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Summary – The promise of rapid industrialization from large IT services companies collides with internal bureaucracy, committees and heavy processes that extend timelines, inflate costs and dilute your control over your IT system. Fragmented decision-making, utilization pressure, juniorized teams, high turnover, successive opaque contract amendments and vendor lock-in via proprietary frameworks drive up TCO and hinder agility.
Solution: choose a lean team of senior experts, streamlined governance, a modular open-source architecture with sovereign hosting and SLO- and lead-time-driven management to accelerate business value.
Large IT services companies attract with their scale and the promise of rapid industrialization, but that very size can become a powerful hindrance.
Amid internal bureaucracy, utilization-rate targets, and cumbersome processes, their agility in addressing your business challenges diminishes. This paradox exposes CIOs and executive leadership to extended implementation timelines, fluctuating costs, and the risk of losing clarity and control over your information system. This article dissects the main risks of entrusting your projects to a “digital behemoth” and proposes an alternative centered on senior expertise, modularity, and digital sovereignty.
Digital Behemoths Slow Down Your Projects
A large IT services firm weighs down every decision and delays the execution of your projects. It relies on multiple committees and approvals that are rarely aligned with your business imperatives.
Reduced Maneuverability Due to Hierarchical Structure
In a large IT services firm, the chain of command is often lengthy and siloed. Every request has to move from the operational team up through multiple management levels before it secures approval.
This leads to longer response times, additional meetings, and discrepancies between what is described in the specifications and what is actually delivered. Urgent adjustments become an obstacle course.
Ultimately, your application scalability suffers, even as needs evolve rapidly in a VUCA environment. Delays create a domino effect on planning and coordination with your own business teams.
Proliferation of Decision-Making Processes at the Expense of Efficiency
The culture of large IT services firms often drives them to structure every phase with steering and approval committees. Each internal stakeholder has their own criteria and KPIs, which don’t always align with your priorities.
This fragmentation leads to significant back-and-forth, with deliverables revised multiple times. Utilization or billing rate targets can take precedence over optimizing value streams.
As a result, trade-offs are made based on internal metrics. You end up paying for the process rather than the operational value. The consequence is a loss of responsiveness just when your markets demand agility and innovation.
Example: Swiss Cantonal Administration
A large cantonal administration entrusted the overhaul of its citizen portal to a globally recognized provider. The specification workshops lasted over six months, involving around ten internal and external teams.
Despite a substantial initial budget, the first functional mock-ups weren’t approved until after three iterations, as each internal committee imposed new adjustments.
This case shows that the size of the IT services firm did not accelerate the project—quite the opposite: timelines tripled, costs climbed by 40%, and the administration had to extend its existing infrastructure for an additional year, incurring increased technical debt.
Juniorization and Turnover Undermine Service Quality
Large IT services firms tend to favor resource volumes over senior expertise. This strategy exposes your projects to high turnover risks and loss of know-how.
Pressure on Service Costs and Team Juniorization
To meet their margins and utilization targets, large IT services firms often favor less experienced profiles. These juniors are billed at the same rate as seniors but require significant oversight. The challenge is twofold: your project may suffer from limited technical expertise, and your internal teams must devote time to ramp-up. This extends ramp-up phases and increases the risk of technical errors. To help determine whether to insource or outsource, consult our guide on outsourcing a software project.
High Turnover and Loss of Continuity
In a large digital services group, internal and external mobility is a reality: consultants change projects or employers several times a year. This constant turnover requires repeated handovers.
Each consultant change leads to a loss of context and demands time-consuming knowledge transfer. Your points of contact keep changing, making it difficult to establish a trusted relationship.
The risk is diluted accountability: when an issue arises, each party points to the other, and decisions are made remotely without alignment with the client’s operational reality.
Example: Swiss Industrial SME
An industrial SME saw its ERP modernization project entrusted to a large IT services firm. After three months, half of the initial teams had already been replaced, forcing the company to explain its business processes to each newcomer.
Time and knowledge losses led to repeated delays and unexpected budget overruns. The project ultimately took twice as long as planned, and the SME had to manage a cost surge that impacted production.
This case illustrates that turnover, far from anecdotal, is a major source of disruption and cost overruns in the management of your digital initiatives.
Edana: strategic digital partner in Switzerland
We support companies and organizations in their digital transformation
Contractual Bureaucracy and Hidden Costs
Large IT services contracts often become amendment factories. Every change or fix generates new negotiations and unexpected billings.
Proliferation of Amendments and Lack of Price Transparency
As the scope evolves, every modification requires an amendment. Additional days are debated, negotiated, and then billed at marked-up rates.
The lack of granularity in the initial contract turns every minor change into an administrative barrier. Each amendment’s internal approval adds delays and creates a hidden cost that’s hard to anticipate.
In the end, your total cost of ownership (TCO) skyrockets, with no direct link to the actual value delivered. You mainly pay for the appearance of flexibility, not its actual control.
Bureaucracy and IT Governance Disconnected from Your Outcomes
A major provider’s governance is often based on internal KPIs: utilization rates, revenue per consultant, and upsell of days.
These objectives are set independently of your business performance metrics (ROI, lead time, user satisfaction). Therefore, the IT services firm prioritizes ramping up its teams over optimizing your value chain.
Project tracking is limited to the provider’s internal dashboards, with no transparency on cost per activity or on the actual time spent creating value.
Case Study: Swiss Healthcare Institution
A hospital foundation signed a framework contract with a large provider for the evolutionary maintenance of its information system. After a few months, a simple patient flow modification led to four separate amendments, each billed and approved independently.
The invoicing and approval process took two months, delaying deployment and impacting service quality for medical staff. The institution saw its maintenance budget rise by nearly 30% in one year.
This case demonstrates that contractual complexity and the pursuit of internal KPIs can undermine the very goal of operational efficiency and generate significant hidden costs.
Vendor Lock-In and Technical Rigidity
Large providers often base their solutions on proprietary frameworks. This approach creates a dependency that locks in your information system and weighs on your TCO.
Proprietary Frameworks and Progressive Lock-In
To industrialize their deployments, some IT services firms adopt proprietary stacks or full-stack platforms. These environments are intended to accelerate time-to-market.
But when you want to migrate or integrate a new solution, you discover everything has been configured according to their internal doctrine. The proprietary frameworks are bespoke, and workflows are deposited in a homegrown language.
This dependency generates high migration costs and reduces the incentive to innovate. You become captive to the provider’s roadmap and pricing policy.
Incompatibilities and Barriers to Future Evolution
In the long run, integrating new features or opening up to third-party solutions becomes a major challenge. Under vendor lock-in, each additional component requires costly adaptation work.
Interfaces, whether via API or event bus, often have to be rewritten to comply with the existing proprietary constraints. To learn more about custom API integration, see our guide.
The result is a monolithic architecture you thought was modular, yet it resists all change, turning your information system into a rigid and vulnerable asset in the face of market evolution.
Opt for a Lean, Senior, Results-Oriented Team
Fewer intermediaries, greater clarity, and a commitment to your key indicators are the pillars of an effective and lasting collaboration. By choosing a human-scale team, you benefit from senior expertise, streamlined governance, and a modular architecture based on open standards and sovereign hosting. The approach involves setting Service Level Objectives (SLOs), managing lead time and quality, and ensuring your information system’s performance without technical shackles.
To discuss your challenges and explore a more agile organization, feel free to consult our experts to define together the model best suited to your business context and strategic goals.
