Response to below

In an IT services engagement, a lot of clients resources are used up at manageing the engagement. In order to ensure peace of mind, complex control mechanisms and checkpoints are built to ensure timely and business compatible solution delivery from the IT services company.
This is quite akin to having very highly coupled modules in a programming parlance. For the client's point of view, this is doubly frustrating. First, because there is a 'cost' of maintaining the services partner. Second, because of the high coupling, BAU is no more BAU!!! More often than not, the client's processes and structures change in order to accomodate the service provider. Result? Cost of changing to a new service provider is even higher, at times so much that the client is forced to maintain the engagement even though it may not yield satisfactory/profitable results.

Why can the IT services companies not have this as one of its goals? Why can they not deliver solutions without minimum or no changes in the existing structure of the organisation? I remember a couple of years back Larry Ellison dented Red Hat's Linux support business in a very bad way - just by announcing that Oracle will make every Linux patch released by Red Hat backward compatible to the version of Linux run by his client.

In fact, I think this is more of a business culture rather than business strategy. Does any company say "We are like water, we will take the shape of any vessel you pour us in, but we will still quench your thirst". A culture like this, can trickle all the way down to a developer. Needless to say, to become flexible, you need much more intrinsic strength than to become rigid!