Getting the most benefit from information systems consultants.

Consultants are usually well-meaning people who enjoy the variety of organizations and problems they face in their work. Most do not like to get bogged down in fruitless and wasteful consulting engagement any more than managers of health care organizations like to supervise them, but at least the consultants are paid for their time. The health care organization that defines a project poorly, does not know what it wants from consultants, or does not direct consultants will pay the price in increasingly scarce resources squandered. The tips in the following article for managing an information systems consulting engagement apply to most consulting engagements and to the use of other expensive advisers, such as attorneys and engineers. But information systems is a field particularly foreign, and often threatening, to most administrators and physician executives, so the risk of wasting money on unsuccessful consulting engagements is high.