Less Complex than Expected – What Really Drives IT Consulting Value

Less Complex than Expected – What Really Drives IT Consulting Value

Digitalization has a broad impact and the risk of external disruption is omnipresent throughout all industries which also applies to IT consulting firms. One response to this threat is to understand better the determinants of how value is created during the joint work on an IT project. Although previous literature offers valuable starting points for explaining value co-creation, no previous research synthesizes service provider and client perspective in a comprehensive model and empirically explains the co-creation of IT consulting service value. We build on the service-dominant (S-D) logic as the fundamental meta-theory and evaluate our deductively derived structural model based on 113 collected responses from IT consulting projects using structural equation modeling. Our major finding is that IT consulting service value only seems to be determined by consultant capabilities. Our findings provide new insights for S-D logic and service science literature and potential for future research.