Difference between system engineer and IT consultant

IT consultant is a person who provides consultation on business and management using IT technology. On the other hand, system engineer is a person  who designs and defines requirements to reflect improvement plans of management issues to the system. IT consultants offer systems or technologies to businesses that better meet their needs, with a greater focus on achieving the goals.

1. What is IT consultant

IT consultants use IT technology to provide consultation to customers’ business and management.

The main difference from system engineers is that they are more focused on achieving your business goals. They analyze the current situation to solve management issues and propose improvement plans and systems and technologies that meet needs.

On the other hand, system engineers design and define requirements to apply improvement plans of management issues to the system.

Generally, their work flow is IT sales ⇒ IT consulting ⇒ system engineer

2. The role of IT consultant

Support from IT consultants allows business to develop systems with a more managerial perspective. On the other hand, business need to start development the system after the requirements are determined almost.

Specifically:

The start of IT consulting is identifying the issues that business have and designing how the systems solve those issues. On the other hand, without IT consulting, the definition of software and system requirements can be started after the system plan is decided.

For example, business have a issue of “churn rate for customers in the insurance industry” and need IT consulting. In this case, IT consultants discover the hidden problem “lack of research for young people” and propose a system plan of “app development closely related to their life” as a solution.

However, development companies without IT consulting starts with the requirement definition for “app development closely related to their life”, so they cannot verify whether the hypothesis “lack of research for young people” is correct.

3. The work of IT consultant

Nowadays, system development companies have grown significantly and various IT services have been provided to business. IT consultant offers a combination of existing services such as Saas and MaaS, and provides the system construction plan that the company wants. Therefore, the demand for the work of IT consultant with knowledge in various IT fields will further increase. In addition, reliable IT consultant who has experiences as programmers, SEs, managers, IT consultant, etc. are invaluable.

4. What BAP can do

BAP has IT consultants (Japanese, Vietnamese, others) living in Japan. With these resources, we can propose applications and systems that match the business model and provide the solution such as SAP and SalesForce, and make proposals that are close to the management issues.