It's one of the truisms of HR performance management that what gets measured gets done. If we reward people (i.e. pay the more) for making stuff big—for having more revenue under management, via sales commissions, for number of staff or size of budget—then people are going to define themselves buy how large they can make their project/programme/budget.

If we want to fix this then we need to change the way we manage IT, and reward driving value and outcomes, rather than size.