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I would say, there are broadly 2 types of consultancy roles in the IT industry - Technical consultants/Architects and Functional/Domain/Business Consultants.

Technical Consultants - work at an Enterprise architecture level to define the sort of technology the organization should adopt. For e.g. whether they should go down the Java/J2EE route or use MS technologies or rely on Mainframes, etc. They are responsible to define enterprise level architecture principles that the organization should follow and what the backbone components of the organization's IT infrastructure will be based on.

They also do work on large software projects to define the architecture and design.

Functional/Domain/Business Consultants -
These people are responsible to translate a business problem into a technology solution. They identify the types of tech available to solve a certain business need. They have a better understanding of the business processes and suggest ways to improve the business process itself.

The depth of roles these consultants play really depend on the organization and the type of assignments they get.

A SE role is the basically about writing software to specifications that have been designed by consultants/architects and Analysts.

Hope this explanation helps.