Why Boutique ServiceNow Consulting Beats a Big 4 on Mid-Market Work
A finance director at a 900-person specialty chemicals company rang me on a Wednesday afternoon last month. He had just signed a Statement of Work with a tier-one global SI for what should have been a straightforward ITSM plus HRSD build. The number on the SoW was €1.4 million for a fifteen-month program. He wasn't calling to celebrate. He was calling because he had spent the previous evening reading through the resource plan and noticed that of the eleven people billed against the project, only two had ServiceNow certifications, and none of them were the two people who had presented in the sales cycle. He wanted a second opinion before the kickoff meeting the following Monday. I've had a version of that call maybe fifteen times in the last three years. The pattern is so consistent it has stopped being surprising. A mid-market company (say 300 to 2,500 employees, one instance, no offshore captive, budget of €300k to €1.5m for the initial build) buys ServiceNow. They put the implementation out to tender. The Big 4 or a tier-one global SI wins because their name is on the shortlist and the procurement team feels safer signing with someone they've heard of. Six to nine months in,...
