In a context where executive leadership expects their IT departments (DSI) to be both sovereign and drivers of transformation… certain warning signs must not go unnoticed.
At Hubadviser, we spend our days inside the IT departments of large industrial groups, banks, or ambitious mid-sized companies. And everywhere, we see the same symptoms. Weak signals that have become visible. Practices that have become habits. Decisions that have become dead ends.
We call them the Red Flags of the IT Department..
They are signs that something needs to change quickly. Here are the 10 most revealing ones. To watch. To address. To fix.
1. No developers in the IT department
More and more IT departments today have no developers or teams so small they can no longer carry projects internally. This is a strong and worrying signal
Why? Because it means the IT department no longer has its own strike force. It is entirely dependent on external providers for delivery, maintenance, or innovation. It’s like a country that has deindustrialized and realizes in times of crisis that it must import everything even the essentials (see France during the COVID crisis).
Having developers is not just a matter of cost or responsiveness. It’s a question of independence, technological culture, and capacity to experiment.
2. Ideological stances on the cloud
Another red flag: dogmatic positions on the cloud. Two opposing and equally problematic attitudes:
The anti-cloud stance, which rejects all cloud initiatives outright. Often based on preconceived notions around cost, security, or control, this rigid mindset blocks all forms of agility and innovation. It ignores that some use cases find immense value and speed in the cloud.
On the flip side, the Cloud-Only doctrine is just as risky. It turns the cloud into a goal in itself without discernment. Yet the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of cloud solutions can prove much higher over time, especially for non-volatile applications not to mention sovereignty and extraterritorial concerns.
The right reflex? A hybrid cloud policy, combining public cloud, private cloud, and on-premise intelligently. And most importantly: base decisions on business value, not just hosting costs.
3. The frenzied quest for user satisfaction
It may seem paradoxical, but trying to satisfy every little business request can become a trap.
The classic type of request:
“I want the button to be at the top right in the app.”
This creates several issues :
High costs, especially without internal developers and relying on external providers.
Massive technical debt, as each unique customization makes the IT system harder to evolve.
Scattered efforts, preventing the IT department from focusing on truly strategic issues.
Example: in an industrial company, how can you seriously work on IoT or energy optimization if the entire team is busy customizing the management software?
By trying too hard to please, the IT department ends up being a small, friendly, responsive IT handyman… but never strategic.
4. No vendor management policy
Ask yourself:
How many IT suppliers do you have?
What are your top 5 contracts? When do they expire?
What’s the fiscal closing date of your main vendors? What’s their product roadmap?
If you can’t answer or your procurement team can’t either, it’s a red flag.
Vendor management isn’t just logistics. It’s a key performance, negotiation, and governance lever. Without active oversight, you suffer the technological and financial decisions of others.
5. No PoC in sight for months
In some IT departments, nothing is happening on the innovation front. No Proof of Concept, no experimentation, no field testing. Just operational work, heads down, no time to explore. That’s a strong signal of stagnation.
Yet the IT department should drive two types of innovation:
Business-driven innovation: for example, helping Finance, Marketing, or Logistics test generative AI through concrete use cases. Here, IT should support or even lead.
System-driven innovation: new tech paradigms (event streaming, microservices, serverless, automation) that make the system more agile, scalable, and resilient.
If no testing is underway, you’re missing out on performance opportunities. Innovation isn’t a luxury, it’s a lever of transformation to activate and manage.
6. More external contractors than internal staff
This is a common issue in large French companies.
When external contractors become the majority, it’s no longer an IT department, it’s an outsourced steering platform. Sovereignty is entirely lost.
Reinternalizing doesn’t mean doing everything in-house. It means regaining control, at least over critical skills.
7. No application decommissioning
How many applications in your portfolio are no longer used? How many are obsolete or add no business value?
If you don’t have a clear decommissioning process, that’s a red flag.
Good IT governance means knowing what to remove. Every app maintained without a reason represents debt, cost, risk, and unnecessary complexity.
8. No way to prioritize requests
A classic: requests pile up… but there’s no framework to decide.
You end up confusing urgent and important, strategic and cosmetic, “must-have” and “nice-to-have.”
Worse: you prioritize whoever shouts the loudest.
Without a clear prioritization process, IT is just firefighting. It loses the ability to arbitrate and focus on what really matters.
9. The IT budget isn’t consolidated
It’s taboo, but in many companies, the IT budget is:
Fragmented
Unreadable
Detached from value creation
An IT budget should tell a story: how much we cost, what we bring, and where we’re investing for the future. Without that, it’s impossible to convince executive leadership to back an ambitious tech roadmap.
10. The CIO has become just a CISO
Final red flag: an IT department that only talks about cybersecurity.
Of course, security is fundamental. But if the CIO or their executive committee focuses solely on that, innovation, transformation, and growth projects fall by the wayside.
A CIO is not a human firewall. They are (or should be) a leader in performance and change.
About the author
Ismail has 15 years of experience in IT and digital consulting. He spent nearly 7 years at Gartner. He has supported innovative startups in their growth strategy and worked with CIOs of large groups on their digital transformation. In 2021, Ismail founded Hubadviser to help CIOs challenge their vision with top-level experts.
