A sceptic's guide to web strategy

I've recently joined the Strategic Services department in my newly merged company where, I've been told by my new line manager, "there's no place for cynicism". I think he meant scepticism, but contrary to the perception you may have of me, I wasn't being anything but positive at the time. In fact I uttered not one negative word.
But I have to challenge the perception of companies like ours that they're somehow going to challenge the leading consultancies, break into their markets and offer clients incisive advice about their business strategy. There's such a level of naïvety about how clients may -- and should -- react to some jumped up person in their 20s or 30s who has just read Michael Porter's Competitive Advantage and thinks that no one else has, despite the fact it's been taught on almost every business course in the western world in the last ten years.
So we're selling our intellectual property in Situational Analysis, Business Intelligence, Strategy, etc. as though our clients were inept gits who don't know their own business. I say we're selling this, but of course we're not. What we are selling is user research, usability, and brand development because most businesses haven't ever addressed these issues and are confused by them. If our clients really wanted Business Intelligence and felt they couldn't read all the books produced by McKinsey, they'd go out and hire one of the Big 5 or an individual who used to work for them. But to think that anyone with any experience of a consultancy would ask us to come in and tell them how to run their business is foolhardy, to put it politely. We should be finding a niche that clients have limited exposure to but know is important: content management, for example.
This is all borne out by the "strategy" project at the moment, which is probably the least strategic project I've ever worked on. One of those where I say, "I wouldn't have started from here if I were you".
Our web strategy offering should be:

• Are you expectations from your web applications realistic? This applies to both websites and intra/extranet-style applications.


• Does your brand work on-line?


• Which technologies should you be using to deliver your requirements?


• Do you understand what's easy or difficult to do on the web?


• What else can you achieve on-line that you hadn't thought of before?

That's it. Web stuff's not that complicated, but if your head's out of the web, it can be daunting. But thinking you can persuade clients to part with thousands of pounds each day without being sceptical is about as far from a strategic approach to our value proposition as you can get.