The real problem with BSF was the aggressive payment mechanisms in most BSF ICT contracts, this is what forced the restrictive managed services which generated the bad press. BSF was always a construction-led affair and ICT should have remained separate. I once thought it was the fault of the "big bad businesses", until I got out into the big wide world and realised that those big businesses are actually made up of people trying to do their best and who on the whole bring skills and experiences you just can't gain from working inside a school or even a small number of schools. These people often have a challenging environment because hostility caused by the misconceptions described above is frankly verging on the ridiculous in SOME schools and LAs and has actively prevented schools getting the best from the available funds.
Having spent 12 years in jobs at each level in schools and then with a number of the big BSF suppliers my observation is that the idea that the big companies are to blame is flat wrong. They have actually brought design standards to the market which were missing from 90 percent of schools I've visited, who in SOME cases have spent a lot of money over the good years in a ad-hoc way sometimes without a plan and sometimes simply on whatever the latest craze was, without investing in quality infrastructure or best practices, often learning on live systems. In my experience this lack of standards and poor infrastructure design was very often caused by schools receiving bad advice from local small businesses who appear often to be happy to tell schools what they want to hear, instead of what they need to know, as well as selling cheap, instead of the correct solution for the requirement.
The people who work in the big businesses so often maligned have often delivered and/or supported dozens of schools within very demanding contractual climates and most of them started out in schools themselves, so perhaps those representing small businesses, such as the original poster, might like to consider this before pushing the "big bad business" misinformation.
