Roman Vasiliev - Professor, Head of Department of Information Systems Strategic Management, Faculty of Business Informatics, National Research University Higher School of Economics. 
Address: 20, Myasnitskaya str., Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation.
E-mail: rvasiliev@hse.ru

Galina Levochkina - Associate Professor, Department of Information Systems Strategic Management, Faculty of Business Informatics, National Research University Higher School of Economics. 
Address: 20, Myasnitskaya str., Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation.
E-mail: glevochkina@hse.ru   

      The purpose of IT consulting is to provide recommendations pertaining to information system strategic management, IT architecture evaluation, design and development, enterprise business process automation project management and many other issues relating to the use of computers and information technologies. Success in this field depends predominantly on insight of factors, which realization enables to concentrate resources in those areas where a provider can get a significant edge over major rivals and gain the best position in a target market. However at present there is no universal, generally accepted tool to determine such factors.
      This paper suggests an approach to determine corporate critical success factors for providers of IT consulting services and formulates relevant approached-based preparation and implementation recommendations.
      We consider such sources of critical success factors as industry-specific characteristics of IT consulting, characteristics of general environment (economic, political, social and technological), timing factors, competitive strategy and position, specifics of IT consulting service provider’s management structure and specifics of IT consulting areas.
      Based on analysis of these sources we suggest sets of success factors which constitute an underlying information basis for critical success factor selection procedure.
      Activities to identify corporate critical success factors are suggested to be implemented in the project format. For each project phase basic tasks defined, and recommendations are articulated for implementation of relevant activities, as well as composition and content of project documentation.
      These outputs may be used by providers of IT consulting services in the process of identification of corporate critical success factors, as well as by consulting firms involved in implementation of such projects.