optimizing things to take less consulting time, as you say, wasn't always a top priority. It only becomes a top priority if you're trying to do more with the s

optimizing things to take less consulting time, as you say, wasn't always a top priority. It only becomes a top priority if you're trying to do more with the same consulting time. With straight hourly billing multiplied by people involved, as is common in enterprise, that's never an issue--in fact, in many cases quite the opposite. However, lower down the totem pole of gullibility lie people who feel burned by the enterprise model and insist on fixed-bid projects, which shifts the risk onto the consultancy. Now the incentives are to get the most done with the fewest people in the least time, at least if you have more work than you can handle. In this situation, automation, installers, scripting, etc. become a big win. There are other business-relevant incentives for this type of automation, of course. The biggest one I can think of is to make the deployment process even "stupider," thus theoretically allowing for the possibility of employing even cheaper people to perform it. The second biggest one is standardisation (removing individual customs and habits out of the install process), consistency, and reduction in human error. On a less directly economic level, some manual processes are so tedious that if you don't automate them, your employees will grow demoralised from having to do them over and over. Lord knows we've run into that one a lot. :-)