Upsetting clients to keep them satisfied: the paradox of service delivery in a specialised IT consultancy

Purpose: Mainstream accounts of knowledge-intensive business services (i.e. consultancy services) delivery are based on an conventional commoditised view of knowledge. This leads to an insufficiently problematised portrayal of the service delivery process. The paper seeks to remedy it by drawing on the critique of the conventional view of knowledge.

Methodology: The paper employs diffractive analysis. This entails the ‘plugging in’ of several concepts derived from the critique of the conventional view of knowledge in management and organisation studies, and the empirical material collected in course of a singular case study of MonTech, a specialised IT consultancy, into one another.

Findings: Service delivery at MonTech is characterised by a paradox of having to upset clients to keep them satisfied, which can be attributed to four interrelated characteristics of service delivery at the organisation: 1) difficulties in capturing in language software that does not yet exist; 2) incommensurability and disjointedness of client and service provider meanings; 3) client reluctance to interact with the software as an epistemic object; and 4) working for multiple clients at once.

Research limitations/implications: As with other in-depth singular case studies, the reported findings facilitate only naturalistic generalisations.

Originality: The paper offers an alternative, more problematised explanation of service delivery that challenges traditional managerialist accounts.