Exploring the role of consulting in local government digital transformation

To improve the way external consultants can support public sector reforms, a better understanding of their relationship with their public sector clients is required. In this context, understanding the different ways consultants and their public sector clients engage in digital transformation projects and the effect of this relationship on project success is crucial. Against the backdrop of scarce financial resources and high accountability requirements, particularly at the local level, the authors' findings will help senior officials in local governments understand how government departments should be managing their relationships with external consultants to achieve better results. The research results presented in this article will also help external consultants to better understand the working mechanisms at the municipal level in order to be able to offer better services. This article examines the link between the type of relationship between external management consultants and public managers and project success in digital transformation at the local level. Municipalities are often unable to manage digital transformations on their own and therefore require support from consultants. These projects often fail or do not achieve the desired long-term effect. In this article, the authors examine the collaboration between external consultants and municipalities in digital transformation projects and their results using a comparative case study of seven local government consulting projects in Switzerland. Agency and stewardship theory serve as conceptual anchors to capture differences in client-consultant relationships. The results indicate that this relationship is mostly inclined towards a stewardship perspective and that this kind of trust-based collaboration model is necessary but not sufficient for guaranteeing project success in the long term.