The past week's news about booking.com business problems has several insights. Like the old sayings say:
Wise people learn from others' faults, dumb learn from their own
What we know about the situation:
They made an SAP system implementation
They hired an external consultant
Normally all the management believes, if we hire a good pedigree consultant and implement an excellent pedigree system, even if it is expensive as hell, it will guarantee success! As nobody was fired to implement an IBM product, but if you try to implement a no-name tool with a no-name vendor, failure means you lose your head!
Let's elaborate on the Booking.com case. In case you are a customer!
Who do you think is responsible?
The software product vendor?
The implementation company?
Or the company itself that sells the services?
Many executive board and executive leadership thinks they can hand over the responsibility to other vendors, however, ultimately you are responsible for all decisions!
None of the customers will ever think about who is your contractor or vendor!