When Everyone’s a Buyer, No One Owns the Enterprise
How Functional Buying Broke the Business and How to Build it Back
The CIO didn’t lose control. They were told to hand it over. And they did. Piecemeal, vertically, and without guardrails.
In doing so, the organisation hardcoded its siloed structures into software. While at one point enterprise software used to be a technology issue, it is now clearly a structural and leadership problem.
Business leaders can’t blame IT for misalignment anymore. They took control. They claimed the narrative, won the argument, and seized the buying power. CIOs stepped back, shifted to enablement, and gave the business what it asked for: autonomy.
The result wasn’t alignment. It was fragmentation. And it was delivered department by department, system by system, without a shared foundation or enterprise design. The business didn’t just absorb IT. It absorbed it on its own terms. And now it owns the outcome.
Don’t believe me? Today I regularly see functional leaders undermining the CIO or tech leader role. They demand to buy their own software. They demand to run their own implementation projects. They demand to design digital roadmaps from inside their silo. The marketing team builds automation stacks. HR owns onboarding portals. Finance upgrades ERP. Procurement launches sourcing platforms.
The modern enterprise is often described as fragmented. Most observers blame the “messy middle” of the enterprise stack. And much of the blame is placed on the application landscape. The point solutions, the middleware, and the legacy systems. They see sprawl and diagnose complexity. But the fragmentation didn’t come from chaos.
The software industry taught executives to buy function-specific tools. It made sense. Best-of-breed tools promised faster ROI, domain-specific value, and departmental autonomy. So functional leaders did what was asked of them. They bought software aligned to their domain. And they loved it. They finally had technology they could control. And CIOs tolerated it because it was one less thing to own, or at least manage. And vendors thrived on it by selling around the CIO directly into the line of business.
Executives were rewarded with speed, control, and targeted functionality. Their departments built digital environments tailored to their needs. Each decision made sense in isolation. Taken together, they fractured the enterprise.
ERP reinforced this pattern.
However we got here, whatever our individual roles, it segmented functionality, not unified it. Finance, HR, and procurement received their modules. Each ran with its own logic, workflows, and data models. ERP gave the illusion of cohesion. It really delivered fragmentation in code.
Many organisations responded with integration projects. APIs, data warehouses, service buses. These tools connected systems. They didn’t connect experiences. Employees still jump between platforms. Processes still rely on email to bridge gaps. Data travels through extract-transform-load routines rather than direct relationships.
Integration didn’t fix verticalisation. It just wired it together. Enough to support survival, not flow.
Today, organisations and the executives that run them fund this fragmentation. Annual budgets continue to allocate capex to departments to feed the disfunction. Each function justifies its spend with local metrics. Leaders chase efficiency inside their silo. No one is funding cross-functional capability.
The finance head upgrades accounts payable. The HR director implements a new LMS. The contact centre leader rolls out case management. Each decision is intended to improve performance within a function. Yet each one also deepens the divide. Every investment sharpens the vertical. Every vertical tightens its grip.
The enterprise grows more efficient in pieces. It grows more disconnected as a whole. I could name many organisations where this is the exact situation.
Ultimately it is the people at the edge that absorb the cost.
Employees navigate the breakdowns. Customers feel the gaps. These aren’t abstract design flaws or system delays. They are real, daily experiences. And yet, they remain largely invisible because the enterprise rarely measures what happens between the silos.
A user submits a request, but no one owns the full journey. A customer speaks with support, then repeats the story to billing. Systems reflect organisational boundaries. Experiences reflect those same borders.
Employees don’t blame architecture. Most don’t know what that is. They blame culture. Customers don’t complain about integration. They complain about service. Customer journeys break at departmental borders. Data is reconciled between silos, not shared. The enterprise fails in the seams.
There is a clear path forward.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) really does reshape how the enterprise works, and how it thinks. It replaces siloed systems with shared capabilities: workflow, identity, integration, automation. It shifts the logic of design from departmental control to enterprise flow. The organisation stops building from structure. It starts building from outcome.
PaaS decouples ownership from value. It turns control into contribution. It replaces vertical stacks with horizontal infrastructure. It reframes the core question: not “Who owns the system?” but “What does this enable?”
This isn’t just a new delivery model. It’s a new operating model. One built for shared journeys, not isolated functions. It allows teams to design experiences that cross boundaries, and processes that reflect how work actually gets done.
In platform thinking, no department owns the process. Each domain adds capability to a common flow. Procurement supports an end-to-end sourcing journey that spans risk, legal, and finance. HR contributes to a seamless onboarding experience that starts with recruitment and ends in productivity. The platform dismantles silos by replacing ownership with participation.
Platform thinking works. It’s proven, it’s coherent, and it unlocks enterprise performance. But it also threatens the unspoken social contract that keeps powerful business leaders in control of their turf. Organisations resist it because it redistributes control. It invites collaboration, but in doing so, it also dilutes authority. It forces people who are used to being “owners” to become participants. And for many senior leaders, particularly dominant buyers, strong-willed CEOs, or silo-protective directors, that shift feels like loss, not progress.
But no organisation can build horizontal capability with vertical budgets. The dysfunction organisations experience isn’t a side effect. It is a root-cause. It is bootstrapped and budgeted for. It is structural. Organisations don’t just inherit it, they recreate it. Every year.
Many organisations tried to solve “experience” (customer, employee, service, regulatory etc.) by assigning it to the Chief Digital Officer. As if one role could stitch together what the rest of the organisation pulls apart.
It didn’t work. Because the problem isn’t digital, it’s institutional. The responsibility for experience doesn’t belong to one office. It lives in the spaces between them.
To fix it, organisations must fund what they’ve long neglected: the flow across functions. They must stop treating platforms as IT infrastructure and start treating them as business infrastructure.
They must stop measuring success within silos and start investing in the experiences that cut across them. Experience is not a department. It’s a collective responsibility. And it starts with how you fund the work.
Therefore platform programs need different sponsors. Not department heads, but enterprise leaders. Not local P&L owners or directors, but the CEO who is open to change.
Leaders must stop measuring performance in silos. They must start measuring how the whole system performs. How quickly customers are served. How effectively employees are onboarded. How smoothly services are delivered.
If leaders want a horizontally designed, outcome-focused organisation, they must first believe in it, and then fund it accordingly. Without that belief, no structural change is possible. Budgets will protect the old model, and the enterprise will continue to fragment.
Silos don’t persist by accident. They persist because leaders fund them. That funding reveals a deeper flawed belief: that control within functions delivers results. That belief now stands in the way of what the enterprise needs most to operate at scale: coherence.
The brutal truth is that the current model won’t scale. Confident buyers, the very ones that we the industry created, turned departments into digital kingdoms. Every function now scopes requirements, evaluates vendors, and negotiates contracts on its own terms. Then vendors sold to those kingdoms. Then integrators stitched the systems together. Architects just mapped the chaos. No one fixed it.
Customers feel the friction. Employees absorb it. The organisation runs on handoffs, workarounds, and blind spots. The fragmentation isn’t just technical. It’s institutional. And it was designed that way. We didn’t unify the enterprise. We atomised it. And we called that progress.
The enterprise now needs a new shape. Platform thinking offers the blueprint. But execution depends almost entirely at this point on leadership. That means redefining success. Not by how well a function performs, but by how smoothly the organisation works as a whole.
This won’t come easy. It challenges power, incentives, and deeply held beliefs. But the alternative is stagnation disguised as optimisation.
We have reached the end of what is possible in “the confident buyer” era. What comes next isn’t a new system. It’s a new enterprise where no one in the C-suite currently owns it. Not the CIO. Not the CDO. Not the CFO. Not the CEO. And that’s the problem.
As a project or program the fix is straight forward. For the right PaaS vendors, it is easily demonstrable. Because it is real.
The challenge is that change and momentum won’t come from below. It requires the CEO to acknowledge and reframe the problem, and the CIO to regain the lead architectural role and own the logic of how the enterprise works. If you are on the sales side of the industry, these are the roles that matter.
The solution is a new approach to how systems are designed, funded, and owned aligned to four fundamental beliefs:
Value no longer comes from owning a system. Value comes from enabling outcomes (flow) across the enterprise.
Architecture must move work across systems, people, and decisions. It’s not about storing data in systems of record. It is about designing motion.
Track and measure what matters across the seams: time to serve, time to onboard, time to resolve.
Fund capability, not territory. Budgets should enable enterprise flow not the functions it wants to protect.
That’s not just the opportunity. As the generation now in charge, that’s the responsibility.