1. Designated Teller of Hard Truths. I operated outside each client's organizational hierarchy and internal factions. By design, I was expendable and not seen as having a particular bias or “dog in the hunt.” That made it easier to say the difficult things that needed saying. E.g. "Your product...is not good and not competitive." "Competitor X is eating your lunch because A, B, and C. You need to get your act together and admit that those are important issues."
2. Bringer of News from the Outside World. Large organizations become exceptionally insular and self-referential. Everyone inside has to speak the house jargon and more-or-less toe the company line. I could break that spell, bringing in new concepts, perspectives, language, and attitudes. Over the years as a tech analyst, I introduced object-oriented programming, CAD/CAM/CAE, distributed computing, Unix, “Big Iron Unix,” the Internet, grid and clustered computing, web services, standardization, buy-not-build strategies, Linux and open source, virtualization, automated provisioning and orchestration, cloud computing, blade servers, scale-out architectures, and DevOps. Many of these were initially unfamiliar or viewed with disbelief and hostility. I also was a conduit for shifting customer expectations and appetites, market attitudes, and cultural vibes—offering a “voice of the customer” or “voice of partners” when internal teams wouldn't otherwise get a clean, unfiltered read on what was happening in the world outside their walls.
3. Family Counselor. Surprisingly often, I told organizations what other people inside the same organization were thinking, saying, or doing (and what customers or partners thought of that). The degree of insularity, siloing, and parochialism in large organizations is hard to overstate. I was almost like a counselor, helping internal teams see, understand, and appreciate their peers, and put what they were doing into a larger perspective that would have otherwise been overlooked.
I did a lot of other things, but these were my largest, most systematic, and most recurring patterns of "adding value."