The vendor-driven market treats transformation initiatives as sales events — and they're very good at it. They smell the budget, the mandate, the internal pressure to deliver. So they insert themselves early — invited into strategy conversations, showing up with frameworks and architecture diagrams that happen to have their platform at the center.
By the time you're deciding on architecture, the decision is already shaped. You think you're choosing the best technology. You're choosing the loudest vendor's preferred outcome.
Transformation initiatives fail 60% of the time. Most of that failure doesn't happen at implementation — it happens in the strategy phase, when vendor conversations happen before business outcomes are defined.
If vendors are already in your strategy meetings, this is already happening to you.

