The company works off legacy systems and does not have enterprise applications supporting their business. Business processes that can be easily automated are done mostly manually by separate departments with no overall governance. Some applications are homegrown and do not have the capability to keep up with the requests for support from the business.
The entire IS department might as well be Offshored, as it is overrun with onshore/offshore Indian consultants from Cognizant. I have never worked in a place where your colleagues will break out of speaking in English right in front of you because they sense the other person would understand better, and it happens at HF often. This is not contained to the Indian consultants.
Overall, the company has a very unprofessional work culture. Every single project in the organization has problems arising from many factors. A few are: not knowing how to implement the SDLC, project management not managing projects past scheduling meetings with gianormous lists of attendees, assigning subject matter experts who are experts at nothing (if you are lucky to have SMEs assigned at all). Everyone's schedule is bogged down with back-to-back meetings that have no clear agenda, no clear purpose, and no clear follow-ups or deliverables. Lots of time is wasted just listening to people who like to talk (about nothing useful). Very little work is actually done or assigned and accountability is out the door.
When problems arise (and you can guarantee they will), management will go on a witch hunt to find someone to blame. They will, also, throw their own people under the bus. Those who are being blamed usually are not the cause of all the problems, if they are even the main cause at all. Management just loves their scapegoats. Never do they actually try to manage in order to prevent being reactive to impending issues seen from miles away, nor do they try to mitigate full-blown problems when they've finally blown up and eventually try to find a solution so the company can move forward. They just play the blame game and take punitive action on the person(s) they've decided to single out. This can entail being publicly screamed at or blamed, told you can't take days off nor work from home or reassigned to other responsibilities.
The work life balance in this company is terrible. The majority of the workers have nothing else to contribute other than their attendance at work. People talk down about telecommuting and boast about staying many late hours to fix a problem that was avoidable, or schedule meetings with no less than 10 people at 5 pm (because this was the only time that worked on everyone's fully booked calendars). In fact, telecommuting and teleconferencing is discouraged at many points and levels in the company. In today's increasingly global economy with today's technology, that is just backwards.
This company recently called its employees to tell them that the office was open during 2 major snowstorms (one of which was a full blown blizzard). The office being open is a given; usually companies call you on your personal line to tell you the office is closed because their associates' well-being is a #1 priority (from my personal experience). Not HF! They want to push you to risk your safety in a storm in order to come into the office to go to your meetings in person or to just do face time.
All these factors cause this company to essentially be a revolving door. People get hired, are hit hard with the reality of working here, and leave shortly thereafter. Usually, it's the good, effective workers that wise up and leave.
In conclusion, this is not a company that I see being very competitive in the future, especially if they cannot retain talent. The culture is horrible, unprofessional, and intractable, and they just do not have the leadership that understands what it means to morph into a large organization with well-defined processes and structures. Leadership does not strategize, nor assign accountability, nor work toward providing a stable framework that allows goals to be set and reached and fair metrics to be taken. This company does not have the capability to expand past their regional footprint of business nor do they respect nor incentivize their #1 resource: their employees.