their integration. In particular, the challenges of over-reliance on consultants show that when organizations use short-term solutions in a continuous transformation, unexpected challenges can manifest themselves. In the IT department’s case, the initially temporary use of consultants’ services became a permanent part of the IT department and its operations, leading to the outsourcing of those operations. Note that this outcome was not the result of ill intentions of the consultants (cf. Lapsley and Oldfield 2001), nor was it the result of a poorly managed client-consultant relationship (cf. Robey et al. 2002). Instead, the focus on operational factors led the IT department astray, and proper attention was not given to the long-term consequences. When the long-term effects started to materialize, it was already too late to change direction.