The Enterprise System Dilemma: Why Large Platforms and In-House Solutions Struggle to Keep Up

When I chat with IT and Operations professionals and ask how their software solution is performing today, I often hear some version of:

“It works… but we have our challenges.”

That’s exactly how I felt running operations, and it was because like others we were running large enterprise platforms or a home-grown system. Sure, we expanded the systems capabilities over the years investing huge sums of money and time, but we still found ourselves adapting processes around systems. While they were once a perfect fit, they became inflexible and difficult to evolve.

The Problem with Large Enterprise and In-House Systems

On paper, investing in a major enterprise system or building your own solution sounds like the safe choice: on vendor, one platform or one codebase you fully control. But in practice, challenges emerge:

• The system is strong in some areas but weak in others.
• Businesses are forced to adapt their processes to fit the tool rather than the other way around.
• IT teams spend more time maintaining customizations, integrations and work arounds than focusing on innovation.
• Any new requirement, regulatory changes, new customer demands, or process improvements trigger costly develop cycles, often involving outside consultants or lengthy internal projects.

What begins as a “solution” turns into a long-term burden of expensive upgrades, customizations break with each release, and IT budgets begin to lean heavily toward maintenance instead of modernization.

Best-of-Breed as an Alternative

Instead of relying solely on a large enterprise platform or stretching a homegrown system beyond its limits, more organizations are finding success with a best-of-breed approach. This means selecting specialized tools that excel in their domain and integrating them into a cohesive ecosystem.

For example:

• A CRM such as Salesforce or Hubspot designed optimize customer engagement.
• An ERP or Financial system such as SAP or NetSuite or QuickBooks for smaller businesses.
• Business Intelligence e.g. Snowflake or Looker.

With thoughtful integration, this strategy reduces complexity, lowers development overhead and makes it easier to adapt to new business needs. Enhancements are faster and less costly because their applied to focused, purpose-built systems instead of re-engineering one massive application.

The Future of Enterprise IT

We all know businesses evolve, and markets shift. Technology advances faster than ever. Large, all-encompassing systems, whether bought or built struggle to keep pace with change.

Meanwhile, modular specialized solutions:

• Offer deeper functionality where it matters most.
• Innovate faster with more frequent updates.
• Scale and adapt without forcing massive development investments.
  
  

Organizations that thrive will be those that step away from relying solely on oversized platforms or aging in-house solutions and instead embrace flexible, modular systems that grow with them.

I would love to hear your thoughts.