When Boutique ServiceNow Consulting Beats a Big 4, and When It Doesn’t
A CIO at a €300M industrial firm rang me last month. He'd just finished a bake-off between two Deloitte practices and one boutique shop, and he wanted a sanity check before signing. The Deloitte proposal came in at €1.4M for a phase-one ITSM and CMDB rollout across three regions. The boutique quote was €480k for the same scope, with fewer bodies but named senior architects on every workstream. His board was pushing him toward Deloitte. His gut said the boutique. He asked me to help him think it through honestly. I don't sell against the Big 4 by default. I've watched boutique shops blow deadlines just as badly as Accenture, and I've watched Deloitte crews save a floundering programme that a specialist SI had already botched. The question "should I hire a big four firm or a specialist SI" doesn't have a universal answer. It has a set of conditions, and the sensible thing is to walk through them before signing anything. There are scenarios where a Big 4 practice is genuinely the right call, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.