Comment by jillesvangurp

Corporate stupidity and expensive consulting go hand in hand. It's easy to blame Accenture here but arguably, it's Hertz that messed up here. They should know better. Did people get fired over this? The CIO apparently left with a nice juicy big package. Probably that was no accident and the writing was on the wall around that time.

This level of spending and failure reeks of severe levels of incompetence, negligence, and stupidity. They probably have layers of management covering each other's asses. And now they are forking cash over to lawyers as well. Maybe the lawyers do better than the consultant, but either way, they'll get payed a lot. They'll squeeze them hard probably. Easier to point fingers at Accenture than to admit management and leadership was asleep at the wheel for years.

Of course, Accenture probably dropped the ball here as well. But what are they going to do when faced with a customer this dumb asking for all sorts of things and probably constantly moving the goal posts? Say no? Of course not.

So, they did the obvious thing: pick expensive enterprise solutions and dangle nice sounding buzzwords in front of the customer. Tell them what they want to hear basically. And then pick some boring/conservative technologies and go to work. Angular was still reasonably fashionable around the time and 25 year old "senior" Javascript "specialists" are a dime a dozen. So it's not surprising that that became a thing. And we're all so agile these days that you wouldn't believe it. Standard sales pitch and practice for the last 2 decades.

The reality is of course that Hertz signed up for classic waterfall complete with blueprints and everything and Accenture was smart enough to not go fixed rate here. Better still, Accenture was smart enough to realize that IBM, Oracle, and others also were in on the action so they did not take responsibility for any of that; only for their part. Classic recipe for lots of scope creep and budget overruns. Which of course happened and was probably encouraged to happen.

That CIO looks like he knew what he was doing. Big spending, fat pay check, and be gone and take the package when the shit hits the fan.