Company Size Is Neither Inversely Proportional To Risk – Nor Can Company Size Guarantee Quality
The Decision-making Dilemma Of Small vs. Large Firm
The majority of decision-makers are lulled into a sense of security when they mention that, among several qualities of a selected vendor, the vendor is a “large company”.
Making a decision to select a vendor to provide custom software, support services or search services is very stressful because a wrong decision could cost the decision-maker his/her career at the greatest and or cripple the decision-maker’s personal reputation at the least.
In the early days of Information Technology, IBM was the ‘800-pound gorilla’ for computing. Back in the 60’s and 70’s there were firms competing with IBM (a.k.a. “Big Blue”). They were called “IBM and the seven dwarfs (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, CDC, GE, RCA and Honeywell)”. The mantra of the day was, “You can’t get fired by picking BLUE”.
So, even back then, decision-makers sometimes made the “safe” decision by purchasing IBM mainframes despite the fact that some of the “seven dwarfs’” products actually served their firm better either because of the price-point or the computing-need niche.
The Big Secret About Large Firms
The “Big Four” accounting firms, other financial-centric firms and many large firms all offer IT services such as custom software, support services and search services amongst other IT services. Even Amazon, a retail company, offers Cloud Services to compete with “real” IT companies like Microsoft, Google and IBM.
So, what is the secret that you should know? Custom software, support services and search services consist of only a handful of employees in segmented departments within a huge company.
When an IT salesperson (a.k.a. ‘expert consultant’) makes his/her pitch, they will say that their company has 100,000+ employees (for example). The false implication is that this firm has a huge number of human resources to rely-upon to service your need.
BUT THAT IS A FALSE AND DECEPTIVE NARRATIVE!!!
What large firms do not tell you:
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- Each department/product line could be comprised of a dozen employees or less – not hundreds.
- At times multiple products are supported within a single “department” and their IT talent is spread across multiple product lines.
- Each of those departments are profit centers for that huge firm.
- And, if any department fails to yield profits, the department will be closed and the product line will no longer be offered by that huge firm.
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