I work for Pivotal and I feel I have some relevant experiences (from which the following personal opinions are derived). I started in Labs, our consulting divis

I work for Pivotal and I feel I have some relevant experiences (from which the following personal opinions are derived). I started in Labs, our consulting division, known for being vociferously about XP, Lean product management and User-Centred Design. These days I work in R&D. The latter has been very educational, as we've been involved in building larger and larger systems, with lots of "oh that's what our customers meant when they talked about problem-of-scale XYZ". I know that my own temptation as a Labs Pivot was to imply that customers just weren't agile-ing hard enough; R&D has kicked a bit of that stuffing out of me. As Brooks argued in No Silver Bullet, there is essential complexity and accidental complexity. Enterprises deal with amounts of both that are hard to comprehend. You get some fascinating problems and pathologies at Enterprise scale. As the article implies, nobody ever really intends to create them, they emerge from the system's evolution. I think the core logic of outsourcing is sound, but it's like many simple ideas: simple, but not easy. It's actually a restatement of economics 101 -- comparative advantage and gains from trade. Even if you are strictly better at doing everything yourself, it still makes sense to trade with others. At Pivotal we often discuss this as "the value line", the point in the stack where, we argue, it is more effective to delegate your technology problems to us (or -- this is how I feel personally -- to a comparable vendor, like Red Hat, over pure DIY) and to turn your own technology efforts towards the things that add value for your customers. Even if you could do a better job than any of the vendors, it might not make sense for you to do so. That value line isn't static, of course, and it's differently located for each customer. And it remains necessary to retain enough inhouse expertise to sensibly assess vendor solutions. Enterprise software and software development is a complex "experience good". This isn't limited to software, it's true of many complex purchases -- I have a book in my collection called Industrial Megaprojects which contains a fascinating parade of such examples. All that said, transformation is possible in my experience. The key is, as the article describes, that it takes a long time, a lot of work and a lot of money. It most of all requires enough time for cultural norms to resettle and for trust to solidify. I've worked with companies operated on a fear basis and basically, the best we could do was to create insulated bubbles of agility. We've worked with other companies which have more or less transformed themselves once we brought a spark. Sometimes we will be the true vanguard of a revolution, sometimes we will be the fad-of-the-week that the hardened veterans will shrug and mouth the slogans for while continuing with the actual way things get done. Sometimes, because many of our customers are so vast, we will be heroes to one division and villains in another. The best that I and my peers can do is to help each client as honestly, empathetically and fully as we can to transform themselves. But, as the article points out, that is hard.