On the effect of digital frontstores on transforming business models - Concept and Use-Case from the Consulting industry
Link zur Publikation:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3fbd/0e1f318a1677c10f34d08e24886561a4ec93.pdf
Abstract:
Digitization has been changing society and economy enormously for the last 15 years. Surprisingly, consulting, 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 implementation 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.