Why Arjen Van Berkum Is Right (and Why It Still Keeps Us in the Doom Loop)
Arjen Van Berkum just published a compelling case (see image above) for why IT should own contract management as a dedicated silo.
He’s right.
IT is the control tower.
Contracts are the backbone of digital operations.
Risk, compliance, continuity, and innovation do live inside those agreements.
But this is also how we end up in Collins’ “Doom Loop.”
We identify a real problem — fragmented contracts, high risk, poor visibility.
We build a logical solution — an IT-owned silo with structure, roles, and a three-layer framework.
We call it strategic.
And we still fail at 80%.
Because the problem was never the silo.
The problem is the readiness to make any architecture — siloed, enterprise, or hybrid — actually work.
The assumption beneath Arjen’s framework is that the organization has the maturity to enforce it.
Across 27 years and 180+ cases, that assumption collapses in the same place every time:
58/100 readiness.
Below 72/100, even the most elegant model becomes another structure on sand.
The solution has never been silo vs enterprise.
The solution is sequencing the architecture to match the readiness:
- If readiness is 58/100 → start with a silo. Arjen is absolutely correct.
- If readiness is 85/100 → orchestrate enterprise-wide. That’s the future — but only when the foundation is stable.
- If readiness is 65/100 → hybrid, phased, human-led. Otherwise the organization collapses under its own ambition.
The Hansen Fit Score doesn’t choose ideology. It reveals capacity.
It tells you what your organization can actually absorb.
Arjen is right: IT contract management deserves to be a discipline.
He’s also proving the Doom Loop: we keep solving the visible layer, not the readiness layer underneath it.
We don’t need better silos.
We need to know when we’re ready to leave the silo behind.
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Procurement Insights
Silo-Based Contract Management Is Not a Strategy — It’s a Symptom
Posted on November 28, 2025
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Why Arjen Van Berkum Is Right (and Why It Still Keeps Us in the Doom Loop)
Arjen Van Berkum just published a compelling case (see image above) for why IT should own contract management as a dedicated silo.
He’s right.
IT is the control tower.
Contracts are the backbone of digital operations.
Risk, compliance, continuity, and innovation do live inside those agreements.
But this is also how we end up in Collins’ “Doom Loop.”
We identify a real problem — fragmented contracts, high risk, poor visibility.
We build a logical solution — an IT-owned silo with structure, roles, and a three-layer framework.
We call it strategic.
And we still fail at 80%.
Because the problem was never the silo.
The problem is the readiness to make any architecture — siloed, enterprise, or hybrid — actually work.
The assumption beneath Arjen’s framework is that the organization has the maturity to enforce it.
Across 27 years and 180+ cases, that assumption collapses in the same place every time:
58/100 readiness.
Below 72/100, even the most elegant model becomes another structure on sand.
The solution has never been silo vs enterprise.
The solution is sequencing the architecture to match the readiness:
The Hansen Fit Score doesn’t choose ideology. It reveals capacity.
It tells you what your organization can actually absorb.
Arjen is right: IT contract management deserves to be a discipline.
He’s also proving the Doom Loop: we keep solving the visible layer, not the readiness layer underneath it.
We don’t need better silos.
We need to know when we’re ready to leave the silo behind.
30
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