There are hidden consequences which easily occur when companies adopt best-of-breed technologies, often leaving them with worst-in-class capabilities. But it doesn’t have to be like this.
Speaking at the SAP Executive Exchange for CIOs and CFOs, Darrel Orsmond, financial services industry head at SAP Africa, shared insights into how companies can make smarter decisions over their digital transformation initiatives.
When organisations buy new application software, the decision usually starts from one of two fundamentally different positions:
- The first is a solution-led approach: find the best solution that fits user needs and implement it.
- The second is architecture-led: find the software that integrates best with your existing technology stack and plug any feature gaps where necessary.
Both approaches are valid. But they set companies on very different digital transformation journeys, each with very different consequences.
Two competing approaches to transformation
In the best-of-breed camp, organisations cherry-pick top-performing software for each business function: the best CRM, the best HR tool, the best marketing automation platform.
This can deliver powerful business capabilities and high levels of user satisfaction, but often at the cost of complexity. Integration becomes more difficult, reporting gets fragmented, and processes, data structures and upgrades become harder to manage. As complexity increases, so do costs. And these negatives tend to be permanent.
In contrast, the architecture-led approach prioritises alignment with existing platforms and investments. Solutions are selected based on their ability to integrate quickly and seamlessly with current systems. This simplifies data models, reduces disruption, and accelerates value delivery. However, it may require teams to compromise on specific features, supplementing with additional tools or workflows where needed.
It all comes down to the trade-offs
Best-of-breed systems often appeal to business units because of their user-centric features and slick interfaces. But the real question is: how well do they fit within the broader enterprise architecture?
Ironically, best-of-breed can slow down agility. Disconnected tools require more coordination, more project time, and more negotiation between business and IT. A change in one system can trigger unpredictable consequences in another, driving costs higher.
Another overlooked trade-off is innovation velocity. Best-of-breed may offer short-term gains, but each new system introduces integration debt, consuming time, budget, and IT resources that could be spent on innovation.
SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP), for example, provides a foundation for extensibility, analytics, AI, and automation, enabling innovation within the ecosystem. This reduces the need to bolt on new tech and maintains architectural simplicity.
In short: The more fragmented your systems, the more your business is defined by its IT constraints. The more unified your platform, the more freedom you have to innovate.
Five neglected elements that derail transformation efforts
- Integration is always harder than expected – Very few teams accurately estimate the integration effort. Two proprietary customer data models, for instance, can trigger downstream complexity in reporting, security, and process management.
- Ongoing complexity isn’t priced in – Evaluation committees rarely account for the long-term cost of maintaining inconsistent data models, process duplication, or custom security protocols.
- Supplier leverage is lost – Fragmenting your stack across too many vendors dilutes purchasing power. The result? Higher costs, less influence over product roadmaps, and scattered support.
- Talent becomes siloed – Best-of-breed systems often require specialist skills. Instead of building shared knowledge and cross-skilling opportunities, companies create isolated teams of “missionaries” to support niche tools.
- Complexity becomes permanent – Once embedded, complexity rarely goes away. In a cloud environment, customisation can’t easily be transferred to a vendor, meaning the cost of uniqueness stays with the business forever.
A better path to digital success
This isn’t to say that best-of-breed is always the wrong choice. But it is often misunderstood, or worse, misapplied. Too many transformation programmes focus on immediate functionality rather than long-term capability.
In contrast, building within an existing, broad-based platform can reduce integration costs, accelerate delivery, simplify maintenance, and scale far more effectively.
It’s not just a technology decision. It’s a strategic one, and it pays to get it right from the start. IT capabilities are built to endure and need to be able to respond quickly to business changes – in this regard complexity remains a permanent enemy.