Towards strategic goals: understanding practices of external IT consultants in client digitalization projects

In today’s business world, digitalization influences how organizations evolve. However, digitalization associated with organizations’ strategic goals potentially carries high costs and also risks. In our paper, we adopt the strategy-as-practice lens as a theoretical framework to understand the realization of organizations’ strategic goals through digitalization. Given the prevalent role of external practitioners in shaping the strategy of organizations, our paper specifically focuses on external IT consultants and their practices of doing strategies that shape the outcomes of client organizations’ strategic goals through digitalization. This way we focus on inter-organizational context and digitalization as new phenomena for the strategy-as-practice field, and we try to combine insights from digitalization literature and from external consultants as change agents with the strategy-as-practice perspective. By conducting interviews with 23 external IT consultants, our paper contributes to a holistic understanding of practitioners, both within and outside focal organizations, and how their interactions shape the organizations’ strategic goal realization.