I guess half a lifetime of slogging away at big orgs has made me cynical, but I can hardly even see how this rates as news. Once worked at a place where we spent a month on an app server bakeoff, selected vendor X. Following week, boss’ boss informs us we’re going with vendor Y. Corrupt? You tell me. Or the time I worked at a Fortune 100 company that had their entire IT outsourced to one of the big consultancies, only to find out that the CIO had a relationship with that consultancy. I could go on. It used to frustrate me more until I finally realized that in a big org, multiple games are being played, and you are probably not at the table of any game being played that matters.
Oh, indeed. That book impacted me in a big way. It’s bleak, but I did appreciate that it was the first thing I ever read that actually explained organizations in a way that made sense.
This is very much my experience. I went through a couple of very lengthy and detailed RFI processes to select the best vendors, just for the procurement to fail at the final step for some arbitrary reasons with the VP's prefered solution being the only valid alternative.
