Part 3 of 3 in the Solutions Landscape series, drawn from Chapter 6 of Optimizing Corporate Efficiencies

Early in almost every solutions-landscape review I have run, I see two general debates that arise. The first is the buy vs. build debate. The second is whether to invest in a multi-function platform, or to create a landscape of best-of-breed solutions. Should you standardize on a platform that covers many functional areas, or should you pick a best-of-breed point solution for each individual need?

There are five basic tenets I use as a lens on this question:

Platforms lower total cost of ownership, most of the time.

A single platform, applied across several functional areas, usually costs less to run than a collection of separately licensed, separately maintained point solutions. I say "most of the time" deliberately. I have seen cases where the math did not hold, and I always tell teams to check the actual numbers for their situation rather than assume the platform wins on cost by default.

Platforms never do everything well.

A "one size fits all" solution will always ask you to live with some compromise somewhere. If your organization has a function with genuinely unusual requirements, the platform's majority-rule approach to feature development may leave you underserved in exactly the area that matters most to you.

Platforms constrain you.

Point solutions give you more freedom to implement a process exactly the way you want it. A platform gives you a framework, and frameworks come with edges.

Best-of-breed lets you pick the best tool for every job.

You are not compromising on any single function, because you selected the strongest available solution for each one individually.

Best-of-breed comes with an integration tax.

This is the part people underestimate. Every point solution you add needs to talk to the others through a growing web of touch points. Each of those integrations adds cost, complexity, and risk to your environment, and none of that shows up on the original price tag. In fact, the majority of integration cost arrives over time, as the complexity makes everything more expensive and longer to implement.

Why I Do Not Think the Split Matters as Much as the Discipline Does

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to read this as an argument for platforms over best-of-breed. It is not. Most organizations I have worked with land somewhere in the middle: a platform or platforms covering a meaningful share of their functional areas, supplemented by point solutions wherever the platform genuinely falls short, all stitched together where necessary.

What actually separates the organizations that manage this well from the ones that do not is not which side of the platform/best-of-breed line they land on. It is whether they have a decision framework they apply consistently. Once again, success depends on ensuring that the right people debated the right tradeoffs in the right forum. We will discuss governance frameworks in a later article, but this is one example of many where the right governance mechanisms can help ensure successful business outcomes.

What I Would Ask Before You Add the Next Point Solution

I have been the Chief Enterprise Architect in three organizations. Whenever I saw a proposal to bring in a new best-of-breed tool alongside an existing platform, I would ask a short list of questions before recommending the new acquisition:

  1. Does the platform actually fail to meet the requirement, or does it just require living with a compromise someone does not love? Those are very different problems, and often, only one of them justifies a new system.
  2. What is the full integration cost — not just the license fee, but the build, the ongoing maintenance, and the risk of every new touch point we are creating? I have watched teams budget for the software and forget entirely to budget for the plumbing that connects it to everything else. And just like plumbing in the real world, this plumbing requires regular maintenance and suffers from failure from time to time.
  3. If we approve this exception, are we prepared to explain why the same logic does not apply the next time someone else wants an exception? Once you allow for point solutions for a reason that you cannot generalize, you have effectively opened the door to other point solutions for any reason at all.

None of this means best-of-breed is the wrong answer. Sometimes it is exactly the right answer, and I have recommended plenty of point solutions because the platform genuinely could not do the job. What I do not recommend are point solutions that exist only because nobody wanted to take the time to answer the questions above. That is not a technology cost. That is a leadership cost, and it is almost always the more expensive one.

Chapter 6 Series

This is the third and final article in my series on the solutions landscape, drawn from Chapter 6 of my book, Optimizing Corporate Efficiencies. The first covered why so many companies end up with duplicate solutions when they need one; the second laid out a framework for the buy-versus-build decision. Together, the three make the same underlying case: the goal is not a single right answer for every organization. It is a disciplined process, applied consistently, that forces the real trade-offs into the open before the organization commits to them.

I find it interesting that 30 years ago I published an object-oriented design book that argued that technology is always a game of tradeoffs. The book captures rules of thumb, not rules, and communicates the many tradeoffs between them. I continue to see this same "rules of thumb" philosophy where so many want to see fixed rules.

Earlier in this series: The Solution Duplication Problem

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