Why IT Organizations Keep Growing — and Deliver Less
Over the past two decades, IT organisations have grown steadily. More people, more layers, more roles. At the same time, the complaints sound increasingly familiar: slow decision-making, sluggish delivery, limited business impact, and systems that become harder, not easier to change.
This raises an uncomfortable question:
How can an industry built on productivity, automation and scalability consistently deliver less as it grows larger?
Why IT still struggles to deliver
Part of the answer lies in the nature of the IT sector itself. For many years, IT has offered relatively strong compensation, job security and status. This has attracted a continuous inflow of professionals whose careers develop around technology rather than within it. They occupy roles in coordination, process, governance, management and alignment, often without ever having built software or designed systems themselves.
That, in itself, is not a problem. Any organisation needs coordination and structure.
The real question is different: how do these roles relate to value delivery?
And more importantly: what happens when they grow faster than the number of engineers who actually build, maintain and improve systems?
From engineering-centric teams to coordination-heavy organisations
Having started my career as a software engineer and system architect, I’ve seen this shift accelerate. Where teams once consisted primarily of people who deeply understood the system they were building, today many teams revolve around a small core of engineers surrounded by an expanding ecosystem of non-technical roles. As a result, the distance between decision-making and execution steadily increases.
Agile’s original intent — and what happened to it
Against this backdrop, the rise of Agile and Scrum is interesting. On the surface, these movements appear to challenge exactly this trend. Agile software delivery originated with experienced engineers and architects — captured in the Agile Manifesto — who were already observing the same pattern: growing organisations, increasing coordination overhead, declining progress and diminishing business value.
Their response was deliberately simple: small, autonomous, domain-oriented teams of skilled professionals. Teams with decision-making authority, direct access to users, and end-to-end responsibility for both building and running systems. Fewer handovers, less hierarchy, more craftsmanship.
When language replaces intent
In practice, however, what I see most often is the adoption of terminology rather than intent. Scrum, Agile, SAFe, PI planning, ceremonies, roles and frameworks are everywhere. But the number of engineers rarely grows at the same pace. In many organisations, it even stagnates or declines while the number of non-engineering roles increases.
- Product Owners without real product mandate.
- Scrum Masters without technical context.
- Agile Coaches coaching teams on processes they themselves are not accountable for.
The result is a paradox: organisations claim to work Agile, while structurally organising themselves in ways that are increasingly less Agile. Autonomy moves upward in the hierarchy, decision-making becomes more abstract, and teams are given responsibility without corresponding authority.
Maybe Agile isn’t the problem
So perhaps the problem is not that Agile doesn’t work. Perhaps the problem is that an engineer-driven philosophy has been absorbed into a management-driven organisational model.
The real question, then, is not how many people work in IT, but how many of them actively create value by building, understanding and improving systems. As long as that ratio continues to shift away from those closest to the technology, IT organisations will keep growing and continue to struggle with their own productivity.