Shaun Snapp on Criminal Intent in IT Consulting Firms

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Executive Summary

It is quite common for IT consulting firms to collaborate with vendors to provide fraudulent information to customers.
Learn why this can often qualify as criminal intent.

Introduction

IT consulting is often presented as companies providing services and advice to customers. In many cases, a particular vendor will be said to have an excellent ecosystem. However, if consulting firms continually lie to their customers, and lie as directed by software vendors to reinforce the exact information provided by the software vendor, then the ecosystem’s intent can be viewed as a conspiracy against customers. The crime to be committed is fraud. The criminal intent is deliberately working in conjunction with a software vendor to perpetrate a fraud. It is curious how infrequently the term fraud is used in software, but it should be used quite frequently. Some vendors have vendor partnership agreements that control the marketing and the statement made by their consulting partners. Typically, customers are entirely unaware of this fact. Consulting companies nearly always present themselves as independent from the software vendor, but they maintain specific software skills, typically only a few software vendors. And their objective is to drive purchasing decisions, generally by any means necessary, often knowingly providing false information to accomplish this objective. Consulting companies will ostensibly agree to support an RFP process and rig the process so that the vendor they have resources to bill with ends up being selected.

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Conclusion

The typical information provided by vendor partner consulting firms is often fraudulent and creates a criminal conspiracy with software vendors. The question being, why is the term criminal conspiracy not more widely used when describing consulting ecosystems? It meets all the criteria, and IT consulting firms operate in an unregulated market. In many cases, the consulting firm gives the least accurate and most positively spun information on a software vendor that wins the contract. The system ensures that the most highly biased information gets to customers. Yet consulting firms are not held accountable for the quality of the information they provide.