The Anti-Platform Pattern Era and the Discipline That Breaks It
What Singapore’s GovTech Teaches Us About Building Platforms
When I began a deep meta-analysis of platform and PaaS adoption a few months ago, I expected to find a familiar curve. Organisations, I thought, would be slowly moving away from ERP monoliths, experimenting with modular systems, building orchestration across workflows, and finally maturing into platform-led models. The data should have bent in that direction.
But it didn’t.
Instead, across many publically available studies from Gartner, Deloitte, McKinsey, MuleSoft, Flexera, Salesforce, ServiceNow and many others, the evidence lined up in an unexpected way. Architectural maturity on paper looked promising. Platform maturity in practice was stalling. Instead of bending toward composability, the adoption curve was bending the wrong way, toward hardened anti-patterns that trap organisations in the tactical middle.
As tech leaders, this is the unsettling reality of 2025 we need to face. We are living in an era dominated by anti-platform patterns.
The problem isn’t simply that organisations are slow to adopt platforms. It’s that the most common adoption paths are actively entrenching fragility.
Too many enterprises normalise practices that were never designed to scale. RPA-first automation that chains spreadsheets together. Departmental platforms masquerading as enterprise backbones. Vendor suite lock-in confused for strategy. Data treated as an afterthought, reconciled after the fact instead of embedded at the start.
These patterns aren’t marginal. They dominate. Which means the modal adoption path is inverted. Instead of climbing toward composability, most organisations are reinforcing the very behaviours that anchor them in the tactical middle.
Part of the reason we are living in an anti-pattern era is cultural. We are in an age of instant gratification, where quick fixes are rewarded and long-term discipline is undervalued. Tactical automations and departmental platforms give the appearance of progress, but they don’t compound value. They satisfy immediate demand, while deferring the harder work of building trusted data, governance, and observability.
I think that is why platform maturity feels stuck. In most cases, the anti-patterns are not being corrected. They are being institutionalised. Short-term wins are hardening into long-term operating models. Instead of bending toward composability, the curve is bending in the wrong direction.
Vendors sell to departments, not enterprise architects. Integrators deliver projects, not platforms. Analyst benchmarks track adoption volumes, not governance quality. Gravity keeps pulling everything back to the wrong centre. An enterprise black hole where nothing escapes.
And in too many places, these defaults have already hardened into operating models. RPA-first, departmental platforms, suite lock-in, data last. Unless deliberately broken, they will continue to define the next decade.
Part of the trap lies in ownership. Throw a rock and you’ll hit a survey with neat data and percentages. When aggregated, about 40% of organisations say the CIO owns architecture, another 40% say the CIO owns platform strategy too. A tidy picture, as though architecture and platform move forward together from a single office.
But the neatness is an illusion.
CIOs naturally claim ownership when asked, but operational influence is far more fragmented. Departments lobby for platforms to meet their own needs. Vendors push roadmaps that shape adoption more than any architecture board. Integrators fill the gaps.
The result is a gap between nominal ownership and operational reality. Platforms are treated as CIO-owned but department-driven. That guarantees they remain tactical. Without governance in practice, with authority, budget, and teeth, platform maturity will always stall.
The anti-pattern repeats across workflows, automation, and reuse.
Most workflows are still department-specific, stitched together with minimal integration. End-to-end, event-driven orchestration appears in fewer than 10% of cases.
Integration reuse is shallow. Forty percent are single-use, another third are reusable only within a team. Managed catalogues that span departments remain rare.
Automation is equally fragile. RPA and scripts account for nearly half of all activity. Integrated platform logic is the minority, composable reusable automations rarer still.
The result is that enterprises are working hard but not compounding value. They are busy, fragmented, and tactical. The building blocks of Hybrid Platform Architecture (HYPA) are absent.
If this picture sounds bleak, it is. But it is not inevitable.
Look at GovTech Singapore. While many governments remain stuck in ERP legacies or tactical automations, Singapore has become a recognised world leader in digital government precisely because it has chosen to avoid the gravitational pull of anti-patterns.
GovTech treats platforms as shared infrastructure. They start with trusted data entities. They stitch multiple platforms together through common identity, events, and policy. They enforce governance dynamically, through code not committees. They instrument services for journey-level observability. And they fund platforms as products with long-term ownership, not projects with short-term budgets.
This is what disciplined platform adoption looks like. It is why Singapore is increasingly cited not just as a digital leader, but as a pioneer in as-a-service adoption architectures. They have shown that platform maturity is not theoretical. It is achievable if treated as operating-model infrastructure rather than software procurement.
The question is what it takes for others to follow. The answer is not even grand theory. It is six quarters of disciplined execution.
In the first two, get a clear picture of your current state. Define trusted data entities like customers, assets, cases. Publish basic policy and event standards. Establish a small platform strategy office to hold the line.
In the next two, rebuild a handful of high-value cross-functional flows as event-driven services tied to those trusted entities. Instrument them for journey-level observability. This reinforces funding flow not function.
In the final two, expand the catalogue of reusable services, enforce policies consistently through code, and convert tactical RPA into proper services. Introduce chargeback and FinOps so cost, reuse, and time-to-change are visible. This last bit is critical for Agentic.
That is the onramp to platform. The path from tactical to composable. From illusion to practice. From anti-pattern to HYPA.
Everyone talks about platforms. I talk about them a lot! The truth is most organisations are reinforcing anti-patterns that will keep them tactical for decades. But as GovTech proves, there are counterexamples. They seem to inherently understand that platform maturity is not a dream but a product of discipline, governance, and treating platforms as infrastructure.
What makes GovTech different is that it never tried to bend the laws of technology nature. It did not abandon the core physics of IT management. It never bought into the myth that the old disciplines were uncool or obsolete. Architecture principles rooted in frameworks like TOGAF. Governance and risk disciplines that echo COBIT. Service management maturity that grew out of ITIL. These foundations were not discarded. They were absorbed into a new, platform-first operating model.
Where many organisations tried to shortcut maturity, GovTech doubled down on discipline. They made tech management engineering cool again. Almost in the same way hyperscaler cloud engineers have become modern icons. In the platform era, it turns out the geeks really do inherit the earth.
That is why their trajectory looks different. While others normalise anti-patterns that fight against gravity, GovTech aligned with it. They understood that the real energy of platforms comes from operating with, not against, these laws that have served as the foundation for our modern technological environment. And crucially, they didn’t outsource that responsibility. They built and kept the capability in-house, embedding it into their operating model. That ownership, more than anything, explains why their maturity looks so different.
And it’s not only governments that can do this. Enterprises that are self-aware enough to see the anti-patterns in their own environment need to look carefully at their own capabilities as well as the types of partners they choose. The service providers who have architecture, governance, and service management in their DNA. Companies like Fujitsu, or IBM, or TCS, or DXC if it has managed to archive and hang on to what the old HPE once represented, are examples of the natural candidates to help organisations bend the curve back.
These are not flashy project vendors. They are providers who hold firm to the core physics of IT management and translate those principles into platform-first execution. For organisations trying to escape the gravitational pull of anti-patterns, these are the partners that can anchor a return to discipline and set a trajectory toward true platform maturity.
The next thirty years will not be decided by which ERP or CRM vendor wins. They will be decided by whether organisations can master interoperable platforms as their operating backbone. The anti-pattern era is real, but it is not destiny. Gravity can be broken, or better, harnessed. The curve will continue to bend the wrong way only if organisations continue to ignore the physics that hold it together.