Buy, build, or leave it alone

Technology decisions arrive as two options, buy or build, and everyone in the room has an interest in one of them. I should be honest that I have an interest too. The third option is to change nothing and look again in six months, and it costs nobody anything, which is why it never gets a slide.

When it genuinely is not the answer, the choice between buying and building comes down to one question. Is this how you make money, or is this how you keep the lights on. Nobody has ever won a customer because their expense approval flow was bespoke. Buy the lights. Build the thing your competitors cannot order from a catalogue, and build very little else.

The second question is about how settled you are. If the process will look the same in three years, buying is safe and sensible. If you are still arguing internally about how it ought to work, buying freezes the argument at whatever the vendor decided, and you will spend two years configuring your way back out of their opinion.

As for leaving it alone, it is only a failure if the pain is growing. Write down what the current mess actually costs per month, in hours or in errors or in a customer who left. If you cannot put a number on it, you are not ready to spend money on it, and I would rather tell you that in month one than invoice you for finding out.

MMB