Very spot on — consultants are able to navigate the bureaucratic structure within an organisation to deliver work that the orgnaisation cannot navigate itself.

Very spot on — consultants are able to navigate the bureaucratic structure within an organisation to deliver work that the orgnaisation cannot navigate itself. I've worked a decade in technology consulting. 10 years ago the client had no idea what they needed — apps, e-commerce, digital self-service were all new concepts. Now, organisations are already equipped with smart people who know the answer — but sometimes you just need to catalyse change when you can't do yourself. The existence of consultancies, or agencies in the creative/marketing side for that matter, isn't a failure of an organisation — not always at least. Sometimes its simply becasue the organisation has created a structure which works very well in one set of circumstances and very poorly in others. (There is a reason why big tech, for all its expertise, has a roster of outside ad agencies who do development and deployments of their non-core services ... it's just faster to have agencies do web dev than setting up internal teams. You get a few agency devs set up on google3, and you've got yourself a billable pipeline...)