To measure is to know: Development of an instrument for measuring consulting service value

Abstract

While their fundamental business model has not changed for many decades, consulting firms are currently faced with serious challenges putting the complete market at the risk of disruption. Given that situation, it is essential for consultancies to understand how value emerges in consulting projects in the eyes of their clients. Turning to the customer perspective, it is also important to understand how value emerges from the relationship with consultancies. While previous literature provides valuable but fragmented starting points to explain the joint value creation in IT consulting projects, we suggested a synthesized conceptual model drawing on the service-dominant logic in a previous article that integrates both the service provider and client perspectives. In this article, we now put forth a measurement instrument that we subjected to a preliminary empirical validation with which the important determinants in both spheres can be assessed to ultimately explain the value of the IT consulting service in a follow-up, large-scale quantitative-empirical validation.